“Melissa is currently working to improve her painting technique while forming a unique style, with this, each painting uses specific elements and exaggerates them in a way that enhances the emotion in that moment. Specifically, she enjoys overplaying the lighting and contrast of her paintings while creating dreamlike colours for a dramatizing, surreal effect. Preferring the use of oil and acrylic paint application in her work, Melissa paints her subjects using human figures or skeletons. Bringing to life images she uses from her own photos, or through ideas from her imagination, she strives to render these with an overall realistic technique, but disrupts this style with painterly or gestural changes to the environment. Either using figures as a means to create a dialogue with its soft movements and gestures or using skeletons to have an imagined state of being that distances from reality while still depicting relatable emotions. With each painting, she hopes to continue practicing new styles and new narratives that blend together reality and imagination to bring out an enhanced mood within that moment. ”