FATEMEH HAGHNEJAD

Fatemeh Haghnejad, better known online as BlueBirdy, is an Iranian traditional and digital artist with a sublime touch. She’s a character artist obsessed with storytelling, able to depict moments where a character – be it an elf or a commuter riding the subway – is caught in a moment of self-reflection or contemplation. Her art is intimate, with characters wearing their thoughts on their faces, so it’s easy for the viewer to buy in to the scene wholeheartedly. It’s a skill bourne of hundreds of hours of drawing, and 2020 unsurprisingly brought even more time for Fatemeh to hone her craft.

You could say it was always going to be this way for BlueBirdy (a name that came from an old woman in a dream). Born in Iran to a family of artists, it was her grandfather who was the first big influence on her desire for creativity. He inspired Fatemeh’s mother and aunts to pick up paint brushes, and as a kid, “seeing them all painting and talking about art