Two girls are running late for a picnic. One pedals, zooming. The other clings to the back of the bicycle, laughing. They leave traces of petals from their bouquet in the basket trailing in the air. The afternoon light is casting a shadow, and neither of them is particularly worried about being late. Whatever is happening between them is private, but the viewer can’t help but want to know.

Christina Zhang, a senior majoring in animation and digital arts, aims to capture unidentifiable feelings like this in her art. 

There’s a group of found family stargazing at a library for hours. There’s a Zhengdan rocker mid-performance, electric and untouchable. There’s a girl with a turtle peeking out from her bag, unbothered and full of spring in her step. There’s a yuri comic that will rearrange something in your chest and leave you staring at the last frame a little too long. 

Zhang, who posts under the Instagram handle @cronchy_baguette and has been sharing her art since 2016, has built a following of over 146,000 people following her line work, intentional color use and the stories that happen just beyond the frame. She has also worked with studios including Netflix, Dreamworks and Disney as a visual development intern.

“There’s a boldness and graphic quality to her work. … She’s got technique, but it’s actually infused with character and soul,” said Josh Staub, a professor of cinematic arts. “She’s found this really good balance. It’s loose and expressive.” 

Zhang said, in her adolescence, she bounced between “Warrior Cats,” “Percy Jackson and the Olympians,” “Harry Potter” and “Angry Birds” fandoms, discovering along the way that the older kids in these communities were posting their art online. Especially in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, she further built up a personal universe of original characters — fully formed, fully feeling, just waiting for a page to live on. 

She describes her style less as something she invented than something she cooked up. The metaphor she reaches for is perpetual stew: a medieval practice of keeping the same pot simmering for years, adding new ingredients, but never quite starting over. 

“I provide the pot, but over the years, I’ll just keep getting ingredients from different parts of my life. And the taste, it forms a unique taste, but it’ll keep changing little by little,” Zhang said. “I would say right now, I’m the most satisfied with my style that I’ve ever been, and it’ll only improve.”

Zhang identified herself as a romantic, as a lot of her art is about love and movement. Characters mid-run, mid-jump, mid-leap, mid-fall for the love of their life, are caught in suspended animation.

“I love when two characters be looking at each other from across the room. You don’t know what they’re saying, you don’t know who they are, but you can tell that there’s a vibe,” Zhang said.

Across her artwork, Lee said Zhang explores LGBTQ+ themes, especially leaning into sapphic relationships.

“That kind of female-centered view is so under-appreciated and underrepresented in the media,” said Jamie Lee, Zhang’s close friend and a senior majoring in animation and digital arts. “[Zhang draws] strong female leads and [promotes] themes of feminism in a very genuine way.” 

Zhang’s two most beloved original characters by her and her fans are Sydney and Harper, who keep finding each other across page after page. They’re high school sweethearts, but they have a love-hate relationship. In one drawing, Harper is rendered entirely in warm colors, and Sydney in cool, but she’s wearing one small warm accessory.

“That little touch is very intentional, knowing [Zhang], all these gold embellishments that’s on Harper is very intentional,” Lee said. “You can understand the story just by feeling, even if she hasn’t posted all the full details.” 

When it comes to visually depicting the emotions and personality of her characters, Lee said Zhang thinks about how each characters’ flaws and strengths come into play in how they wear their clothes and style their hair.

“The best thing that could happen to me when I make an art piece is for people to tell me that, ‘There’s a story going on here, and here’s my interpretation of what’s going on.’ I want them to feel as if there’s something more that they should know,” she said. “For me, it’s always important that, whenever you see something, I make you get the feeling that … it’s like one panel of a huge comic.”

Her senior capstone film, which will screen May 17 at 1 p.m. in Norris Cinema Theatre, follows a young woman in 1980s China taking a transformative train journey from her rural hometown to college. Zhang grew up as the only child of Chinese immigrant parents, and the film is based on their real lives. 

The imagery is a combination of an evocative historical story and a fantasy story but the feeling it’s after is universal. Anyone standing at the edge of a new chapter in life can find themselves somewhere inside it, Zhang said.

“She’s [good] at taking risks in her work and trying different things and working outside of her comfort zone,” Staub said. “There’s [a] moment in [her thesis] where there’s a dragon flying across the sky, and the way she’s handling that and interpreting that … she’s doing it in a much more expressive way, but it also still reads, like the audience will understand it and find it beautiful.”