My name is Joyce Hu, and I am a senior currently majoring in graphic design and minoring in computer science at Boston University. I started attending in Fall 2017, and will be graduating in Spring 2022. I am a first generation ABC (American-Born Chinese), and have that semi-fluent Chinese that is both decent and not very good at the same time. Beyond illustration, I love the medium of manga and the storytelling that exists there. I also love playing Tetris 99 and rhythm games, and Pikachu is my favorite little boy. Despite being a homebody, I find biking very freeing. I've recently also discovered a love for risograph printing and nail polish! Some of my academic history: In Fall 2018, I was hired by two pre-med seniors to help in their Keystone project, where I had to illustrate their children’s book concept about a girl going to the doctors and overcoming her fears. The book was 30+ pages, and I was able to fully design and conceptualize the characters of the book. In Fall 2019, I had the amazing opportunity to work as an art intern at Fablevision, a Boston-based digital media studio that focuses on making educational kid-friendly content. There, I got to make concept art and design background art for the intern-directed project, Amelia's First Sleepover. I experienced what it was like working with interns in other fields in a collaborative, scheduled pipeline. During Fall 2020-Spring 2021, I took a gap year to reevaluate what I wanted to do in the future, taking online classes at Concept Design Academy and Brainstorm in Dynamic Sketching, Perspective, Character Design, and Figure Drawing Anatomy. My time that year was invaluable to me; beyond just learning technical skills, my teachers taught me so much about what it was like for them in the industry, and the individual paths they took to get there. I regretted my major so much at the time, but getting to hear my teachers' perspectives and fellow students' backgrounds, I realized that I, too, was on my own path. Now that I am back in school, I am working hard to balance my personal illustration studies and school work, excited to be able to dive fully into this industry once I graduate. Despite it all, I believe that learning graphic design was an incredibly useful asset for my repertoire. It granted me a different way of thinking, and will serve to make my visual development/world building all the more fleshed out. In the future, I hope to further develop my artistic styles to be able to draw more than just in an anime-esque aesthetic. I want to add a greater sense of dynamism to my form making, and to be apt at designing in both a semi-realistic and more cartoony language. I love working with color and rendering in my illustrations, and wish to improve my compositional skills. For these practices, I am currently working on developing a story about a girl overcoming her fears after meeting a tiger.