My Art at RISD

As part of exploring the artistic side of Design Engineering, I attended the RISD Pre-College program in Summer 2025. The pieces here are from my Drawing Foundations and Design Foundations classes. My concentration there was Furniture Design, where I built a bench; that project has its own page, which you can find in the menu.

My Dorm Room Door

At RISD, the dorm room doors are chalkboard surfaces so students can draw on them. On my first day of Pre-College, I drew this mural on my door. I like creating murals that start at the center and grow outward. This activity ended up being a great icebreaker as people walking by stopped to talk, and that’s how I met some of my floormates for the first time.

Drawing Foundations

My Very First Still Life (Vine Charcoal)

This 20 minute drawing was my first ever still life. The item drawn is a tall glass vase. Something to improve here was the line weight. Throughout my next few projects I experimented with that some more.

Still Life Image

A tall jar, lantern, lamp, and pencil sharpener.

The Drawing Based on the Still Life (Vine Charcoal)

This was one of my first still life drawings. I learned a new strategy here to get the line angles correctly. Applying the strategy was something for me to improve on during the course.

Still Life - Three Things That Represent Me

An orchid (symbolizing my love for plants and gardens), swim goggles (I am always ready for a swim!), and a 3D printing spool (an important part of 3D printing—an amazing technology that got me into design experiments.)

My Still Life Drawing (Vine Charcoal)

Here I experimented with shadows and line weight. I decided to draw darker shadows for the swim goggles.

Exterior of My Sunroom

Interior of My Sunroom

My Drawings (Vine Charcoal)

Butterfly Sample (Urania Ripheus)

My Drawing

I added fine details using a pencil, colored pencil, marker, and sharpie.

Skull Still Life Image (with black and white filter)

My Drawing (Vine Charcoal)

I spent a lot of time getting the horn angles right in this drawing. The shadow outline ended up a little too dark, so making the outlines lighter is something I’d improve next time. But I’m happy with how the overall horn shapes turned out.

Live Figure Drawings

I used vine charcoal for both these drawings. I particularly liked the shadows and hair texture of the drawing on the right. I need to work more on fitting the entire drawing on the page proportionately.

Longer Live-Figure Drawing

I also used vine charcoal for this drawing too. Here, I liberally used the eraser to help with shading. I think the angles came pretty well, although some of the corners could've been a bit more rounded.

Drawing a Collage from Existing Images

Left: The collage I made with magazine cutouts.

Right: My drawing of the collage using colored pencils.

Design Foundations

Pattern Design

Explored pattern drawing by creating a negative space name tag, and three variations of the same pattern.

Color Fact Poster

Overlapped various blue colored flags over each other to emphasize the fact that 53% of all flags in the world contain the color blue.

The Color Wheel

I learned more deeply about colors by painting the color wheel myself using watercolors.

Making My Own Color Wheel - Deep Royal

The names that I used for various colors can be seen in the image.

Sculpture Design

An image that went viral on the internet caught my attention: a turtle with a straw stuck in its nose. It helps create global awareness about how man-made litter harms wildlife. I decided to use this for my sculpture design. My sculpture is a scaled version of that image.

The idea is to place this sculpture on a beach right next to the ocean, to discourage people from littering. People will be able to walk inside it, go down the stairs to the ocean level, and view the ocean live, just like in an aquarium.

The turtle and the base are both 3D printed, and the straw is a piece of excess 3D print filament. The ocean and the bottom floor is all made from thick mixed media paper. Real sand is also glued to the surface.

This piece was selected to go into the final Pre-College Design Exhibition!

Shoe Design

I designed this one-eyed dragon shoe using paper and cardboard. The detailing was added using hot glue. Tissue paper was added to the wings to give them a fluffy feel.

Final Day Postcards

I created these postcards as a parting gift for my classmates in design class. Each was inspired from their design products.

Postcards Case

I also made a case to keep all the postcards that other students gave me.

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