Believe in Your Dreams, Kauaʻi High

In 2013, a concussion took Trysen off the soccer field halfway through his senior season at Kauaʻi High School. He spent the time painting, and made it his senior project.

What began as a small section of wall grew into a full mural at the request of principal Debbie Lindsey. "Believe in Your Dreams" runs across the block wall in bold yellow and orange letters. The background is Kalapakī, the place right behind the school: its green ridgeline rising over the water, with a reef full of fish and a honu along the bottom. Students see their own home in the wall, which is how Trysen still starts every design.

Trysen won an Aloha ʻIke grant to fund the project, with his teacher Leah Aiwohi as advisor. His mentor, muralist Ken "East3" Nishimura, flew in from Honolulu and Rasone came from Las Vegas, joined by Kauaʻi artist Jason Medeiros, to help him run a free two-day "Spray Away Meth" art workshop with The Hawaiʻi Meth Project for middle and high school students. The wall made the front page of The Garden Island while it was still being painted.

The wall led straight to the next one. Trysen went on to tour with the Not Even Once anti-meth campaign, painting message walls on Oʻahu, Maui, Lānaʻi and Hawaiʻi Island, work that earned him his first mayoral proclamation in 2014.

It was his first public wall, and the start of everything Inspire To Create Media does now: art that gives young people a message to carry and a place to put what they feel. Seven years later, "Believe In Your Dreams" was the cover line when The Hawaiʻi Herald put Trysen on the front of its Seventh Kauaʻi Issue. In 2025 he returned to the same campus to paint the birds on the Drive With Aloha mural, again alongside East3.

In the press: The Garden Island, front page and The Hawaiʻi Herald cover story (print, May 1, 2020).