About​

Helen Benavidez is a Mexican-American visual artist pursuing a degree in art and animation at California State University Fullerton. Originally from Watsonville in Northern California, Helen was emboldened to pursue a career in animation thanks to growing up in a household of fellow nerds where she was inundated with animated films, comics, and cartoons. Helen loved the fictional stories, especially those that included magic, swords, magical swords, and any mystery. These sensibilities also show up in her own work where she’s eager to write up a grand conspiracy for her drawn characters to fall into. Helen has experience writing and drawing, becoming a published author in 2017 thanks to the Bookshop Santa Cruz Young Authors Competition. In 2023, she finished her first animated short film “Closing Shift” which she completed as a solo project including writing, boarding, designing, animation, editing, and voice acting. 

Helen as an artist is still actively developing her visual identity and has fallen into many stages and passing phases over the years. While her art style is continually developing stylistically Helen has grown to continually fall back on the aesthetics of brighter colors, prominent black line art, and a more cartoon-based art style harkening back to the late 2000’s animated shows she grew up watching on television. Helen’s tendency to use cartoon styles is personally nostalgic and driven by the desire to utilize the exaggerated and stronger stylized shape language to articulate a clear narrative feature without using words or dialogue. Helen also has a tendency to change up her art style depending on the tone of the character, creating separate art styles for unique projects based on the narrative genre or overall tone, for example using heavier outlines, straighter and sharper lines, and solid black shadows for things with horror iconography. In terms of her narrative sensibilities, Helen regularly features elements of magic and fantasy in her stories and specifically loves to explore how these fantastical elements upturn our “normal ” societal structures placing magical systems in our everyday lives rather than letting it live in its own little world. Visual art helps guide the hand through these exploratories and reinforces the other. Helen’s great passion in art is the ability to communicate character through creative choices that allow one to see who a character is without muttering a word. Helen’s work filled with character designs and concept art attests to this as she uses visual art to explore written stories. Her visual art inspires her narrative tales, and her narrative tales feed back into her drawings, using the development of art and narrative to reinforce each other in a perpetual loop. What’s driven her to the medium of animation is the grand opportunity for impactful narrative choices and being able to solve how to tell the story in the most interesting yet clear way possible. Helen’s ultimate goal in art is to find those satisfying creative solutions, and to tell a good story in the most interesting way possible.