This post was updated April 9 at 8:03 p.m.

Reia Uchiumi has always made art for other people – even in the years she made it for no one at all.

Uchiumi, a third-year global studies student, runs the Instagram art account @reiabay, where she posts portraits of human faces, she said. The account, which she started in April 2020, was born out of her childhood experience of making art and sharing it with people, she said. She added that, as a child, she would sit in the park and draw what she saw. She said that when strangers told her they liked what she made, she gave it to them.

“That was my first experience. Slowly as I grew up, art became something so personal. … I never shared anything at all,” she said. “But at that phase when I just created my Instagram account, I was thinking, ‘What if I could share it again, and what if I could make others happy again?’”

Uchiumi said she grew up in Japan in a family with no artistic background. She began her art journey with watercolors because her parents had to buy a kit for the arts and crafts class in elementary school, she said. But she added that she would often run out of paint, which annoyed her. When her parents bought her an iPad in middle school, everything changed when she began to create digital art, she said.

“I started drawing digital art, and that opened up a huge amount of possibilities for me,” she said. “It was something I could do every day, anytime. The convenience of it got me more and more into art.”

Theater, which Uchiumi said she started in middle school, gave her work a more emotional focus. Watching facial expressions of deep feelings that convey hundreds of meanings got her into drawing people rather than landscapes, she said.

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A single portrait of hers contains more than 200 shades of color, she said. Her process begins with a pencil sketch in a physical notebook, she added. Uchiumi then photographs the sketch with her iPad, imports it into a digital illustration app and builds up the color digitally, she said. A finished piece takes anywhere from five to nine hours spread across three to four days, she added.

Kaylie Harley, a graduate student in the Department of Library and Information Sciences at UCLA, met Uchiumi at a Nikkei Student Union meeting where Uchiumi shared her account with Harley. She said what struck her the most was the intensity of the colors and how bright Uchiumi’s pieces looked.

“The thing I always notice is the way she draws the eyes and faces of her characters,” Harley said. “She’s really good at portraying emotion in her artwork. The majority of her art is female faces and seeing them in a range of emotions – she does that really well.”

Harley said Uchiumi is also one of the kindest people she has met, and it shows in everything she does. While working on theater or film projects together, Harley said Uchiumi has amazing creativity and is also a very collaborative person, always open to others’ creative processes and working together with people.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Uchiumi said she was back home in Japan feeling more powerless than she had ever been. She decided to channel that feeling into something purposeful, she added, printing out her digital illustrations onto T-shirts and hoodies. She said she sold them online and donated the profits to the Red Cross Society, Doctors Without Borders, UNHCR and UNICEF.

“Never in my life had I felt this powerless over not having control over things that I thought I had control over,” she said. “I was very frustrated, but then, at the same, time I thought of, ‘How can I make that better with everything that I got?’”

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Jingyao Zhou, a fourth-year mathematics student at the Institute of Science Tokyo, said she attended art class with Uchiumi, and they collaborated on a painting for a food festival inspired by Japanese culture. She said Uchiumi has the ability to represent her experiences through her art in a very positive light, which allows people to feel connected to each other.

“It (watching her build @reiabay) inspired me to work really hard with my life as well, since she’s doing so many things that are really good for the world and inspires other people,” Zhou said.

Uchiumi said she wants everyone who finds @reiabay to feel that beauty can come out of negatively perceived things. Uchiumi, who doesn’t usually go to art museums because of school, uses Pinterest as a “museum visiting experience,” sourcing inspiration from the variety of art by all different artists across the world found on the platform, she said.

Uchiumi added that there have been many changes in her art style. It is still evolving and is not yet where she wants it to be, she said. Uchiumi said she wants other artists to feel that it is okay to try different techniques, taking off the pressure of needing to establish an art style.

“Art could be a medium where the world can stay connected, because pictures and images have the power to convey meanings beyond words,” she said. “It shows that we all have the same feelings, emotions and sense of beauty and aesthetics. Of course, each and every one of us differ, but maybe art is something that connects us all.”