With hoodie up, headphones on, and iPad out, Tristan Ferraro is ready to design on any given day of the week. For him, a spark can come at any moment, no matter the place, no matter the time. He is always ready to create.
Tristan is currently a senior, and his passion for creating and telling stories with art is something that he often showcases, whether that be through a school assignment or for his own personal leisure. His journey through creation is one of inspiration, self-discovery, and learning from your own trial and error.
His love of video games and movies sparked his interest in drawing. “I really have to thank my first video game that I ever played for, like, starting my art journey,” said Tristan when talking about Super Mario 3D World. “It’s all really simple stuff and really bright colors for a young kid, and that was kind of the very first thing that I found myself inspired by.”
Video games laid the foundation for Tristan, and most of his early drawings were derived from the games he played. Over time, that evolved into animation and then more in-depth, creative projects. “It was his thing,” said longtime friend John Pieczyski ’26 when recounting Tristan’s start in his art journey. “Because when you’re that young, like everybody draws, everybody doodles, everybody tries to make stuff, but nobody really makes it their thing, you know. When I was younger, I didn’t know how to be passionate about something, [but] you could just tell it was what he was passionate about.”
In high school, his art has transformed into a wide variety of animation and creative projects, such as his current project Radical Recruits, a trading card game. Tristan first laid the foundation for this project in 8th grade during his shark tank pitch, and then further developed it through his CEL Capstone project in 10th grade, which he won an award for. Now Radical Recruits has evolved into an almost-finished product with the help of venture accelerator, and he plans to release it over winter break.
“It’s very big,” said Tristan when asked about developing Radical Recruits. “You know, this art that I’ve been working on for a long time, and these characters that I’ve kind of grown to really care about, even if they started, … as, like a short sentence on a Google Doc for a character premise, now, they’ve kind of grown into their own thing.”
Radical Recruits has taken a great deal of time to develop and put into motion. It’s a big step forward from what he has traditionally created, and something Tristan plans on continuing into the foreseeable future.
Back to now, Tristan plans to continue working on art projects while going to college for animation. To him, art is his passion and has become a huge component of his life. It’s something he uses to express himself and his creative side in a uniquely different way than other people. For Tristan art is his passion, and video games for him is what started it. According to him, he believes that anything can be a “seed for a passion to grow later.”
