Nam Maple - Post 4 - Message/Meaning

1. What is the meaning, idea, and message of your work?

The meaning of my work lies in using character design as a way to explore identity, emotion, and human nature. At its core, my work is about expressing personal thoughts and feelings through original characters who embody larger themes like empowerment, kindness, and resilience. The message I want to share is that creativity can be a powerful force for connection and inspiration. My goal is to create characters and stories that not only reflect my experiences, but also resonate with others and encourage them to embrace their own creativity.

2. What is a problem in the world my art helps to solve or a story it helps to tell?

My work helps fill a gap in media by creating characters and stories that focus on themes like emotional resilience, imagination, and the feeling of belonging. I’m interested in how people cope with challenges, express themselves, and find connections. Through character design and visual storytelling, I aim to reflect real emotions and experiences in a way that feels both creative and relatable.

3. What is important to convey in your work?

Important themes I want my work to convey are: Emotion and personality, a strong sense of identity, imagination and storytelling, and inspiration for others.

4. What do you want your audience to feel?

I want my audience to feel connected, inspired, and understood. Whether it’s through a character’s personality or the world they live in, I aim to spark a sense of curiosity and emotional recognition. I hope people see parts of themselves in my work, or at least feel invited into a space where imagination, emotion, and personal meaning are valued.

5. How do you imagine the work will be received? 

I imagine my work will be received as both visually engaging and emotionally meaningful. People might first be drawn in by the style and characters, but I hope they stay because they connect with the themes and stories on a deeper level. I think different audiences will take away different things. Some might relate to the emotions, others might be inspired creatively. That range of responses is something I welcome.

6. What does the work accomplish?

My work should inspire creativity and curiosity, while building a sense of connection with the audience.

Provide examples of your work that fulfill this mission:

Magical Tika Posters 1-4

These are posters I designed for my BFA project Magical Tika. The posters reflect Tika’s personality by showing her as both cute and powerful. The bright colors and playful style match her spunky, energetic, and kind-hearted nature, while her strong poses and confident expressions show that she’s ready to stand up for what she cares about. Even though she looks small and cheerful, the design makes it clear she’s tough and not to be underestimated. This balance supports my goal of creating characters that are fun and approachable, but also carry deeper meaning and strength.

Post 3 - Le'Andra LeSeur - Nam Maple

    Le’Andra LeSeur draws inspiration from the way our bodies respond to and process experiences. How we see, speak, and listen. It’s through these senses that we take in the world around us. For her, language and creating art become tools to examine and express everything we’ve taken in.

     What motivates me to create meaning in my art is the desire to communicate complex emotions and ideas through characters that feel alive and relatable. I see character design not just as a stylistic choice, but as a powerful tool for storytelling. One that allows me to embody themes like identity, empowerment, and emotional resilience. Creating characters like Magical Tika gives me a way to explore my own experiences while also connecting with others who might see themselves in my work. Ultimately, I’m driven by the hope that my art can inspire others, especially young creatives, in the same way that my own inspirations have shaped me.

     My use of digital tools like Procreate and Illustrator lets me create bold, expressive visuals that bring my characters and themes to life. Drawing from media like animation and video games, I design characters that visually embody ideas like kindness, strength, and identity. The clean, vibrant aesthetic and focus on storytelling help reinforce my goal of creating meaningful emotional connections with the audience.

FINAL PRESENTATION - SUZIE BARRETTO

>>>> presentation link <<<< 

For my final presentation, I talk about who I am as an artist, my influences, what themes I explore in my work, as well as my proposal for my BFA show. I’m an illustrator and graphic designer based in NJ, currently studying Illustration at NJCU. My art mixes fantasy and humor based on my interests and personal experiences, and I also make it a point to be inclusive because it’s important to me being that I am a Latino woman of color. I also go into how I’m really into character design and making stories that feel relatable and emotionally real.

For my proposal for my BFA project, I’m thinking about creating a short comic book centered around a supernatural story with a female lead. I want the installation to include the comic, maybe a short animation, and posters showing my process. The main goal is to show how visual stories come together and hopefully inspire others to build worlds of their own.

Juliette Reyes - Final presentation

For my presentation, I’ll be discussing who I am, my work, and what I’ll be pursuing next.

I’m a visual artist from Jersey City, New Jersey, currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts. My work includes a range of illustration and commission projects completed throughout Jersey City.

In Spring 2026, I will be a part of the BFA show exhibit at the NJCU Gallery, showcasing my latest work.

My portfolio focuses on character design and illustration. My career goal is to work in the animation industry as a character designer.

One project I’m currently working on is based on The Yellow Wallpaper. This project is helping me grow as a character artist and develop my design skills. I’m creating characters from the book and designing concept art as if the story were being adapted into a movie or show.

Slide show: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/186EU_YUWcYCp_1evRw-tKLXbqcUhf2a7N2Uynrz8oBc/edit?usp=sharing

Revised Artist Statement + Bio - Suzie Barretto

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.

Post 10- Final Presentation Francis Troy

Slideshow link ---https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1StAJI27nOpmFzHIGV4TNpuiAnTH1fl5CbBCWMfwOeUs/edit?usp=sharing

My name is Francis Troy. I am an artist based in Bayonne, NJ, though I grew up in various parts of the tri-state area, including New York, New Jersey, and parts of Connecticut.

I am an animator and Illustrator. I predominantly create my art via digital drawing and animation tools, though I do enjoy creating works using paints and physical drawing tools.

 Throughout the years, many different sources have influenced my work, including various Illustrators, animators, and comic/manga artists. A wide range of influences has informed the way I create my art. 

My art evokes a strong sense of surrealism, though how that surrealism manifests depends on a project-by-project basis.

Along with surrealism, I work to combine elements of storytelling, the feeling of the ephemeral, and the usage of representation to facilitate my storytelling using the mantra of show, not tell.

Art can be used to convey human struggles, camaraderie, growth, humor, and a myriad of other ways to convey complex themes. I wish to use my art to cover these bases with my storytelling

The works that seem to exemplify the traits I wish to show in my art are

Undead ascension

Undead Ascension illustrates a figure seemingly regenerating as they remove themselves from a buried casket. The figure climbs to the surface, pulling itself into a strange world using its gravestone as leverage.

The trio

The Trio features an ephemeral depiction of my three furry family members standing in the entrance of my then-new home. The three fuzzy pillars in our family are orienting themselves to our then, new home   

Summer vibes in your bones

Summer vibes in your bones is a piece that features a small group of skeletons enjoying themselves in an abstract beach setting. The colors are strange, and the landscape is strange, featuring a color scheme that one would likely never come upon on Earth.

Francis Troy

Angry Restaurant Baby

Digital Animation

1920x1080

Angry Restaurant Baby is a silly and sparsely explained animation. A belligerent, angry man waltzing into a food establishment in a disrespectful, rageful fashion, entices the vitriol of a strange giggling baby sitting by their lonesome. This leads to an unfortunate, silly, and violent result.

Proposal

The next project I wish to conduct is the opening scene to a story that I have been working on in the background

I am in two minds about this project overall, as I wish to tell an overarching story, being animated would be awesome, but a large undertaking of time and diligence. As a solo artist, a comic makes a more tangible workload. I figure I can combine elements of both mediums for the introduction to my story.

This story will convey the story of a young man in the far future, where humanity has inhabited many planets across the Milky Way galaxy. Taking a plane to fly across a human colony planet, to visit his older brother in the military, an alien invasion blights the planet he is on. 

For some strange reason, a group of aliens choose to board the very plane that our main character is flying in.

Lots of violence ensues, the plane crashes, but the young man survives. So does one of the aliens. Feeling disrespected, the alien uses what seems to be a syringe of a venom of sorts, injecting it into the human before discarding him into the rubble like trash.

Little did the alien know that his venom, made to kill his own kind, only served to power up his human opponent.

I wish to convey these moments through an animated comic. It will have voice acting, animated effects, and the animated panels will flow into each other seamlessly.

Final presentation

 Welcome back people. The (school) year is almost over and man we are almost free thank God. I'm at my limit (joke). 

Im a student at Njcu who moved from classical painting to the graphic design field. My inspirations for my work are Stan lee and Akira Toryiama. They inspired me in story telling so I am currently working on art for my story. It is a work in progress but it will get done. Work shown in the slides from my graphic design work and my original paintings. As I move away from traditional art as a career I want to be able to keep it in my heart and make pieces on my free time.  

Final Presentation