Hi, I’m Emma.

My name is Emma, and I’m a multi-media artist based in BC, Canada. I first began my artistic journey about a decade ago, when I was around eleven years old. This was when I first discovered my knack for realism drawings, and from then on I never stopped. My career began with only hyper-realism nature drawings, often done in coloured pencil and chalk pastel. At that point in my life, I hadn’t yet explored or experimented with my skills yet, and so I stuck to one subject matter through the first five years of creating. I became known for my complicated animals and attention to detail.

I spent most of my teens in art classrooms and studios. I breezed through my high school art classes, and ended up in the studios most of the time helping out! When I wasn’t doing that or painting murals, I was usually preparing for whatever my next art show happened to be. Even after school, I’d spend hours on end at my desk, creating new pieces to put up. I started selling my pieces and prints when I was 16 (2018) and was able to be found at booths every summer up until my hiatus in 2024. I’m so glad that I got that experience, as it really did open up my world artistically as the years went by.

In 2020 I moved from my hometown to Vancouver Island. It was the very beginning of both the pandemic, and a harder time in my life. I took a break from art, focusing instead on my physical and mental health. I became incredibly inspired during the Black Lives Matter movement that happened that summer. Using my experiences through this movement as motivation, I just knew I had to incorporate the many faces, expressions, and emotions I had witnessed into my art. My focus during this time shifted completely from animals and nature to faces and the stories and voices behind them. I began painting portraits, and it didn’t take me long before I landed on the minimalistic pop style I use now. My mission is to capture faces that hold a certain emotion in them, and to convey that emotion or expression through my art.

My art has never been limited to one medium, subject, or idea, and although it makes it hard to keep up with or even decide on what I want or need to work on in a day, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Every piece I make inspires me to capture another, and it has built up how I view absolutely everything around me. There is art in every single piece of this world. To walk around and be able to see it is a gift. I want to give that gift to others, and see how it helps them grow.

My art journey truly did start with my hyper-realistic animal portraits. My very first piece was a graphite drawing of an eagle, done when I was around 10 or 11 years old. My grade 6 classroom was having a little art contest, and an old friend of mine had found the photo of the eagle and challenged me to draw it for my submission. I hadn’t yet found myself something to draw, and the eagle did seem impossible to me, as I had never actually attempted to recreate anything before, but I didn’t really care about winning the competition, and decided to give it a shot. My rendition ended up looking almost identical to the photograph, and since that day I’ve been obsessed with realism.

For me, drawing animals has always been the perfect way to quiet my mind, and get focused. People often ask how I have the patience to draw each and every hair or scale on the face of an animal for hours on end, but for some reason, that repetitiveness is exactly what gets me in the zone. Something about watching all of those layers, shades, and highlights come together over the hours, and seeing that jumbled mess of lines become a coherent image, is so incredibly satisfying to me. I love being able to just sketch an eye, and then freehand out from it, mapping out every detail as I go.

Portraiture is something that is newer to me. Other than a few portraits sketched for high school classes when I was younger, I didn’t really dive into portraiture until later, in 2020, right after being involved in the Black Lives Matter Movement. In being present at rallies and protests, not only for other black people but for myself and my culture and roots, I got to see not only the despair and fear of it all, but the hope and excitement that was also on everyone’s faces. I saw people who looked like me, and people of various other backgrounds coming together to fight for a common cause, a common goal. I used this experience as an opportunity to capture the beauty I saw in the faces of those around me. While this was a difficult and hectic time, it transformed my art completely. It became less about how much detail I could fit into a piece, and more about how much emotion I could put into one. I began with quick graphite sketches, just learning how to shade and get the proportions right. I soon discovered that like with animals, I had a knack for recreating human faces and expressions. I immediately started experimenting with new mediums and subjects, attempting ballpoint pen, coloured pencil, pointillism, and then once I decided I’d built my skill enough, acrylic paint.

My very first painted portrait, Alencia, is one of only 3 portraits I’ve ever painted in colour. For some odd reason, even though I’d spent the past 7 years doing realism artworks, having the portraits look identical to the photograph just wasn’t speaking to me. Maybe my brain was looking for a change, or had gotten bored of seeing things recreated the way they always had been. I decided to switch things up, and painted Bliss, my first original monochrome portrait painting. It is one of my favourites I’ve ever painted, and is the only portrait in it’s blended style. While I did fall in love with how Bliss turned out, I knew it wasn’t the style I was looking for. I wanted my portraits to still hold the depth and proportional accuracy that they already had, but I wanted them to seem different from my usual realism pieces, so I decided to take away the common denominator found in all of my pieces: The detail!

Simplicity is the first portrait I ever painted in my current style. It was painted 3 times over, as I couldn’t decide on how I wanted the finished product to look. It is the biggest portrait I’ve ever painted, at 3x4 feet, and was the starting point for the portraiture journey that followed. Head over to the Spotlight to read more about this piece!