Hi, I’m Mashal, a 16 year-old student and artist that loves expressing herself through art.

Art has always been a part of my life since I was young. I can remember 5 year-old me, watercolor painting with my mom on the weekends or whenever we had free time; this is when my love for art was born.

Throughout my childhood, I continued to create art, playing with and testing out different mediums. Whether it was color pencil, clay, or charcoal, art is something I’ve stuck with, and in turn it’s stuck with me. In the last one or two years, I took a couple of beginner classes in oil painting and quickly discovered that oil was my favorite medium to work with. I loved oil paint because of the vibrant colors it brings to my art, allowing me to really capture my subject matter. But the best part about oil paint is how forgiving it is. The slow drying time when using this kind of paint allows me to rethink and reshape my paintings however much I want.

Unlike the medium I use, my subject matter, portraits, has always been constant. Specifically, when I was a kid, I loved drawing eyes and was obsessed with capturing the right amount of light in them, trying to make my drawings as realistic as possible. Portraits drew me in because they let me portray the uniqueness of a person. No one person is exactly the same, and each new face is something new for me to explore on my canvas.