Meet Roya Shahidi

We were lucky to catch up with Roya Shahidi recently and have shared our conversation below.

Roya, sincerely appreciate your selflessness in agreeing to discuss your mental health journey and how you overcame and persisted despite the challenges. Please share with our readers how you overcame. For readers, please note this is not medical advice, we are not doctors, you should always consult professionals for advice and that this is merely one person sharing their story and experience.

It’s absolutely not easy. I’ll admit that I’m still going through challenges tied to my mental health issues. How I keep persisting despite all that is to just keep going no matter what. It may seem simple but there are so many things that run across my mind nearly every day with every decision in my life, one of them being “things will get brighter”. By that I mean I know that even if things are seemingly hopeless right now, there’s at least a reason or two to keep going. Be it you want to have your personal project get to its completion, getting to see a show or movie you’ve been really excited about or even looking forward to your next birthday. Whatever the case may be, my biggest reason to persist through my mental health problems is to live. I wanna live to the very end. And I know for a fact that I’ll regret it if I don’t

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I’m an illustrator, animator, story artist, producer and video editor. I’ve always had a bit of a knack for the creative process since growing up with artistic parents and being surrounded by all types of creative media. I’ve been drawing ever since middle school and haven’t really stopped since. It wasn’t until delving into the process of making animated films and tv shows that I was able to find my true passion. And since then I’ve had this drive to want to work on animated projects both big and small

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

One that immediately comes to mind is I’m a very visual person. I’ve always had a keen eye on design, color, structure and depth for all types of things that isn’t art alone. Even at a young age, my parents have told me that I have always been rather visually oriented. And that ties into my art as I always like to make my work visually appealing while also making the details just right depending on the piece. Another one is I have a vast knowledge of trivia on many different things, from the most well know to the super obscure. Now only does it help with learning new things in general, it could also be used as inspiration for your own work. And lastly I feel like studying is a huge learning tool especially if you’re a young artist. It can be something as simple as consuming media you like and and visually pick up aspects you like about them. Also observing artists you like and studying how they draw things like hands, backgrounds or even cute animals can really help broaden your horizon to help improve upon your work

If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?

A big one happening right now has definitely been the current state of the animation industry. Not only do I have friend affected by how things have gone, it’s also affected me as someone who’s been trying to get into the industry for years at this point. The many rejections from studio job applications, my own personal struggles with impostor syndrome and constant art blocks have really hit me hard as of late especially. That along with the current job market being absolutely awful right now, not even being able to get work from a local grocery store. It’s rough to say the least, but I refuse to give up. All I’m hoping is even with things bring really dire right now, I hope to be able to at least bring light into my own life and hopefully shine that same light onto others

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