Andarsia: The 14-Year-Old Artist Creating Realistic Masterpieces
14-Year-Old Artist
A.K.A Tasanee P
Tasanee, also known as Andarsia, is a Taiwanese-Laotian-African-American artist from the United States who specializes in the art styles of semi, hyper, and surrealism. She began her artistic journey in 2014 at the age of 4 and has been drawing for 10 years. As a child, she had a “brilliant imagination” and drew a variety of ideas, including fictional portraits depicting her characters, scenes straight out of her imagination, as well as perspectives that she remembered from her dreams. It wasn’t until early 2022, at the age of 11, that she decided to adopt the style of realism to build her intuition and learn the basics of art on her own, inspired by observing the works of many famous realist artists. While practicing realism art, she almost immediately fell in love with the style because she found the art to turn out lively, and she thought to one day apply that style to her imagination to generate life, as if you were experiencing the scene for yourself, or as if the person were to actually exist and is alive.
Initially, she had her own art style that could be described as “anime-cartoonish” and she would always draw freehand her art.
,,Guidelines didn't always work for me. I have been free handing for my entire life, it always seems to turn out better whenever I draw the way I feel comfortable with." - Tasanee
This freehand drawing technique has been preserved throughout her practices in realism. However, this was the first time in years that she has used this approach to drawing to train her eyes of perspective. She appeared to learn incredibly fast the photo-realistic style by merely observing photos, timelapses of artists progressing through an art piece, and by simply making mistakes. These efforts were all made without the help of an art school or a teacher.
One of the favorites that Tasanee had in drawing realism was the art of animals, whether it be cats, tigers, or leopards. She adored animals and found it to be so satisfying adding each stroke to the bigger picture, or more-so an illusion of an enlarged fluffy, fur animal onto her paper. She enjoyed it far more than she enjoyed drawing portraits of people. This was especially done with soft pastel, where adding highlights, blending, and generating fur was made easier.
As she quickly developed her skill in art, she eventually convinced her parents to let her establish herself on social media after witnessing several artists she closely followed suddenly being discovered internationally. In early summer 2022, when she was 11 years old, she opened several social media accounts managed by her parents in order to share her artwork. Of the many videos she posted on various platforms, a few had caught traction, in which this has given her a social media presence to work with and allowed her artwork to reach a global audience. With little recognition and a multitude of support, she also received hateful comments from people who don’t believe her and had people have attempt to scam her out of her services; "You're not 12." "You're lying for clout!" "Nice AI generated art, what AI did you use?" "Stop tracing and stealing art." So, she posted videos of her drawing from start to finish proving that this was indeed her art, drawn by her.
Despite the negative comments, she pursued building her social media presence with her artwork and is currently looking for ways to showcase her skills through art contests and awards. A notable achievement made by Tasanee was winning the NRA 2022 Youth Montgomery Wildlife Art Contest in the category of 7-9th graders and having her work published in a magazine.
Tasanee’s goal with her artwork is to present the beauty that comes from all aspects of the world, conveying her imagination and ideas, as well as imitating the uniqueness of wildlife and nature that cannot be replaced, to encourage people to protect Earth's treasures. Tasanee also wants to represent wildlife conservation through her animal artwork with her love for animals, by entering art contests organized by organizations that support wildlife protection.
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