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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending the fantastic Flame Con – taking myself all the way from The Bronx, to Brooklyn. (I drove…it wasn’t that serious of a trip). Never before having attended, I was elated with the vibe, the energy, and the beautiful people. I have never attended a con in which everyone said excuse me when they bumped into you. What?! No one ever has time for politeness at Cons! Well, they do at Flame Con. I was super excited about the panels, the exhibitors and the artists, even sparking up a conversation with Tee “Vixen” Franklin!

As I was exploring this con for the first time, I was drawn to the variety of artists and styles exhibited on the show floor. I could not take my eyes off of the illustrations of beautiful brown bodies. I knew I wanted to talk more with the queer artists of color that caught my eye. I pulled up my iPad and interviewed a few artists who I felt particularly drawn to.

Yesenia Moises & Shauna J Grant

First are two women whose artwork gave me shiny anime eyes walking by. Yesenia Moises and Shanuna J Grant, the best part is – they are both from my town, The BX!

Yesenia (left) is a freelance toy designer and illustrator – who loves to draw cute girl characters! Shauna (right) an illustrator and comic creator known for her web comic “Princess Love Pon.” I stopped at table L122 to chat with these two lovely ladies.

Black Nerd Problems: What inspires your artistic style?

Shauna J. Grant: Well my reason to live is magical girls, because Sailor Moon was the first anime I saw, it is what really got me into wanting to create stories and do art. So my art style is very heavily focused on anime meeting western cartooniness. Because I just love animation in general and I just want an endless emersion of perfectly blending those two together with lots of pastels and pink because they give me life.

Yesenia Moises: What inspires me is a mix of things, I also started out watching Sailor Moon and that’s how I started drawing, so it’s a lot of anime inspiration, but these days I’m inspired by graphic design too. I don’t know how to explain it, I draw shapes and it works out.

BNP: What is the most important thing for you as artists of color?

YM: Just do it, just do it… just do it, cuz a lot of times people get discouraged. Especially these days with social media, seeing people posting amazing art every single day, or every other day you feel like, “oh my god I need to be on that level but I’m not”, it keeps you from doing stuff, when you should just create.

SJG: Also staying true to yourself is really important, it’s very easy to be influenced by other things you see. You don’t see a lot of people of color in media, it’s really easy to get stuck drawing characters that don’t look like you. And I say that from experience, I was in my 20s before I was like oh, let me draw characters that actually look Black. So do what makes you feel happy and put yourself into it.

You can find both Yesenia (left image) and Shauna (right image) exhibiting at Anime NYC coming this November! Check Shauna’s work at shaunadraws.com and @shaunadrawscute on social media. You can get more of Yesenia’s work at yeseniamoises.com and @elixiadraws on social media.

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