Senior Tyler Ayers draws, paints and airbrushes in his own way. Being color blind, Tyler makes each piece of artwork look good in his own eyes even if it seems like the wrong colors to other people.

“I don’t think I chose to get into art,” Tyler said. “I just kept doing it. I stuck with it, never stopped. I was doing art before I knew I was color blind.”

The way Tyler perceives color is different from how another person sees it. When one person may see green, Tyler may see purple. To him, it looks right in his head.

“It affects me in a way that I don’t know exactly what color is what color,” Tyler said. “I just go by what looks good to me, and it makes my art unique because it changes the whole perspective of everything. It could be totally off, but in my head, it looks right.”

Throughout his art career, Tyler has had teachers with conflicting views on his art. In the past, he has been critiqued on his color choice by some teachers, but some have enjoyed having Tyler in class and have encouraged him to keep drawing or painting to improve his talent.

“His pieces are phenomenal,” Mandy Knight, an art teacher at FHN, said. “He can take a piece of paper and any drawing utensil and create some of the most amazing pieces ever. He can take anything and then create the most phenomenal drawings that are so realistic, and it’s remarkable.”

Tyler has been inspired to pursue art by his uncle who is also color blind. Similarly to Tyler, his uncle draws when he has the time. They have a close relationship with each other, having influence over each other’s likes and dislikes due to their similar tastes. Though their art may look different to other people, it looks just fine to them. Tyler started drawing when he was little, searching cars or scenery of waterfalls to draw on Google. He drew them detail for detail on paper.

“The coolest thing about his art is just kinda how he pulled the talent out of nowhere,” Dominic Pusateri, Tyler’s cousin, said. “No one in his family draws; no one in my family draws. He had a natural talent for drawing out of nowhere.”

Tyler likes to be able to capture an image and recreate it in his own way, through his perspective. He gets ideas from anywhere: graffiti, dogs, everyday things. A lot of his friends will ask him to draw something, and an idea will spark from the suggestion. He works best at a desk he has at home or in a studio.

“I feel like he sees something, and he puts a lot of emotional feeling into it,” Pusateri said. “He’s color blind and puts things in his own perspective. When he uses his medias, it’s always through his eyes.”