Over the past few years, it has become somewhat of a tradition to present my parents with wooden boxes for their 60th birthdays. Each box is full of a collection of stories and memories shared by loved ones. Having read the stories, I conceptualized and painted each of the boxes to emulate book cover designs that best captured the spirit of each parent and the lives they've lead over their 60 years of life.

You may recall that the Starbucks Red Cup for 2015 was a plain red ombre color, which caused quite the uproar and became a popular topic of the media even in the year leading up to the 2016 election. While many people took to social media to share their opinions, select artists saw the cup as a blank canvas for their own designs. As a landscape architecture student in horticulture class at the time, my illustration was inspired by the Poinsettia, a plant symbolic of the holiday season. I shared a photo of the design to instagram as I usually did with any kind of artwork I created, but you can imagine my shock when Starbucks slid in my DMs to ask for the design...and even greater shock when they called me to tell me that my cup was going to be a part of the 2016 Starbucks Red Cup Collection and that people in Australia, Latin America, and the Asia Pacific would be drinking their holiday drinks out of my cup! 

"Poinsettia" was 1 of 13 cups selected from over 1,300 instagram submissions worldwide.