The world has transitioned a lot of areas of life into a somewhat online form, and art has not been left out. With new software and technology, digital art is becoming more and more popular.
Eastern Michigan University student Sharelle Krisel is an artist with a love for creating cartoon-style pieces. In the future, she hopes to be an animator or children's book illustrator, and someday come out with her own graphic novel.
Krisel is from the Ypsilanti area and is currently a junior at EMU pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
Since preschool, art was a huge interest to Krisel, but she decided more recently that she would like to be an animator. While she sometimes does portraits and abstract work for art classes, she mostly works on cartoon characters, using a variety of mediums.
"Right now I'm using Copic markers, which is like alcohol-based markers, which are really expensive, like $8 a marker," Krisel said. "Sometimes I'll do a little bit of painting with acrylics or even gouache but mainly just markers and colored pencils."
In one of her drawings, Krisel shows two little girls playing with LEGOs, inspired by a photograph of her sister and cousin.
The piece of hers is one of many that demonstrates the joy of the Black experience.
"When it comes to representation, I think that it is really important," Krisel said. "Although there's a lot of Black artists out there, everybody has their own individual experience, so I think it's important to have a theme throughout your art."
Krisel does a lot of her work that focuses on the Black experience, mostly centered around normal day-to-day situations.
"I know a lot of people there's like, you know, abstract artists and stuff, the theme might be political," she said. "Mine is more just about I don't know, like fun topics like oh, you know, growing up through puberty or something like that."
Some of her work though is more abstract, at least when it comes to classroom projects that force her to get out of her comfort zone.
One piece she did a few weeks ago was meant to test out different materials, something she wanted to look like a dream sequence but more abstract.
While Krisel has had a lot of growth with her work overall, she is mostly focused on developing her usual style and becoming more versatile.
"Usually, when I'm not in art class, I'm working on a script and stuff for my comic book," she said.
Krisel enjoys the art program at EMU because she feels like there is a sense of community with more resources than her previous college.
"The last school I went to really wasn't a lot of opportunities for artists so that's why I came here. Once I started, I would say Amy's class, that's when I started to feel more of a community like oh, everybody is so diverse in their art and they're encouraging," Krisel said.
While she does do physical art, Krisel mainly enjoys working digitally, creating characters and replicating scenes from around her neighborhood.
"As far as what I want people to get from it, is just like a sense of nostalgia really. The storytelling aspect of it, like when they look at it, I want it to feel like oh, this feels familiar," Krisel said.
A lot of Krisel's digital art can be viewed on Instagram @skarellesart.
Some of her other favorite digital pieces are below.
