About the Artist
Carmel Mercado is a self-taught artist on a quest to celebrate life and joy with her communities. With her use of bright, bold colors, patterns, speckled backgrounds, and whimsical child-like designs, Carmel aims to evoke happy bemusement, laughter, and a sense of gratitude for the otherwise magically mundane things in one’s day-to-day that create joy. For Carmel, some of those small daily joys include good food and good company (in the form of animal friends), two common themes in her art. Carmel combines both traditional and digital illustration techniques to create canvas art, storybook style children’s illustrations, and mural art. She has been a part of several juried shows and gallery exhibits throughout the Boston, Orlando, and Seattle areas, artwork in the permanent gallery at Sobana Museum (Hokuto-shi, Japan) and has received art commissions from institutions such as the Cities of Bellevue, Tukwila, Kirkland, and Kent.
Carmel’s punchy whimsical style has been heavily influenced by her time working with children as a board-certified pediatric ophthalmologist and from her travels around the world. In particular, Carmel draws a lot of influence from her time living in Japan. Carmel obtained her B.S. in Biology with a humanities concentration in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her medical degree at the Johns Hopkins University.
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