 Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us this evening. My name is Jaina. I am a librarian over at the ocean view branch of the San Francisco Public Library. We're here today to celebrate Filipino American History Month with the San Francisco Public Library. Let's see. We're going to do a quick land acknowledgement. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramathish Aloni peoples who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. An uninvited guest, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramathish community. Some programs that are coming up. We have on November 4th, Malcolm Margolin and Friends. That is again November 4th at 6pm. He'll be celebrating the publication of his latest book, Deep Hanging Out. And we also have a live in the Courrette Oratorium and Streaming event, Kimberly Cox Marshall and Steve Wasserman on Making a Revolution. Again, it's live in the Courrette Oratorium at the main library downtown or Streaming via Zoom and that's November 7th at 2pm. Okay, let's get started. Lydia, are you ready? Hi, yes, I'm ready. Hi, so this is Lydia Ortiz. She is, we'll be discussing her work and she is our Filipino American History Artist Spotlight for 2021. Lydia has a multi-disciplinary practice, including illustration, design, art directing and photography. She is currently a children's book art director and designer at Chronicle Books. And she's an editorial illustrator during the nights and weekends. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Instagram, Twitter, Teen Vogue, at the Cal Academy of Sciences, Wired and more. Take it away, Lydia. Hi, can everybody hear me? Okay. Hi, so I'm Lydia Ortiz. Thanks, Dana, for introducing me. First and foremost, I want to thank everyone for attending this talk and wanted to extend my huge gratitude to the San Francisco Public Library for inviting me. Today I get to share my creative journey with you and it's nothing like I've never, ever done before. I, it took me a while to map out this presentation. I've never really investigated who my true artistic influences were in the past and it was the very indulgent process to discover that most of my influences were from my childhood and growing up in the Philippines. The whole presentation is going to be sort of a story time and it's a bit long, so I hope everyone's comfortable and I'm just going to go ahead and start from the very beginning. Actually, let me see. I'm going to disappear for a while so you can focus on the slides. Sharing screen. And here we are. Are people seeing the slides okay? Yes. Yes. I'm going to start from the very beginning. Pamela at Kabataan, which is Tagalog for my family and my childhood. I was born in the Philippines. The Philippines is made up of more than 7,000 islands. I'm from the island of Luzon and Manila is the capital of Luzon. I am specifically from Tondo, which as a kid I took so much proud, like I was so proud to come from Tondo because there's a certain like badge of bad assery associated with Tondo. This is what Tondo look like in pre-colonial times. It was called the kingdom. And the reason I'm so in love with Tondo Manila is that it's the hometown of the Catipuna and so I just wanted to share a little disclaimer that in a few slides you'll see the KKK on a flag and it has nothing to do with the racist organization group KKK in the United States. The Filipino group is a group consisted of Filipino men and women who organized to overthrow the Spanish regime. If you're not familiar with Filipino history, we were colonized for 333 years by Spain. And this group were like my superheroes growing up. So Andres Bonifacio was from Tondo. He founded the KKK on my birthday and my hometown. So I kind of just like wore that as a badge of honor and I had photos of Bonifacio over my notebooks and I was just a huge fan. And this is me as a kid in Tondo. I look very excited to be alive in this photo. It's, I call it my latest headshot. This is my sister Konirika in the back. Coming from my family background. These are my great grandparents, Cirula Enriquez and Pedro Enriquez. My great grandmother Lola Lila here was a dressmaker and Lola Pedro was a toy maker. In the past couple years, my family unearthed this newspaper article about my great grandfather's toy design and it was something that we've never seen before. My mom definitely knew about it, but it was just so exciting to see his work and his name on the paper. The headline read. I wish I had this little miniature bike here. There's more. There's his name and it's dated 1932. So this is my favorite love team, my mom and my dad. They met in college in University of Santa Tomas. I ended up going to USD as well as my two sisters. I love my parents so much. This is something that my mom photoshopped for a Valentine's card. They were together for 50 years and they're just one of the funniest people I know and one of my major influences. These are my siblings. My mom and dad definitely nurtured a creative household. They were both busy working so we ended up being raised by our grandma Lola Vicky. So it's all four of us then. Here we are now. My eldest sister is now a jewelry designer in Manila. My second sister, Tony Rica, is an illustrator and a painter as well. And my brother Lawrence Ortiz is San Francisco based designer. And a lot of the stuff that he creates are also relating to Filipino culture. Pogi means handsome in the Philippines. Our dad was just the coolest guy we knew. He was in a band in the Philippines called the Black Cats in the 70s. And when I was super young I really convinced myself or maybe he convinced all of us that he was a member of the Beatles because he looked like it. He was always playing Beatles songs and he's just had so much influence on our lives. This is a photograph of a five-year-old me listening to Beatles. That red cassette tape is Sergeant Peppers I think. And this is a photo of me with my brother when I was learning how to play guitar when I was 12. My dad taught me that if he taught me exactly how to play guitar, it would be better that if I taught myself and I would be able to retain the chords and I think he was right. I spent a lot of hours looking at album art. These two, my dad had a cassette tapes and very, very influential art for me. Klaus Borman, 1965, did the revolver. Sergeant Peppers by John Hayworth and Peter Blake from 1967. And most importantly, the yellow submarine, it's like the anthem of my childhood. My dad would play this when he's in a great mood, cooking, and there'd be just a lot of Lego playing and dancing in our place. And having mapped this out, the artwork by Hans Edelman, also from the 60s, I think, 68. I never realized how much this influenced my art because my art now looks like this. So you can see, so almost direct influence. When I first started drawing digitally, one of the first pieces I created was an image of my dad for his birthday. He hated this piece, he said he looks so flat and funny. And I thought that was a secret way of saying that he really liked it, but he made fun of things. Tom was also a very creative person. She would build us sets. We couldn't find a lot of photos, but this is an example in the background of like a playhouse. She would build out of cardboard and she would have intricate paintings on it. And it's so massive that we could all go inside. In the mid 90s, she taught herself Photoshop and InDesign and started her own creative studio. She, I remember these greeting cards that she made that were based on Filipino culture that she photographed and retouched and designed and sold herself. So they both really filled our house with music and art and books. One of my most favorite books growing up was Unambaboy Salangit. And I love the illustrations on this book and I have memories of my mom taking me to illustrator meet and greets back home. And if anyone grew up in the Philippines, there's this big place called Glico's World. It's like Dave and Buster's and there's so many rides and so much food and they hosted a meet and greet for a few illustrators. And this particular day was just like a pivotal moment for me because I met a comic book artist and I couldn't believe that he drew for a living. So I'm so grateful for my mom to give us that kind of exposure earlier on. I was also very, very obsessed with funny comics. All my siblings and I read these. And we all stack of them at home. And on top of that, my mom also for a few years worked at Ayala Museum. And after hours my siblings and I would spend so much time roaming the museum by ourselves and since the museum's close and we're just waiting for her to finish work, and we got to learn so much about Filipino culture. And we always spent time in the diorama section. These are examples of like some of the dioramas they had, they must have had dozens. So this right here is the Ifugao rice terraces stated 1150 AD. So learning about our indigenous cultures and learning about the Ifugaos and the Aita was a huge part of my upbringing. And right here is the Katipunan Initiation Rights from 1892. That's the one that's based in Tando. Right here is the Battle of Maktan in 1521. And here is the execution of Dr. Josell 1896. I'm going to plug Ayala Museum because they do share a lot of like Filipino history on their social media channels. And this is an example of when Lapu Lapu and his men refused to give in Spanish sovereignty defeated Magellan. It's heavily armored troops. I had a version of this painting on my notebook, based on my notebook, because I thought Lapu Lapu was just also one of the most hardcore people. And so now here I am about to share some drawings I did as a kid. So it's Mahadebu Honili. This is a photograph of me that I've shared with friends and social media before. I was obsessed with art very early on. This is a trophy I got for poster making design contests. The school that I went to Sacred Heart School for, I think, 12 years. They would host an annual poster design contest where it's live drawing. They would have kids draw live. They would give us the theme on the spot. And we just like knock out a poster after a couple hours. So this is something that my sisters did before me too. So every time that I entered this contest, they would attend and support me from the sidelines. And my grandma would always pack crayons for me in ziploc bags and it was so exhilarating. This piece right here is such an important piece for me because my mom's best friend Katpalasi, who's a photographer in the Philippines who also worked at Ayala Museum, noticed my love for art. And I was age 13 when she commissioned me my very first logo design. So she used to write me postcards every time she climbed mountains and she asked me to create art for her all women's climbing group. And this is what it looks like. I can't believe she still had a photo of it. And so just wanted to recreate this from a personal artwork this year. This is called Tiny Cows. I see a lot of cows from the East Bay Hills and then just really being inspired by my art as a kid. And also I was so inspired by Jim Henson and all of the shows that he produced. I learned a lot about early childhood development tools from him. Like, I don't know if people are familiar with the storyteller but I highly recommend the show. It taught me that it's okay to tell scary story to kids and it's okay to like talk about sadness and death and demons and it just really enriched my childhood. Oh, and this is just a sampling of how Jim Henson has influenced my life. I forgot about that slide. And this is a snippet of what my childhood was like. We were a bunch of kids running around unsupervised, going on abandoned apartments, just high energy exploring nature, just so much fun. And a big part of my childhood was riding the jeepney because my school bus was an actual jeepney. It was driven by a Mungroody. He was one of my dad's best friends and I rode it for many years over a decade and these boys Mark and Xavier, I've known them since I was six and still are my very close friends. We grew up inside this jeepney and I dedicated this piece that was commissioned by Old Navy to them and all the experiences and adventures we had growing up. This was commissioned 2014. In 1991, such a pivotal traumatic event happened to me as a child in my entire family. Our house burnt down and I feel like it played such a huge role in this moment because I remember vividly smelling the smoke that night and I told my grandma about it and she'd said maybe someone was just burning leaves because we do this thing called cigar back home and she asked me to investigate it and I ran upstairs to her room to open her bedroom window and just saw like a wall of flames. There was not even smoke. I just saw like just fire everywhere and ran downstairs to alert my family and we had no time to take anything with us. There were boxes of photos that my mom made sure to salvage and nothing else and so I feel like fire keeps creeping up in my work a lot. This is a commission by WWD when they asked me to draw what home means to me. This was when the pandemic started and everyone was like staying indoors and just more samples of my work and I wanted to share that I was a very, very weird kid. I went to Catholic school for 15 years and it's not uncommon in the Philippines. It was Catholic private school and we were taught certain things that I questioned a lot as a child. I remember one time I got in trouble with the nuns because I challenged the concept of hell and I had told my classmates in front of the teacher, in front of sister Aida, that I don't think there's hell at all. And she sent me to sister Naomi and sister Naomi sent me to talk to a priest and it was just this whole like, oh, what did I do wrong? I ask a question. And besides being Catholic and religious, there's a side of me that was so special that I shared with my grandma on spirituality and she would take me to regular trips to the witch doctor because I was a sickly kid and they would always try to find out what's wrong. My mom would take me to like real doctors and my grandma would take me to Montetawas is what they call it back home. And this piece is inspired by that moment where the Montetawas told my grandma that I accidentally stepped on a duende which is like a spiritual entity back home and that they're playing pranks on me and so I was like offering food to make amends and so that they could forgive me and so that I heal. So Filipino folklore and that level of spirituality still is very present in my work and the storytelling. My dad loved telling ghost stories and so did my grandparents and it's just something that I feel very nostalgic about and I keep running to it and I think it keeps showing up in my work a lot and I still carry it with me to this day. This is a photo. These are a series of photos of what my friends and I do on a regular basis is Jay and Kevin and we do regular bird tower readings. Hi Jay and Kevin. So here's a preview of my life back home in the Philippines as a teenager. So I was around 19 here. This is when I found out that the whole family decided we were moving to the United States and I was not happy about it. I had already been attending college in University of Santa Tomas and I had a group of friends who I was so obsessed with and we were in this fake cover band and we were just I was just like found myself and all of a sudden I have to like quit school and pack up and go to another country but it was the family's dream and we were told ever since we were young that this would eventually happen so I ended up going to the States. This is what my art looked like when I was in college. We landed in Union City, California in 2002. I started working immediately two weeks in America. I had to learn American currency. I had to get a social security card and off the bat my sister Rika and I were working at Jollibee. So Jollibee was my first employer. I'm not sure if people are familiar but Jollibee is like a really famous fast food chain in the Philippines and this was the beginning of work in the States for me. And the pressure to help and support the family fell on my siblings and I. So on top of Jollibee I found myself working also at Payless Shoe Store which in the suburbs in Union City was not that bad we had to like do some warehouse work but for the most part it was really quiet so during the slow times I would bust out my sketchbook and start drawing. I so badly wanted to go back to school and I just like plotting how I can get myself back on track. So these are samples of work that I did. Personal projects to kill time working, working retail jobs, which I loved and enjoyed, because I've met so many amazing people. So when I was working at Payless part time working at Michaels, I exposed myself to a lot of traditional medium and I love the discount and I felt like this was a good step to kind of like give time for my art and provide myself the tools that I needed. And when I was working at Michaels this cute boy came in the store, and he was looking for art supplies. And we started talking and he was asking if I was Filipino and was he Filipino and we were just like, I like flirting with each other, and he checked out. He came back he said he lost his phone is this whole story that I love telling because it's just like such an incredible chance encounter. But a good example of, if I wasn't at the right place at the right time, like things would have been very different. So this man is Patrick Raffin on, and we ended up dating and have been together for 16 years now he's one of my biggest influences. He lost his phone in the store and so he wrote his website at the back of my name tag it's a whole long story but then we're here now. These are examples of his work and like in contrast with my black and white work, his work was so vibrant so colorful and I just couldn't believe how he plays with light and saturation. These are work he did for the Asian American magazine hyphen based in San Francisco. When we started living together, like this fake cake that he built in our studio apartment set up the fire alarm and I woke up not understanding what was going on because there's like a burning candle and a styrofoam cake in the middle of our studio apartment. It's just like a sampling of what it's like living a creative life where there's no separation between work and life. These are more samples of his work. So back to school. I went to Shabo college. Patrick encouraged me and my family supported me to take less hours working at retail jobs and start investing in myself and going back to school so Shabo college really gave me a lot of the tools and education for learning software. Mark Schaefer from Adobe taught me all the Adobe classes I needed painting from John Comisar Janice Goli taught me basic in design class I was there for like maybe seven years. And it just felt like an exciting time for me. I was wanting to go back to another school after I finished my associate degree. So I went back to California College of the arts at CCA, and majored in design. It was really difficult I felt like it was such an eye opening experience for me to be an immigrant in an art school where a lot of my classmates, not all of them but a lot of them had like free rides and had their tuition taking care and I had to like really struggle working on the side and missing homework and just like, I felt like it was a gift that I gave myself but also I felt like I did myself a disservice because I couldn't give it my 100%. But during thesis class in 2011. I felt like I had a really groundbreaking moment. So I'm going to share my thesis video and I'm going to read my thesis statement because it was. It was a great experience for me to explore my experience as an immigrant. And it was so much time investigating what happened to me when I was plucked from my teen years as a teenager in the Philippines. Sorry, I'm trying to stop share and switch share to this video. This book captured my entire experience as an newly immigrant. Filipina in the States. So my thesis statement, the migration of an individual begins the psychological process with lasting effects on identity. This play in identity construction ultimately produces a uniquely augmented identity, one that is neither old or new, but instead complex and layered. Growing from my background as Filipino and soon to be American. I have collected in this book an unusual narrative that looks into my own augmented persona. In a way, this is a very familiar plot, one that we've seen a lot in autobiographical books and movies, where the immigrant comes to America to take a shot in the American dream. My experience as an immigrant is the biggest adventure of my life so far. The chapters in this book were inspired by the welcome to America immigration packet given to me when I first came to the States. This book structure is based on the glossary of the packet, arranging each narrative alphabetically, giving order to an extremely chaotic experience. The characters you'll see in the book are abstract representations of the protagonist, the immigrant and the author myself. These characters forms are constantly changing in each narrative, a rendition of how I constantly wrestled with cultural, social, political and religious differences, and the book does a good job in telling how each experience changed me and you. By exploring certain identity shifts that I have undergone as a 19 year old immigrant coming here from the Philippines. This book hopes to eliminate the complexities of identity and self that we all face when entering a new place and how we move forward. I'm just going to scrub through. I think this is where I started using a lot of the themes that I take still like a you still in my current work. A lot of the faces that are morphing and the eye creatures also started appearing in this book. And then I'm going to jump back to my presentation. Okay, so I'm going to skip through those are just mostly interiors and I was able to take screen print screen printing class at CCA for the first time, and just fell in love with ink and materials so something I still use to this day to. Okay, my first design mentor. So after CCA, I started working in chronicle books, which again, a place that opens so many doors for me and gave me so much opportunity and this is where I met a lot of the people who kind of function in the same frequency as I do. And my first design mentor. After I finished the fellowships was Michael Morris. So these are photos of him and I, a sweetie and pork chop. Wait, no, he's sweetie. I'm pork chop and this was cheese with our amazing coworker Kayla Ferreira. So Michael does a lot of performance. He, a lot of you actually might know him as I might have outed his identity as if one of the tree twins but I ended up drawing him and David his amazing husband. So this is my first design mentor he taught me so hard on how to design a book and how to type set properly. And under his art direction, I designed my first full book it's chainsaw confidential edited by Steve Marcus and it's an autobiographical work by Gunner Hansen who played leather face in the chainsaw massacre movies. And I felt like this was such an exciting project because I didn't have to illustrate anything. And it's all type and it's so disciplined and it's so meditative and calming. So there starts my love for book design. I encourage Patrick to also go back to school because I felt like it was such a fulfilling experience for me. And so him and I decided to move to New York. So it says leap at the ice in New York, let's move to New York together. New York was wild. It was like the one of the best five years of my life. It's the reflection of the moon on an astronaut's helmet. And this is one of our first Halloween's in New York, and we entered the costume contest at the American Museum of Natural History, and we won first place. We were always in museums like almost every weekend that it was so exhausting and there was very little time to make art is just like absorbing the culture and absorbing a lot of the energy from the city. A sample of the art that I made in New York when David Bowie passed away. He's a lot of marbling. And New York also kicked off my editorial illustrations. My first project I've done was with Teen Vogue. This was a time where they were publishing a lot of articles on identity and gender and mental health and all topics that aligned with my, the things that I want to work on. So it was just like a perfect fit and a perfect timing. I was so excited. I was so nervous and their art director interviewed me and asked what I, what I stand for what I believe in and I ended up doing a series of illustrations for them that I think are still circulating to this day. And then from there, my very first New York Times article, my editorial piece was with Matthew Dorfman. He wrote for me on social media and that's why I always encourage illustrators to use technology and the new social channels as a tool. Because I felt like I was just creating a lot of art drawing regularly and posting online until people started finding me. So Matthew Dorfman is one of my very first art directors that like kept coming back and I've worked with him over six times now for the book review the New York Times. So this is one of our samplings of the work we've done together. Some process that I want to share I do a lot of ink and marbling when time allows this is an overnight project for the New York Times on tech and big oil. And my art director Alexander Zigmando was so excited to see marbling on my portfolio that she requested to do marbling so ended up using ink to finish this piece on big tech and big oil. The last few example was this one for kink that got published this year. And these are sketches and I wanted to share this one because the sketches were so quickly done and so close to the, the final product and this is the one that ended up going publishing where I felt like we nailed it so early on and this is how it looked like in the final. More illustration work for Washington's Post, the Women's March. This was when I was interviewed by the Washington Post where I talked about the but the undead March and I illustrated it to you. And while we were in New York, Patrick and I were approached by Instagram to create a mural which is still, I still can't believe that this happened. It was a very different of the Flatiron building, it was installed it wasn't painted on, but it was installed a few days before the 2016 presidential election, and there's so many like sour memories after that that I feel like, when I think of this moment. I try to compartmentalize which memories I stick to. Anyway. So Patrick and I really loved working together and we still continue to do so we do a lot of like. We did the Little Feminist Series for Mud Puppy. We're now exploring 3D art, and he's doing a lot of video games that we work on together side by side. So although New York was so exciting and exhilarating, I felt the pull to go back to California. My family was back home his family is back home. So after five years, we decided to go back and I was just so lucky that there was a job opening at Chronicle books at that time, and I applied, and I got the job. So, in 2018, I started my job as a book designer, a picture book designer and it was my dream job, like I have decided ever since I was a kid that I wanted to work on books and this is just like the right fit for me. This is The Favors by Kasia Denisovich, my very first picture book that I've designed with my editor Naomi Kristen, who I know is watching right now. It was an incredible experience I learned so much from her and continue to do so. And my favorite design detail from working on this book was that I got to create a font out of Kasia's handwriting. It's such beautiful art. So if I told this little girl that soon one day she'll be designing books and comics herself, she would just like probably blow her mind. So these are samples of more work that I'm art directing and designing at Chronicle right now. When we return to California, this is a project that I worked on with the Academy of Sciences. It's a really great welcome back to California project for me because I love the museum. And to see my work and supporting their nightlife program was such a dream, and working on projects and posters with local artists this is for Jader, when he would perform at the stud. And then another highlight of my portfolio is to be able to work with Patrick again and one of our great friends Michelle from Chronicle books on the still life with bricks and published by Chronicle book is a bit surreal for me to still see our names there. The concept was to create sculptures using Lego without clicking the Lego pieces. So we just had to get really creative with these. And just like a behind the scenes speak at what this paint party puzzle look like before we built it. Michelle and I had to buy like 20 paint buckets from Home Depot in the morning and then return 20 paint buckets at Home Depot at night. And it was just so fun, fun not to work in the computer all day and just being really physical. 2019 I was invited by now it's okay to create a mural for Twitter. And I had told her that I want the mural to be installed and not hand painted but she was able to convince me to paint it myself so this took maybe a couple weeks because I was working full time so in the morning I would go to Twitter headquarters, go to Chronicle books during the day and then go back to the headquarters at night and have slept in their headquarters maybe a few times. And this is what it looked like was photos of me shaking my booty while painting the mural. So three weeks after that mural was finished a pandemic started and everything just turned upside down and life is so funny that way. I kept busy at home, making these PSA posters as a self initiated project to handle my anxiety and just to do something that's positive. A lot of people found me on social media with these PSA posters. This is one of my favorite pieces that came out of that year. And when I checked the date on when this was created it was actually the day that the sky turned orange in California. This is a photo that my brother took and he lived downstairs from us in Bush in San Francisco and this was what it looked like more personal driven personal initiated projects. And then last year I created these vote posters. To kind of just get the community excited about voting. Madonna mentioned me in her story and still I have this image in my portfolio that I wear it as a badge of honor. And in as in the nude found me with those posters to and they were able to share it with so many others as well and I'm so grateful for people who share my art and amplify my voice. And so more New York Times pieces. This one was commissioned by Meg Schiffler from the SF Commission, SF Arts Commission. And it's pandemic mass that were distributed across San Francisco and here they are seen with the boxes and by any hand community center. This is one piece for me commissioned by Bon Appetit Mag because I was able to draw to go on. This is one of my most favorite dishes to share with my grandmother it's base it's pigs blood basically and Alex Madrid from Bon Appetit Commission found me on Instagram and I thought it was just like a perfect fit. Also, commissioned by California Endowment Fund is to draw a Filipino rap artist Ruby Ibarra. And a really fun piece for me was to work on the LA Times cover for 420. I just got the vaccine days before this was commissioned and I literally had a hundred and three degree fever drawing this so I think it kind of influence the way it looked. And this is a plush toy that my mother-in-law created of my eye creature for me and I just wanted to thank Mama Cherry for that. MTV found me from the LA Times cover and still pinching myself over this collaboration because it was just, I believe MTV and I want to thank Gavin and Rich to for finding me and helping support Filipino artists and Filipino themselves and opening the doors for people who are not usually found in these places. I was commissioned for a API month to draw sweetie Adriana Conan Gray and Guapdad 4000 more personal work. I just, it's very, very important for me to create, almost on a daily basis. I feel like when I don't my anxiety is just heightened. So everything just pours out in my art. Are you taking care of yourself as a PSA that I share often on social media, and shared enough that it turned into a collaboration with New York's really, really excited about this. And then at the end of 2020, Magica is grief and magic in English. The greatest love of my life died. And this is my dad in he loved the outdoors. When I was in New York I would call him all the time and I always ask him, I sent him out which means, where are you. And then this is a photo of my first Blizzard I'd never seen snow before I moved to New York and look how funny I looked and look how happy he looked and it was just, I'm so glad I was able to take the screenshot. And this is a personal project that I did called as in Canada. Just like in my letters to him regularly. I asked, I asked him where he is like what adventures he's doing now. I was thinking where are you again. Are you young again. Are you able to bring these memories with you. And three days after he died we went on a hike here at Little Yosemite in Sunol. And it was such a terrible hike for me. I was trying to just do something outside and crying the entire hike and out of nowhere Patrick points out this rock that had a silhouette that looked just like my dad. And it's just like a really great reminder for me that there's something, something else out there that we can't explain and there's people guiding us and I don't really know what it means because it's such a specific silhouette and I know it might sound nutty saying this but I think my dad said it to me. You had to be at the exact same time exact same position for the shadows to fall in this place to notice it. It's just pretty incredible. So it's a good reminder to be open to things and to be receptive to the image world and I want to wrap up with what I think my purpose in the image world is and I just want to keep telling my stories, I want to continue to use artist therapy, mainly for myself and if it inspires others to I want to reflect the happiness I feel for the world. I want to use it as a tool to get my community to act and I want to mentor others how so many have mentored me and just basic advice is to hydrate sleep take care of yourself be kind surround yourself with your people I cannot emphasize that enough. The same people who who work in the same frequency as you and for artists to carve time for their art and prioritize creating for yourself. And to tell your story because no one else is going to do it better than you and everyone I believe has a unique perspective to offer and to not be scared to put yourself out there. That's all I have. Sorry that was long. I'm going to stop share now. Our people still there. We're totally still here. Hi. I actually wanted to share that I did not want to present this live and I had a full thing recorded in the zoom recording failed to upload so this is the best that I could do. Oh, great Lydia. Thank you so much. It is really. It's actually kind of interesting. So right now I'm taking a bunch of Philippine studies classes at City College. So like hearing about your immigration story. I like absolute I'm reading about right now. People who are moving from the Philippines to other parts of the country like mean to other parts of the world. And for and what reasons are sending them away. Yeah, that was just no interesting to me and really ties together, like a lot of things that I'm working on this year so thank you for that. Yeah, yeah. Have you ever worked with City College before. Right now I'm doing a, the designers at Chronicle books and I are, are you hosting a mentorship with San Francisco State University. So it's a very new program and we're just so excited but I would love to like connect with City College. Yeah, I don't know if you know the, like the department head of the Philippines studies program there. Lillianne. No, I'm going to write your name down. Yeah, I'll write your name down. Anyway, I didn't see any questions in the Q&A but if anybody in the chat has questions, we have a little bit of time, or never mind. It's okay, you can take questions. Yeah, no I can ask a few questions I had a few questions like. What made you move from, like, what the hell I want to say it because you are a doodler, right, you like to draw a lot of things but what made you move to more like graphic, like more graphic style. Yeah. Yeah, that is actually really important question too because I feel like it was that of convenience I, I love drawing with traditional media but drawing digitally is faster and I have a full time job. I have a full time job and I've always kept a full time job so I'm always juggling to things at the same time. And working digitally is so much more efficient and every once in a while I would have an art director that would notice something in my portfolio that's made traditionally and it's such a highlight for me to be able to jump and work on pencils and paint and ink and so it was very deliberate choice to switch. It's a lot of science yeah. So, let me think. I had some questions, I was going to ask you. Besides your personal influences, like, I know you said the Beatles were a big influence. But are there any other artists that you admire, like that are like contemporary artists. And to your artists I'm really inspired by a lot of Filipinos currently in San Francisco, especially Mike Arcega and the TNT tricycle group I'm not sure if you guys are familiar but they do. Yeah, they take this tricycle that looks like it just time traveled like came from a wormhole from the Philippines to SF and it's just so inspiring and I've been wanting to go out and sing karaoke in there. Yeah, there's so many people inspiring me right now. Dana there are a couple questions with you and now and one in chat from YouTube. Okay. Alright, let's see. Are you opening that mentorship program you mentioned to the public or is this going to be SF State students. Right now is just SFSU students we're talking about it, I'm expanding it possibly but we could keep you updated. Yeah, something a great program. Future project or places you want to visit. I just every chance I get I just want to keep going back to the Philippines. I just feel like that home sickness is so real that I just want to make peace with that part of me and visit home as often as I could. So nice. I've only been one. I've only been once to because I haven't visited. Let's see we have a question from you to Jennifer Wofford. Do you ever feel creatively blocked. And if so, how do you break that block. Yes, often, I feel creatively blocked a lot. A big reason why we move to the East Bay is that we're so close to a lot of nature. So, going out, seeing the sky and the ocean is a big tip for me just walking. Yeah I noticed on your Instagram you guys going a lot of hikes and things like that. Really, really nice. I remember when you posted the cows I was like what is she that she's seeing all those cows. That was from the Hayward Hills and here in Union City. Let's see now that you've achieved many milestones what are your new goals like what's next for you. I don't know the, the, the call to teach is very strong. I think I really want to teach I don't know if I'd be a good one I'd be probably a really scattered. I feel like I've benefited so much from teachers I've had that I can share a lot of what I've learned back to art students. I used to teach actually here I used to teach over 6012 years old art classes here a long time ago at the library. Here in Union City. Oh, that's cool. Best job I've had. Okay, I think that's it for questions. So bad. There are a lot of questions in the Q&A. Oh, there are questions in the Q&A. Let's see. Next dream client. Oh my gosh I've been dreaming ever since I started drawing to work with MIA. So there, I don't know if you guys are familiar with the rapper MIA if anyone knows her. I slid into her DMs once and she just started ignoring me. She is so amazing. Big girl crush. Yeah. Let's see. Was there a moment when you realized you had developed a very distinct signature art style? Like, that is just so you. I think that was sometime in New York when I started doing more digital work, like the boldness and how graphic and saturated the colors are in my art. I finished one of the Teen Vogue pieces and I felt like, holy shit, this is it. And I just tapped into that feeling since then. Okay. Sorry, I'm just reading through the questions really quick. This one's kind of funny. A dobo chicken or pork? Chicken. I think I have to go with chicken too because that's what I grew up with. Yeah, but I feel like you could eat more of it and not feel so guilty. The pork version is so fatty and greasy. But it's good. That's the best part. Let's see. It seems like you have a wide range of abilities. What is your favorite medium? My favorite medium has to be pen and ink. Or like the sumi ink, how watery and how intense and rich the black is. Did you say sumi ink? Sumi ink. Yeah, it's used for Japanese calligraphy. I use it a lot for sumi negashis, like marbling, where you just play with it in the water. Oh, that sounds cool. Do you have any plans to illustrate your own picture book? I don't know. Who asked that? I aspire to sumi. You did it. The questions are over. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for coming tonight and attending. We have another program tomorrow. I think it's the last Filipino American History Month program on the youth side. It is, let me see, what is it called? It has to do with holo holo. I had it and then I lost it. There's lots of love coming in the chat for you, Lydia. Thank you. It's probably my entire clan. Family and cousins and coworkers that I all forced to go here. I'll pop the link in for all of the Filipino American History Month events we had. And they will get the holo holo tomorrow. Oh, it's called who really invented holo holo. So it's tomorrow at 3pm. Thank you so much. I want to know. I know. I don't know. That was wonderful. I'm popping on. I'm popping on too. Thank you so much. Thank you. It's over. You did great. Thank you so much. Thank you in the background too. So good to be with this beautiful Jaina. Great job. We'll see you again. Bye everyone.