My name is Aya Morgan Wilding, and I’m a freelance Illustrator mostly known for my love of nearly ancient JRPGS, glitter pens where they’re not needed, and a deathly caffeine addiction.

I wasn’t always an artist; part of me dreamed of being a fashion designer. Which is something I got to get out of my system whilst playing the Style Boutique games as a child (and I still love New Style Boutique 3, it’s a modern masterpiece that no one’s quite willing to hear me out on which is a shame but also it’s quite ‘girly’ and on hardware that’s no longer in production so… it happens I suppose.)

Unlike most people raised in the late-2000s, my taste in nostalgia isn’t just Wii Sports and the one Platformer with an ugly-cute mascot. It’s more RPG and SRPG heavy, so my fictional role models and artistic influences over the years (Tetsuya Nomura, Kazuma Kaneko and Ayami Kojima to name a few) have undoubtably shaped my taste in everything from games to clothing to people.

My Brand Name was born from that actually! My thoughts and interests are so scattered according to algorithms, so when I decided to abandon Instagram and move to Tumblr full-time I wanted to embrace everything that makes me… well, me. Since it was a place I could post without worrying about fans not liking anything else I did I just wanted it all to burst out. Pop, even. So really it’s in reference to my brain being up in the clouds and exploding everywhere with all I have.

My Illustrations, original characters or pre-existing ones with a bit more of the ol’ razzle-dazzle, are a love letter to both the upbringing I had as a nerd and my other communities. If the sheer amount of inherently queer media in my portfolio wasn’t enough to clue anyone in, I’m a lesbian and frankly I’m tired of our stories not being as fleshed out as they could be in comics. My indie comic project, Melomanix is the first of many where I hope to put my best foot forward for representing sapphics globally.