Shannon Richards is a California-based artist living outside Los Angeles. She received her degree with honors from UCLA in Gender Studies and Public Affairs. Before that, she studied abroad in Oxford, England, focusing on art history and English. Because of this, she inadvertently also earned an AA in English Literature. 

Shannon has won numerous awards from locations such as Laguna College of Art and Design, where she spent the summer learning figure drawing on a scholarship, and earned a perfect score in her Advance Placement art class her senior year of high school. 

Her mediums span from oil paints, to watercolors, to digital work, all with a focus on animals, portraits, food, and anything else that brings a smile to viewers faces. The fine art skills were developed under the hand of Philip Journeay, a highly awarded oil painter, for about ten years. The digital illustrations use a soft layered style with crayon-inspired brushes that took her about three years to develop.  

Shannon studied portraits since she was 14 and over ten years later has not grown tired of the practice. Inspired by anything her ADHD grabs on to, she currently is consumed with a galaxy far, far away.