Mayleen Ponce

Animation major with a minor in Interactive Media

Junior as of Fall 2023

Expected Graduation Spring 2025

Ever since I was young, I have had a passion for art. It started in kindergarten, where taking an art class was required. I remember being more into it than the other children, and my friends would even ask me to help them on their projects. Since then, I have never stopped taking art classes. My elementary, middle school, and high school years have all been filled with various art classes such as: Digital Art, Photography, Art and Design, AP 2D Art, AP Drawing, and more. There was never a time in my life where I did not love creating art.

After dabbling in many artistic areas such as photography, design, traditional drawing and painting, and digital drawing and painting, I have learned what styles suit me the most and how to execute them in the most efficient ways that I can. In high school, I had a special fixation on drawing the human figure. Realism portraiture was my favorite art to make, and I got especially good at creating this kind of art in my junior year of high school. I also practiced drawing anatomy constantly, from gesture drawings, to sketches, to full studies. After mastering realism in this way, I started to branch out into a more creative field. My love of capturing the human figure in 2D transformed into creating a person on paper from scratch– also known as character design. Going from realism to stylized characters was not an easy transformation, but through hours of hard work and practice, I have come a long way in character illustration. Not only is it my biggest strength, character art and design is also one of my biggest passions in life. Hoping to become a character artist for games or animations in the future, I decided to major in Animation.

My animation major proved to be extremely different from what I had been used to, and somewhat unexpected. Programs like ToonBoom Harmony and Adobe Indesign were new things I had to learn on top of animation and other techniques of artistic execution. What was unexpected to me was the more technological side of my major. Coding was something I had never expected to partake in, let alone something I would like. Creative coding was a class that was very difficult, but extremely fun and rewarding when done right. There were several sleepless nights and cries of frustration, but I enjoyed that class so much that I decided to add a minor in Interactive Media. With this, I wish to broaden my knowledge of the digital world and gain experience in web building and game design.

Succeeding graduation, I hope to collaborate with a team of creatives to make memorable characters fans will know and love. I want to make the sort of characters that people dress up as for Halloween or cosplay purposes, because their designs are enjoyable and recognizable to many. I want to make characters people will take one look at and say “Woah, that’s a cool looking character.” Whether they be designed for games, shows, or movies, I hope my characters can be shown to all parts of the world.