About Alisha Zaheer

Hello, my name is Alisha. I am an artist, designer, and emerging writer who is passionate about storytelling in both the visual and literary fields. Art for me was a passion that developed after my long established love of reading and collecting books. For the longest time I didn’t think I could make it very far in either field and so out of self doubt and self depreciation I didn’t pursue my passions. But I learned that if I didn’t try to pursue my passions, my very essence of being, I would be miserable on the safe and cowardly route for the rest of my life. After much deliberation on the matter I’ve decided that I want to be brave. I want to spend my life doing what I love unless and until I find another passion. The intention of my work essentially boils down to this: I want to tell stories. Visual stories, stories of the spoken word, I want to tell them all. There is a lot of intention and deliberation behind my work. 

As a designer I want it to be known that I strive to tell stories through my art. I like designing narratives through visual components that come together to create a cohesive piece. My style of art is very graphical and illustrative. I tend to focus a lot on subject matter in the content of my work. The projects I’m usually most passionate about have certain themes that reflect real world issues and occurrences. As an artist and designer much of my work revolves around designing visual stories that help get a visual message, lesson, or meaning across. Design is a form of communication. It's a way we tell people what to think and feel. It is almost like a superpower to be able to manipulate how people feel just by looking at something you've created. I like being able to create moods through shapes, color, and hierarchy. Art and design for me is a tool to tell people what I feel and how strongly I think they should feel about it. 

A designer has a lot of power in being able to manipulate the emotional response of a viewer just like a writer can with their stories. I use that power to craft narratives that inspire awe or wonder or anticipation. In a project I did a while ago I designed a little photo book that was themed after, Alice in Wonderland, which I titled, Down the Rabbit Hole. In this project I staged a series of about twenty photographs which I arranged into a storybook format with original writing within the book. It was a combination of my two passions and a project that I worked very hard on with a very limited time constraint. But despite the deadline I had so much fun staging the photos to tell a story and writing my own little story about my subject’s (my little sister) journey through a surreal and strange world. 

My work is often inspired by the things that I’m passionate about and the things I interact with during my day to day. Some people who are my inspirations are my peers. I get so inspired by the people I interact with and their creative journeys fuel mine. The world around me fuels and fans the fires of my creativity. When I’m inspired then the planning process doesn’t feel so tedious. I enjoy the journey from start to finish because I’m excited about the end result. The anticipation of the final output is what gets me through the researching, sketching, rendering, editing, proofreading, and remaking/rewriting. And I am in joyful anticipation of whatever projects I take on in the future.