_ajmart_ - Amaryllis Monzon

First of all, happy Hispanic Heritage Month! This month is a time to celebrate all the beautiful things about our culture and I'm so grateful for all of you who tune in to the blog and help create our Kawaii y Latina community! <3 I'm hoping to squeeze in some extra blog posts this month to celebrate.

In this week's post we are highlighting the Mexican artist Amaryllis Monzon, a 20 year old artist, creating original characters along with stories to go along with them. She is a college student who will soon be attending Otis college of art and design to continue studying illustration. 

Her introduction into kawaii culture as a kid included shoujo animes and mangas, which also impacted her art style as well. Amaryllis blends this inspiration with her own life experiences growing up Latina, creating characters that many people can relate or see themselves in. "If it wasn’t obvious enough with my work, I love illustrating character concepts and designs or comics and colorful pieces! I use a lot of brighter colors with my work especially pink, I feel no matter what I’m drawing there is always some bit of pink hue somewhere in the piece. If the subject matter of my pieces aren’t a character of mine it’s usually my artist persona as I also use my art a lot to feel good about myself as a form of self love!"

Amaryllis also made a great point about how a lot of us being into kawaii culture really challenges the usual stereotypes that we are usually labeled with, "I think it’s great for more Latinas to get into kawaii culture and express themselves more in such a sweet and cute way, I feel sometimes at least in my experience we can be told we have sharp attitude or we’re always placed in that “spicy Latina” stereotype and I feel kawaii culture is just such a expressive and l enjoyable way to embrace our femininity more and step away from that stereotype that some try to stick us in."

As you may know, one question I love asking my interviewees is their opinion on why Latino's may gravitate towards kawaii culture. This is what Amaryllis had to say: 

"I feel they gravitate a lot towards kawaii things or cute culture because it has a very

childlike whimsy and innocence to it, and i feel with the way some of us are raised and

tend to be in a lively extroverted household we sometimes find enjoyment in loud and

positive aesthetics such as kawaii culture! Not only that I find that lots of latinos are

raised on mixed media and find themselves in things they are shown and since not a lot

of popular children’s characters are latino aside from dora you tend to project that onto

racially ambiguous characters like hello kitty in a way as there’s numerous edits on

social media of hello kitty repping different Latino flags or even sailor moon characters

edited by amazing artists to have them look more Latina!"

Some of Amaryllis's upcoming projects include a story called Late Night Party of Five, centered around one of her original characters. She also recently became an affiliate for the makeup brand, Flower Knows. You can keep up with her projects and art by following her on Instagram here. <3