brynlee_quintana

A Girl Built from Ruins 🖤

People often say that architecture is “turning dreams into stone,” but no one ever says just how heavy those stones are on your back! My name is Brynlee Quintana, and I’ve been drawing pretty things out of chaos for my whole life. But before I could render the world, I had to survive it.

At 16 years old, I was crashing in a car with only the glow of my laptop to warm me—stealing wifi from the closed cafes while I taught myself how to make 3D models. My father? Gone. My mother? An empty shell in her own life, evaporated by addiction. Early on, I learned, walls don’t just divide spaces, they hide things. And I was very good at hiding.

But pain has a way of hollowing you out—with spaces in you where art takes root and grows. I sometimes turned hunger into hyper-realism, and loneliness into such lumion renders that I made clients cry. Now, when I design glass towers that invade the sky, I think about the girl laying on the pavement, staring up at them, subconsciously wondering if she’d ever be anything other than a shadow of the dreams she saw.

This isn’t a fairytale. There was no prince. Just bird-burst fingers, 72-hour work sprints, and the silent rebellion of finding ways to prove every doubter wrong. My renders don’t just show buildings—they haunt. Because I know what it is to be invisible… until you are a body of work 💋.

(And yes, I still work barefoot at 3AM when I chase that perfect light angle—like warm, ignited light is my last flicker in the world. Old habits die hard.) 🔥