Kelsey Proper

Kelsey Proper is an Asian American illustrator who is currently enrolled at the University of Colorado Denver. She has been drawing for most of her life for fun, but got serious about it during high school. Her main goal as an illustrator is to work in the animation industry as a storyboard or conceptual artist.

This goal was born from a life long love of animated films, cartoons and fairytales. While studying at UCD, she has become competent in many mediums including oils and gouache paint, photography, charcoal and a bit of 3D work. However, her favorite mediums are ink, graphite and digital.

Currently, my thesis project is a storybook. Storytelling and illustration are equally important to me, and I want to one day work at an animation studio in which both go hand in hand.

As a little kid, I greatly enjoyed reading fairy tales and other children’s books and they were huge inspirations for me to start drawing, so for thesis I felt it would be fitting for me to write and illustrate an original storybook of my own. The working title is The Princess and the Witch, and the basic synopsis is a princess is kidnapped by a dragon and taken to a tower. Instead of a dashing prince or knight coming to save the day, a friendly witch rescues her. The witch helps the princess find her way back home and the two of them slowly fall in love.

I have been using several classic fairy tales as well as storybooks based off of popular children's movies as a reference for my story. As I refine the final draft of the story, I plan to split up the text into individual pages. From there, I will illustrate each page based on what is happening in the text.

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