ARTIST STATEMENT
My art centers on escapism and connection, often taking place in made up, fantastical worlds. Using traditional and digital media– graphite, gouache, Photoshop, and Illustrator– I put a lot of my focus on specifically character design and scenery. Finding what makes a character feel real and original is my biggest drive: how their appearance can hint at their personality or backstory, and how their environment reflects who they are. And it’s not always deep, the characters I like to explore can range from being serious, silly, strange, and so on. Then comes the fun part: making these characters interact whether it’s in a comic or standalone piece.
To me, character design is storytelling, and I take a lot of inspiration from video games, films, and animated series– especially the adventurous, cutesy or absurd ones. Shows like Adventure Time and the movie The Iron Giant helped shape my love for fantasy and drama. As a kid, I copied loads of cartoon and anime characters I saw on screen and created my own to live in those same worlds. In many ways, I’m still doing that now– just with my stories this time.
With getting to create my own stories means I can make it a point to be inclusive. As a first-generation college student and woman of color, I didn’t always feel seen in the media I consumed. That absence stayed with me. And as an artist, I’m now the one who gets to make fantasy characters that represent real-world diversity. I aim to make stories about strong female leads, about latino elves, about gay robots– why? Because this is the type of content I missed out on growing up. On top of that, my love for humor also gets to show, letting me further humanize my characters with relatable quirks, give them exaggerated emotions, and put them in scenes that embrace the awkward. I believe it’s incredibly important to show that we all have shared traits and experiences, and that includes people of all ethnicities, sexual orientations, and gender identities.
My art allows myself to make sense of the world and the relationships I make and observe around me. Sometimes a random idea written down while on the bus or a doodle in a notebook is all it takes to start. I hope that I’m able to give my audience a chance to see themselves in an otherworldly story, giving them a space to escape, laugh, and share these feelings with others.
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ARTIST BIO
Suzie Barretto is a New Jersey-based illustrator and graphic designer studying Illustration at New Jersey City University. Working with both traditional and digital media, she uses fantasy, humor and her own personal experiences as a Latino woman of color to create narrative scenes in a style influenced by anime and cartoons, to which she’s a fan of.
Suzie is also a big fan of inclusivity, and will center people of color, LGBT+, and especially women in her work. She likes to depict her characters as real and as relatable as humanly possible, even if they live in completely imaginary worlds. The biggest themes in her art are escapism and connection.
Currently, she interns as a graphic designer with a federal agency and has previously worked with nonprofits. While she enjoys design, her true goal is to pursue illustration full-time, creating stories that are funny, heartfelt, and maybe a bit dramatic.
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