STA End of Year Celebration Flyer

Project Details

We will be holding a end of year celebration the day after the last class day to celebrate all of our amazing STAs. There will be food, drinks and a lot of fun. With that, we need a flyer that helps promote this social. Design a fun and playful flyer that encourages people to join the festivities. The flyer should feel inclusive and if there are people illustrations, ensure that it captures all of the STA groups. 

Drafts

I started by creating some rough sketches of the flyer to figure out the layout. I wanted it to feel warm, playful, and welcoming, so I went with a very whimsical illustration style. The notes I received from my Art Director were to add more animals to the illustration to make it feel like a group celebration and to make each animals represent an STA department.

In my next draft, I added 2 more animals and gave each of them an object to represent their STA team (ex. headphones for audio and a camera for video). At this point, I also brought the illustration into Illustrator to add the text and paper texture overlay. A few more notes I got were to add pizza to the table and to change the color of the drinks.

Final Design

And here’s the final design! I’m really happy with how this turned out, I think it’s very cute and I love the colors!

Summer Marketing Pre-roll Animation

Project Details

For this project, I am working with Lila and Shanda to create a 30 second animation that advertises UT’s Summer Online Courses. The animation will play before online courses held in the Spring. We decided that most of the animations will be done using the puppet tool in After Effects and that we will have one frame-by-frame animation at the end, since this is most time consuming.

Stage 1: Asset Creation

Character Designs

Our first step was to create all the assets, starting with characters. Lila found some base templates from Adobe Stock, and Shanda and I modified them to fit our needs. We added the dark outlines to the outside of the characters, and changed some of the clothingAbove are the five characters I edited.

Backgrounds

We also divided up the environments we were making. I was tasked with creating the park background that includes the Austin city skyline.

Putting Everything Together

The last step of the asset creation stage was to put the characters into the environments and prepare the Illustrator files for After Effects. This meant that each moveable element (character’s limbs, eyes, head, the dog’s tail, etc.) had to be on it’s own layer in Illustrator.

Stage 2: Frame-by-Frame Animation

While Lila and Shanda began the After Effects animations, I began working on the final call-to-action scene of the animation that shows the 3 main characters in front of the UT tower at graduation.

Here is the rough draft I created to establish timing:

And a cleaner version:

Next, I exported these frames as PNGs and moved them into Illustrator, where I can begin vectorizing each frame with the character models.

October 2025

MSAI: AI Applications for Astrophysics Course Graphics

Project Details

This course is about how AI applications can be used to generate astro-physics data, with students who are not expected to have a background in astronomy. Typically, classes work with pre-curated data, so this class aims to teach students to compile data themselves using AI algorithms. The professors want to keep the focus for the course graphics on astronomy, however, and have emphasized that they would ideally like the typical nodes and lines to be replaced with icons of stars, planets, and galaxies, similar to the things that you can get in Mac Keynote’s shapes. In terms of animation, perhaps some sort of cosmic explosion would work well too.

Thumbnails

Mock-ups of Design 4

Revised Design

Animated Intro

Training: Photo Scanning / Color Correction

Title IX Resource Documents

Project Details

• Recreate the documents in a updated and editable manner. They want a redesign of the existing PDFs that eye-catching, simple and clear to understand. They also want to ensure that they can easily change the information in the charts using adobe acrobat.
• The client likes the original design but they are open to use explore new options that better represent the information. The title and the subtitles don’t change on the document when they make edits, only the resources themselves. Therefore, solid background colors would work best. 

Here are the original designs:

This is an alternative design that attempts to make the text more organized and readable.

And these are recreations of the original design with minor changes to the colors, addition of a gray branding bar at the bottom, and removal of the longhorn logo in the background of the wheel.

After ensuring the text is editable in Adobe Acrobat and getting feedback from my Art Director, we decided to stick with the original designs and sent them off to the client!

Updated STA Bio and Caricature!

Summer 2025!

This summer I traveled, hung out with friends, went to my first convention, and drew as much as possible!

Travel

In July, my brother, mom, and I flew to Arizona to visit family, including a new baby cousin! While here we went on a roadtrip around parts of Utah and Nevada. I burnt to a crisp in the sun, but the views were worth it.

Art

When I wasn’t traveling, I was left with a lot of free time, so I decided to draw everyday — a goal I’ve had for a while. I worked on some fundamental skills like form and perspective and am happy to say I am noticing some pretty significant improvements! I’m also studying figure drawing with Tom Fox’s book Anatomy for Artists: Drawing Form and Pose. Thinking about the body as fundamental 3D forms feels like I’ve unlocked a new part of my brain.

In addition to sketching for fun, I also did some more art commissions. In total, I did 15 overlay illustrations and 2 sticker sheets for a special edition set of the Lockwood & Co book series! It was a lot, but they were very fun to do and they pushed my illustration skills to the limit.

March – April Trainings

Animate Simple Course Graphics

The goal of this training is to grasp the basics of Adobe After Effects through some basic animation practice. The instructions were to animate a simple course graphics intro. Here is what I came up with!

I enjoyed working with Photoshop and After Effects to make this very simple course intro. This was a good introduction to the software. I think if I were to go back and revise it I would add some people viewing the art and make the text more colorful.

Logo Design

For this training I was tasked with creating a personal brand/logo. Here are some variations and the final chosen design.

Several elements included in the logo and how they represent me:

• Cat – because I like cats 🙂
• Cap – I wear caps a lot and usually draw myself wearing one
• Pencil – to show that I do illustration
• Star – my cat’s name is Star!
• Red Color – I use red a lot in my art, so using it here makes it recognizable as me
• Kyrartist – My “brand” name!

Logo Animation

For this training I brought the logo I just designed into After Effects to give it some movement! I learned some new techniques like the trim paths feature and how to use the graph editor.

For my first time animating a logo in After Effects I’m pretty happy with this! I like how the star looks like it’s being drawn and the subtle movement of the hand and head. If I were to revise this I would make the logo appear in a more interesting and unified way. Maybe having the head turn around and put some follow through on the hat. I would also like to add movement to the face to give it more personality. Making the eyes blink and the mouth go from neutral to smirking can really bring the logo to life and feel inviting.

Painting in Photoshop

Finally, I completed this quick Photoshop training where I got to explore the different textured brushes.

I’ve mostly used Ps for line art and more flat color illustrations, so this was a nice change of pace. I love how the coloring on the orange turned out. I like the movement in the brush strokes and the variations in hue/saturation.

One thing I would improve on for next time is to refrain from using the color picker. This would help develop my color observation skills.