My Undying Love of Art and Crafting

Hello my name is Melly Herrera, I am an artist currently residing near Los Angeles in San Fernando CA where I grew up. My interests include Painting, drawing, printmaking, writing poetry and photography. I am a proud daughter to immigrant Guatemalan and Mexican parents. I attended Pasadena City College where I studied a variety of subjects including psychology before deciding to focus on my love for art after a semester abroad in Florence Italy and a couple summer spent art gazing with my mother in some of Mexico's most beautiful museum. I later moved to San Francisco CA in 2018, where I lived for three years and graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Studio Art from San Francisco State University. I aim to acquire my Master’s degree in either fine arts or illustration in the years to come.

I feel most inspired in rooms filled with endless art material whether it be my schools art studio, the Los Angeles fabric district where I get to cut and sew my costume to life, my community's endless art supplies stores or my mother's garage. A fun fact I love to share with people is that my lovely mother is a hoarder. I've come to learn that there is a silver lining to even the worst of situations. In this case it is the fact that she saves everything. When you have a two car garage full of everything you once owned you have the strange opportunity to visit your past in a unique way. My mother in the last 25 years of my life has saved things from my high school dance dresses, clothes I never want to admit I once owned, every perfect attendance certificate I received in elementary school and even the identification bracelet a nurse secured onto my arm the day I was born. Among this array of priceless garbage were a select few things I adored the most, my craft books, sketchbooks and stick figure paintings from preschool. I realize now that the reason I love these the most is because it is something I physically created and in a way says the most about me.

The highlight of my highschool career was my junior and sophomore year drawing and sculpture class. I added this class as my elective to be close to some of my best friends and to broaden my knowledge of my favorite subject. Math was always my worst subject, with the only branch of it I ever understood was consequently geometry. Though I was never really the greatest student in my general education classes, art gave me the liberty to find my own never ending truths through my creativity in a class where there were no exact answers to be calculated. What I loved most about this class was my inspiring and eccentric teacher. She and her messy classroom made school all the more enjoyable. Two of my favorite things we got to do those two years was door decorating for the holiday season, which she of course turned into a hallway decorating contest without telling anyone and second but most importantly was her yearly Trashion-Show, which consisted of creating themed costumes out of nothing but recycled material and random junk you find in your mother’s storage room you call a two car garage. I both designed, created and modeled my creations which gave me the ultimate satisfaction. We used caution tape, old nails from my dad’s construction supplies, trash bags, tape as well as wings made from kool aid jammers one year and recycled paper the next that had me feeling that I could make trash into anything I wanted.

This of course set off my love for creativity. I have constructed makeshift props and ensembles for my halloween costumes, concert outfits, Wondercon, themed birthdays, and even half a cardboard gondola for my Italian presentation. I have saved a gold mine of money on overpriced manufactured costumes and for the most part just made my own. Eventually mother’s garage became my go to supply store for the majority of my craft making in my late teens to present time. Sometimes I wonder where I get my interests from and remind myself that my father is a self employed do it yourself construction worker with a past interest in film cameras and my mother is a self-supplied preschool assistant with a garage half filled with abandoned children’s arts and crafts supplies.

I’ve always been a visual learner. Growing up I always struggled with school and was able to make it by just enough to graduate highschool and make it through my College courses with my untreated ADHD. I loved art and every aspect of it. I enjoy surrounding myself with it because it is honestly the only thing that has ever made sense to me and one of the only classes where I have been able to study myself through my creativity. Unlike many parents, mine actually encouraged me to pursue art at a younger age, when I looked at them as if they were crazy for wanting to lead me down a career path with potentially no financial sustainability. It wasn’t until I was twenty-one after a semester abroad in Europe that I jumped the boat from a psychology degree to that of art history. I finally came to terms not with what I wanted to do but what I wanted to be surrounded by.

In my second job as a Messenger Clerk for the Los Angeles Public Library I was given several tasks that started with organizing books but later being more focused on decorating for every holiday, planning out the artistic aspects of every bulletin board and most importantly, felting. It all started with the Children’s Librarian asking me for assistance in creating small felt figures for her to use in her monday morning storytime. One simple replica of a felt figure turned to ten and soon I grew hungry for creative liberty which was happily granted to me. In my two and half years at the Sun Valley Branch Library I had made countless felt versions of children’s storybooks and animals that I had eventually learned how my useless talent had now become a way for children to become visual learners.

I feel most accomplished when I create whether it be a painting, creating a costume, photography or writing poetry. The main benefit of being crafty is that creating helps work the muscles in your brain and your are able to understand things in a visual and hands on way. As a transfer student I came into San Francisco State University with the selected major of Art History and Studio Art not only because it interested me but because I had the wonderful opportunity to learn about art not just by witnessing it and researching it but by creating it just as the artist in our history books have. Being crafty has taught me how I can create a pile of garbage into anything I want quite literally, like ingredients for cooking or resources available to plan out a greater idea.

Art is often mistaken as an unnecessary hobby thrown into the elective category of the education system along with other practical courses such as home economics, woodshop and in my high school, medical terminology. It is frequently overlooked how crafting actually plays a role in aiding various technical fields, the uses it harbors over the ways people learn and how groundbreaking it can be in sparking creative thought for future developers and engineers. For me personally, it gives me a sense of fulfillment when I fabricate a piece of my mind into reality. It then becomes less then a hobby and more of a therapeutic outlet that lets my mind make sense of a greater aspect. Within any creative outlet, a person can find a way for their mind to branch out through any limitation and sprout further knowledge of the world around us, as well as, the limitless capacities of their individual mind.