Editor’s note: Every Wednesday, variety writer Katie Andrew will profile a different local artist. This is the fifth installment of the series.

Megan Maller thumbed through the pages of her sketchbook, crisp and heavy with layers of paint. Images fluttered past of regal-looking women adorned in bright, fantastical dresses.

“It never works if it’s something somebody else wants you to be doing,” the sophomore art major said. “I try to cut out all the bullshit.”

Maller, a proficient drawer and painter, is serious about keeping her art ‘real’ by her own definition.

“For a long time, I was doing pictures I found online,” she said. “They never worked out the way I wanted them to, and I finally figured out it was because I had no idea who those people were. They were always great pictures, but they weren’t my pictures.”

These days the “born and bred” Atlantan fills her canvas with renderings of familiar faces.

“I was going through a bunch of old pictures,” she said of one portrait, an intimate close-up of her and her boyfriend Aaron McCoy’s faces touching.

Maller admitted that capturing the emotion between them wasn’t too difficult: “I knew where I was going.”

A student of professor John Stidham, Maller has been given a semester assignment of creating a portfolio with a consistent theme: portraits of two people conveying all sorts of emotions from romance to sadness to humor.

“I’m obsessed with portraiture.”

Maller finds that her art is heavily affected by the sounds around her. In creating the portrait of herself and her boyfriend, Maller listened to a special selection of romantic songs.

“Because what I do is so visual, the only other thing I can concentrate on is sound,” she said.

Maller believes that despite her natural talent, getting an education is extremely important to her progression as an artist.

“I know I’ve got a lot to learn,” she said. “I would not have been able to do [the painting of me and McCoy] two years ago.”

Surprisingly enough, it’s not the actual instruction that Maller holds in such high regard.

“I think it’s actually more about meeting the teachers,” she said.

Maller considers Stidham one of her greatest influences.

“He’s just a good teacher. I think every [art student] knows instructors within the department who inspire them.”