Growing up, my parents tried to give my brothers and I a childhood home—a place that we could reminisce about and return to as we grew older. That never happened. Instead, our one constant became a little brick stone house in Michoacán, Mexico. We visited this house once a year. It was the one place that changed as I changed. I saw its walls repainted again and again. I saw new trees planted and different flowers grow as others were snipped away. The greenery grew until it engulfed the brick walls and the sheet metal roof. It grew taller and wilder until all you could see was the dark entrance of the house and nothing else. This is my grandparent’s home. Everything there is familiar and almost feels eternal. My grandparents gave that house a life of its own. With Paint Tool SAI and Adobe Premiere, I was able to demonstrate that life. My 2d short animation shows how that house fared through the passage of time. It shows the sky changing, the walls repainted, the plants growing, and through it all tying the family together.
Vanessa Mora Méndez is a Mexican illustrator and digital media artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a movie buff and an avid reader. Much of her work serves as an attempt to find a sense of belonging within her own culture, along with showing continuous gratitude and appreciation for her family. This can be seen in works like Retro Ice Pops (2016), a short animation that features paletas, a Mexican frozen treat she grew up with, and Si Solamente (2021), a set of paintings that revolve around her experiences with Catholicism growing up. Although her creative practice is rooted in traditional art, Mora is currently obtaining a BFA in Art with a concentration in Digital Media from San José State University. This has allowed her to explore different digital mediums, like video, animation, and 3d modeling—all which have allowed her to expand on her creative endeavors.
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