I’m Stella Stringer, a 20-year-old an illustration major from Oregon. I’d say my design interests involve printmaking, animation, and toy/set design. I’m very interested in storytelling, I like to use my drawings to explore identity politics and sort of project my own ideas about myself and the world onto inanimate objects, animals and cartoonish drawings of people. I also use these characters to portray observations I make about other people in my life. (I’ve always been the type of person to experience synesthesia which impacts my work, since I was young I always felt numbers, letters and objects have specific personality traits and correlate with specific colors. That’s where I think my obsession with giving inanimate objects human traits comes from). As far as tools, I go through a million cheap sketchbooks and fine point pens from Muji; I also like using water-soluble crayons, soft colored pencils, want watercolor pens. For 3D work, I’m very attracted to fun textured fabrics and I am obsessed with anything tiny, I use clay and anything else I have to make this kind of thing.
I feel the need to make art because its just how I express my ideas, I have a crazy brain and its always all over the place and its soothing for me to just draw or work on completing one thing at a time and it feels good to make things other people like looking at, I think that’s usually because what I make is usually ‘cute’ but I don’t really try to be cute on purpose, I just really am attracted to cuteness so that comes out in my work. I’m often inspired by techniques and thoughts of other artists, but as far as research goes I’m also a huge nerd for podcasts and documentaries so I have all this unusable information in my brain that actually tends to come in handy when I’m coming up with narratives and ideas, so I go back and reference old sources a lot because I’m constantly learning on my own. I used to be obsessed with reading too but I lost my glasses in high school and then fell out of the habit and now I can’t really read books or long articles without getting distracted, I think I’m an auditory learner. My dad is also a forest ecologist so I grew up very informed about the earth, trees, plants, and animals, I like to go back and look at field guides, I think they’re interesting and inspiring. But mostly I don’t see myself as someone who does a lot of purposeful research until I have some silly idea I’m going forward with, then I use google to answer any questions I have.
After graduation, I have no idea what I’m going to do. Right now I work for a young designer label, I help her with graphics for the garments and whatever else. I love clothing and I’d love to work with designers to put my drawings on clothes in the future. I also would love to just practice and sell my art, maybe do commissions for money. I want to maybe go to grad school for experimental animation. I just want to try a million things because I don’t really know what I love the most.
