The ping from his headphones and the tap on his phone screen, and off he goes. With music of varying moods, tones, and emotions playing in his ears, Jahi begins to work, listening to his music, picking out colors and emotions. He sees colors as emotions, but not in the conventional sense. For instance, he doesn’t associate blues with sadness and reds with anger; rather, he feels the specific shades of colors from the music, such as a sky blue, which creates a gorgeous sunny day in his mind, or the crimson red of a fallen leaf in his backyard. And now, sitting in his room, he draws away with the different colors that he interprets from the song he hears and lets his stylus glide across his screen, leaving streaks of color in its wake.

Jahi Al-Uqdah ’26 has been improving his digital art since the start of COVID, when his parents got him an iPad and Apple Pencil. Ever since then, he has used his art as a form of expression, as well as a way to depict the world around him, as his own creative outlet of sorts. The topics of his art range from his backyard or the street he lives on, to families and their children, or work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and MLK Day events. He composes his work whenever something catches his eye. Commonly, he listens to music in his room or sits outside looking at a reference. If you see him, you’ll know to let the master begin his work.

Jahi really kicked his digital art off with the isolation at the start of the COVID pandemic. “It was a lot of like self reflection, even for like, a young middle schooler, it was a time that I had a lot of like, excess time to think about my future,” he said. This detachment led to a lot of self-reflection and time for him to draw and illustrate his emotional well-being. Starting with digital renditions of his physical arts and landscapes that he drew from pencil and paper, he soon hit a wall that caused his passion for digital art to flicker and dim. This, however, led him to move from the standard pencil brushes to the variety of pens that Procreate offers. 

Jahi was always a creative person. He has several family members who lean into their creative sides, who have inspired him ever since he was young. His grandfather played in a jazz band. Both his father and his older sister draw and paint. All of this led to Jahi wanting to join them in their creative aspects. He saw his older sister forming her collections of visual arts and wanted to follow in her footsteps. “I felt like I had always known he would be creative,” commented his mother. “Seeing him discover a love for art seemed like a pleasant surprise, but not a shock.”

With the implementation of newer brushes, his styles changed. Instead of taking things as he saw them, he began picking out aspects of his art that he loved and implementing them into one cohesive piece. He still sees landscapes from various viewpoints but chooses specific aspects to include, creating collages of the things he sees. A tree from one place and a house from another can all be put into a meadow to create a stunning landscape. 

“It makes my art my own,” Jahi said when talking about his newer art style. “It’s not just something anyone can do, because anyone can take a picture of something and tell an art student to draw it, and a lot of people probably get similar things.” 

This new style lifted his art block and caused his passion to flare back up as he began to draw with a new method in mind, incorporating airbrushes, smooth blending, and gradients into each work. His new style also led to the discovery of new inspirations for his art.

Despite several changes and improvements to his style, he hopes to improve even more on the harder aspects of art, such as dynamic posing, perspective drawings, and even delve into new fields like comic or manga art, using the music he listens to to create a whole new world and design an entire story for people to read and enjoy. With the creative free rein that mechanical and civil engineering provides, he plans on using his creativity and artful prowess in his major in college and eventually building a career around it.

At the start of high school, Jahi had begun working on a portrait, which he holds very close to his heart. It is about him when he was younger. He is creating it for his mother. After a little while, he dropped the piece to reflect on his life and how he got to where he is now. “I spent a lot of time just looking at the piece unfinished, and I felt like once I finished it, I was letting go of a lot of the things that I had done in the past. And once I had finished the piece, I felt like it was a very relieving time in my life, just because after I finished it, it let me move on to basically the next section, and I saw a lot of changes in my art after I finished that piece.”