Hi my name is Raboon Redar, I’m from Erbil, Iraq and I am self-taught pianist. It is unlike anything we have dealt with before, things like that happen once in a lifetime, the coronavirus situation can't be easy to cope with. Often you have to think outside the box and be creative.
Besides focusing and spending more time on improving my piano and drawing skills, I had to control and finish my previous university studies, as it was the priority.
As we took online classes in the March and May lockdown period, most of my time was spent on studying, discovering more, and taking exams on my field of study (Petroleum Engineering) which was finished on July 14th. It was a new experience for all university students and teachers. It made us all improve our writing, time management, and computer skills.
For the post-lockdown days, I had to make new plans obeying the new Covid-19 health guidance and rules. I've started to decline unimportant hangout invitations, less often play football matches but remain physically active, and start a good diet that supports good health as we need a great immune system to overcome the Coronavirus.
You may feel worried or upset about your finances, health or your surroundings. It is hard to stay at home, but by doing so you help to protect yourself and others."

Samara is a high school student from Indiana. She enjoys spending her time outside and is fond of taking pictures of things around her. Over COVID-19 she used these pictures as motivation and as a moment of joy to remember that there are bigger things to be thankful for in life.

Hi, my name is Erin. I am a high school student from Indiana. Ever since my young age I have been interested in making art. I remember I always loved coloring. As I entered high school, I joined my school’s 3D Art program and started making pottery pieces and fell in love with them. Here are a few of my favorites.

My name is Emma Nolting and I am a Senior in high school. I enjoy creating tribal 3D Art. Here is my favorite creation.

Aarat Sinha is a 7th grader attending school in India. Over COVID-19, he created several artwork to show his appreciation for our planet.

My name is Dani, I am a 24 year old visual artist from Tacoma, Washington.

At the start of the pandemic I was living in Chile: teaching English, speaking Spanish, learning how to tattoo, and falling in love. My goal was to make myself a permanent resident and work in the field of international education & meaningful travel.

Unfortunately I felt forced to come home due to the uncertainty of it all: at the time, I didn't know how bad the virus would be and I was afraid to be away from my family.

Fast forward to living at home for the last 6 months. My career in international education has become more exceedingly difficult to enter and I might have to accept a temporary hold on this dream. It is a hard pill to swallow given that I was just getting started in the right direction. However, it is not without its silver linings.

Since lockdown, a new sense of creativity has been flowing out of me and it hasn't slowed down. I faced my hesitation of trying digital art and ended up really enjoying it! Now, I have been expressing myself with mixed media and simple animation. I love combining paintings and photographs with digital interventions in order to bring them to life.

In my household I live among 2 family members with severe anxiety and depression as well as OCD, such mental health challenges that have deepened during the pandemic. This said, I try to protect my mental health at all costs in order to be a stable figure for my Dad and my brother. Making art is key in this effort because it takes me to a space of whimsy and serenity when I need to escape. I hope that my work can give others the same reprise.

The pandemic has affected my family and my routines in many ways. Some are good, like how we have been able to have many more family meals because we are all home more often. But, others are not as beneficial, like how much less motivated I’ve been to complete simple tasks. I’ve definitely experienced negative emotions during lockdown, mostly due to missing my friends, family, and essentially how life was before. Art helps to combat these feelings by taking my mind off of the situation and focusing on something that I find more fun. Art is definitely a way I’ve coped with the lockdown, especially in the form of music. Listening to music, writing music, dancing to music, it just helps to calm me down and make me happier. Painting is another form of art that has helped me. I’ve painted shoes and water bottles for other people, and creating things that help bring happiness to others also brings happiness to me. Seeing someone else smile because of my art helps me to stop focusing as much on all of these scary world events.

Graduating college during a pandemic has been nothing short of tumultuous. I’m lucky to have a family home to return to while I navigate my short- and long-term future.

I’ve had my fair share of unmotivated, miserable quarantine days. My natural extroverted nature caused me to feel loneliness like never before. I was sucked into a hole of Twitter doomscrolling, hours of terrifying news reports, and the constant internal pressure of hunting for job openings that simply were not there. My hopes of working as a video editor grew slim as productions postponed for the year and creative friends flew to further corners of the world.

Slowly, I adapted. I started by crafting small projects all alone: my first animation, art collaging in a notebook, product photography for my Depop shop. Then I reached out to my community: my dad needed an introductory video for his new job, the bakery I work at asked for social media content, a digital Gen-Z magazine called Haloscope accepted me as a film writer. By first focusing on personal expansion, I was able to take back creative control and overcome pandemic isolation.

Being in lockdown has been taxing. I already suffer from anxiety and germaphobia, so this pandemic was bad news from the start. But what I’ve learned this year and will continue to practice is the value of social outreach. From gathering support from old classmates for the renaming of my high school in honor of our late first Black principal Dr. Derrick Nelson to promoting local BLM resources and small business efforts, I have utilized my social media platforms like never before.

Makeup is my creative outlet. It's a way to show the world who you are and what you’re feeling without saying a single word. I have been doing makeup for a little less than three years and still love the feeling I get when I do it. I was inspired by many drag queens to do makeup because they showed everyone their own sense of style, past, and future goals all through their makeup and fashion.Transitioning to a life with a pandemic was a very difficult experience for me. I suffer from both depression and anxiety so it was very difficult to endure a lot of change at once and not be able to see my friends and family. Doing makeup was able to keep me calm and give me peace when things got harder and being quarantined gave me more time to do my art. I did my makeup every other day at least because it was my calm in the storm that is corona. Having time to myself in quarantine also grew my confidence in my artistry and taught me that I should be proud of my work.

I’m a computer programmer and a self-taught watercolorist. I’m from Iran. And when pandemic started, we were working remotely and locked down at home for a while. It was at first funny to work from home but soon my daily timing had changed. I was awake at mid night and used to work more and more on my phone and laptop. I usually fell slept on my desk, which was why I painted myself in the first painting as sleeping on my laptop. I tried to show how I could see the light of day from the windows of Microsoft Windows desktop background. In the second painting I was home for about 2 months, and I had started to eat junk foods and became fat and still sticking to my laptop. And in this painting a little virus was free out there and looking at me with funny face. I was locked down while it was free.
Finally, the quarantine ended, they told we should work at office. Going out is good but weird. Wearing mask at work, avoiding your own colleagues. Many were and still are dying. We were told that kids wouldn’t catch the virus (we found later it wasn’t true) So I painted the third painting. I called it "next generation". To all orphans who have lost their parents but they were survivors. But maybe wearing a mask has become a new habit for next generation
The fourth painting is actually my first painting I made about Corona. I painted it when virus was in Wuhan. There was a doctor leaving his wife who going to a hospital in Wuhan on the news at that time.
The last painting was about Capitan Tom More, the British old Capitan who tried to walk and gather money to help people suffering from Virus. He is 100 years old. Surely it is hard for him to walk. So, I painted a cross on his shoulder. He is carrying the pain & suffering to make a better world (like what Jesus did)

My name is Sarah from Iraq, my hobby is drawing. After the home quarantine, I practiced my ideas in drawing and started to develop more in it, but the Covid 19 epidemic affected me and my daily routine, as I woke up every morning and went to my school where I learn more science and school knowledge and deal with my teachers and colleagues with sincere knowledge.  I was organizing my daily activities carefully, attending my lessons and dealing with Facebook in school, and I slept regularly and woke up regularly until my food I used to eat regularly, but this situation changed the scales of my life, so my appointments differed in all aspects of my life as I woke up late.  I only eat one meal a day, and this technique affected me terribly.  Where I used to go on the bus with my classmates and I was a little happy going and I felt that I was interacting in my school life.  But it is okay to share my ideas and drawings with my family and spend time on that.

I also suffered and experienced psychological anxiety, depression, and mental disorders, which affected my physical condition, so that I became sick and became ill with intestinal disorders and mental illnesses, as I went to an internist and treated myself and my father instructed me to do some sports exercises to strengthen my body and strengthen the respiratory system.  My father also instructed me to replace positive cases with negative cases, for example from sleep and depression, I replace this with sports and getting up early.  As well as reading books and browsing through social networking and other things.  I eat important foods that give the body immunity from diseases and replace disease - strength and toughness - and continue with my daily life normally and go out to some gardens in order to relieve myself from my psychological and physical affairs.

 Despite this!  I overcame depression and practiced my work and my hobbies, such as drawing, writing, etc., because I thought that Covid 19 was prolonged, and I do not mind continuing with daily life as much as possible.  I surfed on Facebook and other websites and contacted my colleagues in order to gain some important information for me and develop my knowledge abilities.

 I dealt with isolation and emptiness by filling this void with what increases my strength, so I practiced sports, jogging and some sports exercises at least an hour a day, this makes me able to resist diseases.  I also heard some of my favorite songs and music, watched some social series, and watched some beautiful, simple cartoon films.  Life is beautiful, and we must make it continue with bonding and social cohesion, and we always inform people of good and happiness, and the day of relief and joy must come.