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.: My name is Melissa Diaz and I
reside in the Philly area of PA. I graduated from
the Maryland Institute College of Art in May 2005.
I have been drawing ever since I can remember;
art is my passion above everything else. However,
I didn’t seriously become interested in
art as a career until my junior year of high school.
.: The Precious Miseries series started as a ‘fun’
break from my ‘real’ art, which is
more fantasy based. I created it as a way to generate
supplemental income at the Anime Conventions that
I attend. Lucky me, I got a big break when I met
the president of Toynami!
.: Many people ask me how I got where I am today,
as far as ‘talent’ goes. If you want
to know my secret, it’s work really, really,
really hard. When you see others partying or watching
way too much TV, don’t follow their lead
and draw. Study in school, become intelligent,
make great grades in all your subjects and draw
more than anyone else. It works for me, it can
work for you too.
I thank God every day for the countless blessing
that He has given me.
List of
Things to Do
More About Melissa Diaz
How I Came Up With The Precious
Miseries Series
Artist Statement 2006
A Little About My History
Design outfits for a Jrock band.
Spend a day with TMR or J Yoon
from Moonchild.
Design characters for a video game
or costumes for a movie.
Have a room full of StiTcheS plushies.
(Like Scrooge McDuck’s vault.)
Be in a movie. (Meh, why not, right?)
Meet Dave McKean.
Found a Christian Art College. (We
need more good/quality Christian art)
Spend a day with Tim Burton.
Be paid to visit Japan.
Make a movie.
Have StiTcheS run for President.
(Well, not really)
Have my own line of clothes.
Acquire Angel Minis on Gaia-online.
Own an animation studio.
Have a random Japanese following.
(Can I help that I love Japan? Can I?)
More important things on
my long term agenda
Purchase a house for my parents
in a drug-free/gunshot-free neighborhood
Save enough money to support 10
kids. (Hey, I wanna adopt)
Help to design my future house,
complete with kick butt art studio space.
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A 2005 graduate of the Maryland
Institute College of Art, Melissa Diaz is an artistic
force to be reckoned with. As a student at MICA
she studied Illustration, Animation and Art Education.
Upon entering her 5th year of study, Melissa was
faced with the decision to continue her education
at MICA and earn her Master’s, or pursue
a licensing opportunity with Hot Topic and Toynami
for her Precious Miseries series. It was the hardest
decision of her life…but also the chance
of a lifetime.
“I don’t regret
‘dropping’ out of my last year because
my passion is Illustration and not teaching. However
at the time it was the hardest scholastic decision
I have ever made. I like to finish what I start.
I went to MICA pursuing the 5 year Master’s
program and therefore I felt that it was my duty
to finish it. I also thought that my parents would
be extremely disappointed in me, but to my surprise,
they supported me in that decision 100%. If I
had stayed with the program, I probably wouldn’t
have done very well, seeing as how I was there
for the wrong reason. Maybe one day I will go
back, but not right now.”
Since childhood Melissa has been
honing her drafting and imaginary skills. Her
father, who was an aspiring artist, inspired her
to draw at an early age. While his focus was on
realism and graphic design, Melissa always had
passion for animation and drawing from her mind.
“I could write pages on how I have been
positively influenced by cartoons, animated feature
lengths, comic books, video games, anime and manga.
The most important lesson that I’ve learned
is that you can only learn so much from them before
you have to return to reality. If you can’t
draw from life, you’ll never improve your
mind and if you never improve your mind, you can’t
improve your art.”
Melissa fully began to blossom into an artistic
flower while in her junior year of high school.
It was during this time that she was able to create
freely under the supervision of the woman who
played a pivotal role in her artistic growth;
Mrs. Unger, her art teacher.
“Mrs. Unger is a blessing among blessings
in my artistic life; I love her to death. She
has done so much for me. While in Delaware County
Christian, she pushed, encouraged and challenged
me to look and draw from reality. *laughs* I remember
when I first met her and showed her some of my
anime drawings, she said something along the lines
of, ‘You’ll be doing other art in
here.’ Thank God for that! Seriously, if
it weren’t for her, I would have dropped
art as a career for good.”
Although the Precious Miseries series serves as
Melissa’s most notable artistic work, she
also practices other forms of art that reflects
different aspects of her life. Many of her styles
are influenced by both new and reoccurring themes
in her life.
“A lot of people ask about what inspires
me, and I’ve always found it difficult to
answer. Almost everything inspires me at some
point or another. Other art, fashion movements,
stories, animations, ideas and places inspire
me. As of now I am obsessed with Elegant Gothic
Lolita and Aristocrat and am in love with art
by Alphonse Mucha, Yoshitaka Amano, David Mack
and Josh Middleton. I love to draw, I love to
color and I love to sew; why not do all of it?
Why should I force myself to focus on one thing,
when there are so many fields that interest me?
Even when illustrating, I love combining mixed
and multimedia.”
Her academic career served as a springboard for
her artistic visions but the words of her father
are what helped her realize that among the spectrum
of great artists in the world, there was indeed
a place for her.
“I learned so much at MICA, but nothing
that is more important than this. My father always
told me that no matter how good you get, there
is always one person better than you. I learned
that it’s not just one person; it’s
a hundred plus. Personally, I don’t think
my art is that great, not when I’ve stood
in the presence of truly talented artists, many
of which are younger than me! I am striving to
become the best artist that I can be and I have
a very long journey to travel.”
Melissa began challenging herself to create a
marketable series to sell at conventions. After
only two months of work, the Precious Miseries
series was launched with seven characters. Feeling
that she could launch the series into a popular
and successful brand, Melissa enthusiastically
created seven more characters.
“Precious Miseries was
never meant to be my main art focus. They were
meant as a ‘vacation’ from my main
focus, which is story based. Now that Precious
Miseries has taken off, I feel that StiTcheS should
follow. StiTcheS is a character that I created
3 years prior to PM, but it has taken him until
now to finally make his mark. When a production
company showed a slight interest in making a StiTcheS
animation, I jumped at the chance. Of course,
I had to rewrite his story line to make it somewhat
original. There are still many kinks to work out
in the plot, but I think that a quality StiTcheS
animation would be my next dream come true.”
Melissa considers herself a 3 dimensional thinker
and from this innovative thought process, she
learned not only how to think in 3 dimensional
form, but also how to problem solve. She never
seriously revisited her 3D fabric experience until
her friend, Alice, convinced her to start cosplaying.
The excited artist then developed a taste for
it and took her ‘sewing’ skills to
the next level.
“A lot of my character designs are based
off of what I would love to make or own and things
that I could never make or own. I like to combine
the possible with the unfeasible. There are just
some things that defy logic, which is why I became
a full time illustrator as opposed to a full time
fashion designer. Although I was never properly
taught, I love to design and sew together costumes,
whether for cosplay or for my EGL needs. I think
that with every costume I make, the more ideas
for Precious Miseries characters I get. This just
goes to show that every experience feeds and builds
upon one another.”
~Edited by Sheila
Fortson
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I was in my senior year of college
and during the Thanksgiving break of 2004 I went
to Arizona to visit family. My aunt had a small
acrylic painting of a little boy in the rain displayed
in her guest room. The picture’s simplistic
character and color palate really resonated with
me, so I decided to draw my own inked version
to remember it by. I didn’t think much of
it until December, when my first Senior Thesis
class was over and I had to make a new thesis
proposal in January. I was really worn out and
tired of my current project at the time, so I
wanted to do something a little more ‘light-hearted’.
(My previous work was based on emotional experiences
and complex stories.) I resolved to begin a ‘fun’
series that I could market and sell at the Anime
Conventions that I attended yearly. I began sketching
little girls with circular heads and no mouths,
which was very similar to the style of the acrylic
painting that I had seen. I went through about
five practice sketches and decided that I was
going to stick with it. The first two I drew as
PM characters were Kojin and Gothica, although
at the time the name ‘Precious Miseries’
was not even a thought. They were only sketches
for a while because I was so afraid that I was
going to mess them up while trying to color them.
(At this point I had also decided that I was going
to hone my not so great water coloring skills.)
I gathered up my courage and water colored them
with fairly happy results. I then drew three more,
Dapper, Obake and Ragdoll.
As much as I loved creating these
little girls and fashioning their clothes, I knew
that they would need a name. I struggled with
finding one that suited them. I didn’t want
the name to make them sound morbid, but at the
same time, it had to reflect a certain sadness
as well as cuteness. To be completely honest,
I couldn’t think of one. My friend Dane
Styler, who is a writer, thought of a few after
I showed him my work. I didn’t immediately
fall in love with the name ‘Precious Miseries’,
even though it seemed like the perfect choice.
The time had come for me to decide
exactly how I was going to sell these characters.
Selling art prints at Cons the last year taught
me that I needed to have something aesthetically
pleasing as well as somewhat utilitarian. I did
a lot of research online to see what I could afford
doing and finally decided to make a series of
postcards. (I used http://iprint.com for all of
my postcard needs.)
After winter break was over I returned
to the classroom and presented my idea to my professors
along with 5 characters, ideas on the Precious
Miseries logo design and the postcard mock-ups.
By February, I had the first series of seven girls
available to purchase as postcards for Katsucon
05. By the end of my senior year, in May, I completed
the second series of seven girls as well as the
first of the third series. It wasn’t until
Anime Expo, in the beginning of July, that I was
inspired enough to make 5 more girls for series
three. (One of which I abandoned.) By the time
I met with Hot Topic at the San Diego Comicon
two weeks later, I had completed 19 out of 21
Precious Miseries girls. (I am currently working
on number 21.)
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I love being an illustrator. Strangely
enough my passion for illustration stems from
loving cartoons as a child. I came home every
day to eagerly watch my favorite animations. You
could also say that cartoons have been my foundation
for loving art. Watching them lead me to read
comic books. I discovered video games as well,
but I did not think about the art behind the games
until much later. I would practice drawing different
characters from comics and cartoons religiously.
I found characters I liked and began to draw them.
This became my form of creating art. Copying characters
played a fundamental role when I began to watch
anime, or Japanese animation. I became obsessed
with learning how to draw specific characters
until I could draw them from memory. After five
years I not only reached that goal, but I was
able to form a style based on anime and fantasy
art. I also began to read the Japanese form of
comics called manga. The style of art intrigued
me, but more so the complex stories drew me into
the character’s worlds and scenarios. At
this time I realized that I loved art with a narrative.
All the forms of art that I was passionate about,
cartoons, comics, anime, and manga, had a definite
story behind them. The common link between these
forms is that they are sequential. I did not understand
that one image could have a narrative until I
began to have interest in the concept art behind
video games. Many illustrations and character
designs reveal who, where and when without words.
Creating one image to tell the tale would become
a challenge and newfound love.
Of late I have been working on
several projects. For the past five to eight years
I have been continually developing scripts for
sequential pieces. Along with the scripts I have
drawn character designs and conceptual images
from the stories. While character designing comes
naturally for me, scenes and backgrounds do not.
Therefore I have also been working on learning
how to use different media. My hopes are that
with the more media I become fluent with the easier
my experience will be when covering large spaces
with settings. I have also developed a taste for
collage. I developed a style that uses carefully
cut and pasted origami paper to create clothes
for my characters. In addition I am learning how
to collage certain elements together to create
my style of illustration.
My latest work has been creating
a series of marketable characters based on select
fashion movements. What separates these character
designs from all my others is that they are mostly
costume based as opposed to story based. This
unique series has posed a challenge for me in
that it forces me to go way beyond the fashions
that I am familiar with. In designing these characters,
I have also been learning how to manipulate my
newly preferred medium, watercolors. With the
more practice I get the better I will become.
In the future I would like to find
a way to use my fine arts skills in making sequential
art. Comics and cartoons are rarely looked upon
as art, so I hope when creating my sequential
series I can take a fine artist’s approach.
In addition I strive to create a sequential series
that combines what I have learned from comics
and manga to create sequential form that is neither,
something completely new. My hopes are, in creating
this, is that people will realize it is ok to
like comics and that they are not ‘just
for kids’ or childish. I also wish that
this sequential hybrid would inspire all aspiring
artists who love comics and cartoons to pursue
their artistic dreams.
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I grew up in and spent most of my
life living in Norristown, Pennsylvania. During
the four years at MICA, Baltimore became ‘my’
city, the city that I loved. There was just something
so magical about it. I was very sad to have to
leave it, but that part of my life is over and
I need to move on. Eventually, I think that I
would like to settle down in PA, so that I can
be close to all of my family.
Although you can’t really
tell by looking at me, I am 100% Puerto Rican.
To be very honest, I am very out of touch with
the Hispanic culture, largely due to the fact
that I never learned Spanish. I suppose the ‘Spanish’
genes caused my fair complexion and straight auburn
hair. I've gotten use to the surprised look on
people’s faces when they learn that I am
Puerto Rican, it’s so funny.
I have no brothers or sisters,
but I do have tons of cousins. Between my father
and mother, I have 9 blood uncles and aunts, 7
of who married and had at least two children.
I have 17 first cousins and who knows how many
second and third cousins! I am extremely close
to my four cousins, whose parents are my father’s
brother and my mother’s sister. I grew up
with them and they have ‘adopted’
me as one of their own; through them I have siblings.
I have never been persecuted because
of my ethnicity or my social standing, however,
some of the hardest things to have in school are
high morals, a genuinely good attitude and a belief
in God. So much of my life has been defined by
the Bible and Christ, but unfortunately not everyone
‘tolerates’ Christians. I’ve
gone to private and public schools, both of which
were difficult in very different ways. In public
school, gaining popularity was overall most important
and in private school, grades and college became
the main focus. Let’s just say that I’ll
take my private school any day of the week, no
matter how difficult the curriculum.
I grew up in a Christian household,
one that believes and trusts in Christ. I believe
that it is God who has given me my passion for
art, my patience and endurance to see a project
through and my sense of artistic direction. If
I am inspired to do something one day, I have
learned to follow the inspiration. That is how
my Precious Miseries journey began.
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