"I’ve been drawing since I was 12." - Valerie Lynn Aguilar

Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Valerie Lynn Aguilar grew up with one younger brother and lots of artistic influences from her grandfather and uncles. She happily admits to being homeschooled all the way through high school until she began attending St Phillip's College. She prefers doing her art digitally using Easy Sai Painter and an Intuos 3 tablet.She's a great all around artist, but we think she excels at Chibi!

"I love anime in general; I've loved it ever since I can remember." she says. She lists among her favorites Slayers, Ranma ½, CardCaptor Sakura, Love Hina, Blue Seed, and of course anything from Studio Ghibli.

When she's not watching anime or being artistic, she's a Culinary Arts and Pastries major at the historical 111-year-old St Phillip's College. "As much as I love art, I love cooking more," she says. Not only does she have a full class load at SPC, she also serves as Secretary of the St Phillip's Anime Club and does art commissions.

Look for this sign in the Vendor/Artist room, and you will have found the world of Valerie Lynn's art.

The staff of Mizuumi-Con would like to congratulate her on her badge contest win. She shared this on being informed of the results of the contest judging: "I never win anything, which is funny. This is the first time I've entered something and won! It's a real honor." And for the record, Mizuumi-Con considers it an honor to have her as part of the family.

Name: Chill Winterheart
Age: 28
Blood Type: A
Height: 165 cm
Birthplace: Manila, Philippines
Birthday: May 16
Website: deviantART

"I've been drawing since I was in elementary, but I do it more as a hobby than anything else. As a kid growing up, I wanted to become a vampire and/or a comicbook artist, but my family wanted me to be, of all things, a lawyer." - Chill Winterheart

Hailing from Manila, Philippines, Mizuumi-Con's Program Covert Art winner prefers to go by the name Chill Winterheart in her travels around the Internet. Chill Winterheart started out early in art, and says "I make most of my stuff the old fashioned way: pencils, gouache, watercolor...you know, the messy stuff. I have begun exploring digital art recently, and I think I'm growing accustomed to it, but I'll have to say no graphic tablet can beat the feel of pencil lead sliding over smooth paper." From what we've seen of her work, her explorations with the Genius EasyPen i405 have been going well. Here's her winning contest entry:

Like many artists, she has a "real" job to pay the bills, but wants to break free from it to work on more interesting things. She shares that she is currently working in the telecommunications industry, but plans "to leave it and study animation soon, and later on get a full-time job related to that."

When asked about herself and what she thinks about winning the contest, she confided, "In conversations, I'm usually the side that just sits and listens; I'm just an ordinary contestant who happened to win. ^_^ "

Well, we here at Mizuumi-Con think she's far from ordinary, and are very pleased that she jumped in with both feet and showed this contest who was boss!