Hey reader, I’m named after Lisa Simpson (my younger sister is named Maggie!) so you can remember my name that way. My family is from Taiwan and most still live there. My parents came to the US after undergrad and loved it (and The Simpsons) enough to have kids here. A large portion of my life has been moving back and forth between Taiwan and California due to various reasons. It sucked being a foreign kid who didn’t speak the common language, but I’m really thankful for those experiences now.

Art doesn’t require language or cultural understanding so it helped me bond with other people. I was extremely shy and quiet growing up so it was mostly other people coming up to me because they liked whatever I was drawing. I’ve been taking some form of art course at most points in my life but I didn’t think I’d become an artist in high school and early college – I was a CS major for a year before switching to IMGD. The biggest fear was not making enough money and I did well in the sciences so I’d figured that was a better investment.

Honestly, my mental health has been poor in the past few years. I couldn’t keep up with brain-juice-consuming programming during the worst of it, so my options were to drop out or find something I could manage. Currently, my goal is to become a technical artist, mainly to help artists solve technical problems and improve creative processes. I didn’t even know it was a job until this year but I’m really enjoying making a Maya modular rigging tool right now. This is an MQP project, but I’m doing it as an ISP because I was incredibly lucky to have done a Japan MQP last A term. We made a VR game in Unity and got to show it at PAX. That was the highlight of my college experience so far. It’s thrilling seeing people enjoy something you created.

My goal for this class is to create a whimsical world. I’ve always been attracted to funny, strange, and stylized things. Miniatures in particular just snatch up my attention. I’m thinking of a miniature mushroom world with warm, soft lighting from the morning sun rising over a forest. Typing it out makes it sound a bit cliche. I haven’t made many environmental assets so it’ll be exciting.

My Work

Shotoku’s Defense: Physics-Based Combat VR Game

Elektra from Daredevil

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WIP Character for Rigs of Color

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Funny sketches

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Other Illustrations

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Logo and Instagram Template

Traditional Art

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You can view my portfolio at https://liaolisa.artstation.com/
but most of the stuff is here too.

Thanks for taking the time to look through this!