Still Drawing

I wanted to be a manga artist. Spent years drawing in my room—Dragon Ball, Akira, whatever manga I could get. I had this real belief it was going to be my thing. Then school got harder, other stuff took over, and at some point I just stopped. The sketchbooks went into storage. The dream kind of evaporated.

Kelsey Smith is 18, from Georgia, and she didn’t stop. She’s at Savannah College of Art and Design making modern work rooted in manga and anime. You can see the influences—Sailor Moon, Cowboy Bebop—but she’s transformed it into something entirely hers, something that exists in its own world.

Her paintings are quiet scenes. Lonely women alone in bedrooms, thinking. Cats. Cute guys in the margins. Everything’s dark but never scary, just still and moonlit. She clearly loves the night, the solitude of it. Sailor Moon shows up in her work sometimes—on posters, in memories—like she’s painting the feeling of being awake at 3 AM while everyone else sleeps.

I imagine her drawing night after night, some music playing, chasing that dream of being an artist the way I used to imagine it. What gets you is that she actually did it. At 18 she’s still at it, still pushing forward something that would be easy to abandon. There’s something about watching someone pursue what you quit. Not bitter, really. I made different choices, and they were fine. But it makes you think about what you let go, whether you made the right call. Makes you wonder what it would feel like to just sit down and draw again.