"For Alexis Fish, art is not always black and white-although looking at her current collection of work, it may appear that way. "It's rare that I use color, and if I do sometimes, it's the smallest amount," explained Fish. She says it's not necessarily that she doesn't like color, but more that color seems a challenge to work with, and it takes her longer to get pieces exactly the way she wants them to look. "Graphite feeds my OCD and my need for everything to be precise and clean," said Fish of her preferred medium. Her pencil-drawn collection currently ranges from surrealistic renditions of fairy like women and animal silhouettes to fan art portraits of characters from "Harry Potter" and "Stranger Things." All of them are rendered in black and white, sometimes with the slightest hint of color that's so subtle it's hard to notice. The 24-year-old artist resides in Doylestown with her husband, Ilya, and draws a lot of her inspiration from fairy tales, both Disney versions and the original folk tales like those written by the Brothers Grimm. Fish is also inspired by contemporary fantasies and other works of fiction in books and film. In personal appearance, Fish resembles the fictional characters with whom she surrounds herself. In fact, her grandmother, the first of many artistic mentors, used to call her "Snow White" for her dark hair and fair skin when she was young. "When I was old enough to hold a pencil and a pen, my grandmother would let me draw with her," Fish recalled.

Much like her grandmother, who she says drew animals and sometimes geisha girls as a hobby, Fish loves to combine portraits, flowers and animals to create her own surrealistic works of art. "Usually my compositions are not something that would normally appear in nature," said Fish, who doesn't draw realistic portraits or still lifes. She likes adding an element of fantasy to much of her work. Although Fish loved art from a young age, spending extracurricular activities in the art room and enrolling in after-school art programs at Lafayette College while still in high school in New Jersey, she admits she needed a nudge from her husband to peruse her dreams of being an artist even further. "My husband for a while was like, 'You need to do something with it. You can keep drawing pictures all you want, but if you don't do anything with them, what's the point?'" said Fish. With his help, she enrolled in a mentorship program with an established artist that gave her the push she needed to set goals for herself. In 2015, she got her website up and running, and started selling prints. Around the same time, Fish signed up to be a vendor at the Doylestown Arts Festival to sell her initial batch of prints. Nervous as he prepared for her first big show, she even had to research how to set up her first booth, but admits she did pretty well. Since then, she has been focusing on selling her prints and originals on her website, and has done a couple shows, including a few tattoo conventions. This is especially exciting for her considering she had an apprenticeship with a tattoo artist a few years ago, and sees herself going down that path eventually. "A goal would be doing tattoos at some point, because that's something I've always been interested in," says Fish. She plans to start another tattoo apprenticeship sometime in the near future. Fish works a daytime job in Doylestown, but most nights and weekends you can find her in her apartment, listening to books on tape or playing a Disney movie she's seen hundreds of times in the background while she works. She considers her art her second full-time job. Fish is currently listening to a Harry Potter book while she works on some commissioned pieces, which she loves doing for people. "The people contacting me are obviously not artists themselves, so once they give me ideas, it's always been really rewarding to get their reaction after I've finished," observed Fish. "Especially with things that are really near and dear to them." Eventually Fish hopes to be working full time as an artist. Whether that's being a tattoo artist, continuing to do commissioned art, or selling her own original compositions, she hopes to eventually support herself solely by her artwork. And who knows, maybe someday she will be someone else's artistic mentor, if she isn't already."

You can find Fish's art on display at the Countryside Gallery & Custom Frame Design in Newtown, Pa., or online at alexisfishart.com orinstagram.com/ alexisfishart.