Adrienne Deupree seems to live, sleep and breath anime art.
As she sits on her bed sketching one of her original anime charaters, the 17-year-old Hobbs High School junior is surrounded by anime postcars, posters and other merchandise decorating her room.
Deupree has been doing anime art since fourth grade. She became interested in pursuig the artistic genre, typically reerringto a term the Japanes use for animated cartoons from their country and others, after a cousin showed Deupree her artwork.
Alternating between dawing and erasing her mistakes, Deupree said she wants to be a video game designer and she's created about 50 anime characters that'll appear in her game called "Reverse."
Her anime video game characters are showcased at her online portfolio or in various folders she keeps in her bedroom studio.
Even though she's more of a "video game freak," Deupree, an Advanced Placement art student who will be taking studio art this year, acknowledged the new animated Star Wars "Clone Wars" movie, has inspired her to expand her artistic abilities.
Set between "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith," "Clone Wars," rated PG, won't have puppets or human actors playing Yoda, Anakin Skywalker and other characters fans are familiar with. Instead it's all animated using computer generated images resembling anime.
Some actors from the live-action film such as Samuel L. Jackson, Anthony Daniels and Christopher Lee will return to voice their respective characters.
"I think the animation looks really good ... and the 3-D looks really cool. That's the kind of thing I want to get into," Deupree said. "It's a unique style they've gone with, but I think fans will like it because it's Star Wars."
Saved on Deupree's laptop is her first drawing of a girl with big pink eyes and bluish green hair called "Giant Floating Head of Doom."
"I feel like I'm going to explode if I don't doodle," Deupree said, quickly drawing the body of a character on a piece of paper. "It helps me relieve stress. ... People wouldn't talk to me if I didn't do it."
Ideas for her anime characters often pop in her head, Deupree said. How characters interact with each other often causes a new character to evolve in her mind and her sketchbook.
"A lot of it has to do with yin and yang," Deupree said of her artwork. "It balances things out. It gives me something to go by, sort of like a default."
Sometimes she feels like she's not taken as seriously as an artist because she does anime.
"It still has line and color," she said. "It looks appealing and you can have fun with it."
In the last two months, Deupree has started working with a computer program to do 3-D modeling. She also uses her computer to recreate her characters' costumes and hair in a computer simulator game.
She eventually wants to craft a resin sculpture of her favorite character to draw, Meikahna, a healer who dresses in a purple and black gown, has pink hair and light blue eyes. The sculpture will be displayed on a bookshelf in her room.
"I've been drawing her (Meikahna) so long," Deupree siad. "She was the very first character I created."
Hobbs High School art teacher Kara Wink said she has no doubts Deupree will be successful as an anime artist who works as a video game designer.
"There's a lot of people who like to be in that industry but many of them are just copying what already exists in anime. She creates characters out of the blue," Wink said.