She’s on point.
A Brighton Beach high-schooler’s subway-inspired artwork could soon grace the lapels of Brooklynites everywhere after her design was plucked to represent the borough.
Art-loving 17-year-old Mellina Melezhik won the first-ever “Brooklyn Pin Design Competition,” a contest that invited Kings County residents to capture the borough’s spirit with an itty-bitty brooch.
“I was looking to challenge myself, but I didn’t think I would win!” a stunned Melezhik told The Post, adding that the idea of thousands of people wearing her design didn’t “seem real.”
The born-and-raised Brooklynite pulled from her own experiences riding the Q train to school and to museum outings with her parents to dream up the winning design — a spray-painted R160 subway car.
She recalled being “mesmerized” every time the train pulled past a massive graffiti-covered warehouse wall between the Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay stops.
“The metro and murals are so cultural to Brooklyn,” Melezhik, a student at Brooklyn Studio Secondary School, said.
“The inspiration for this design was generally that Brooklyn itself is very well known for its metro systems. It’s one of the best metro systems in the US,” she added.
“The graffiti part — I feel like it represents the community and the culture within Brooklyn,” Melezhik said. “It’s both an inspiration inside of Brooklyn, but also it’s something that is well known and inspires others outside of Brooklyn.”
Her submission was one of hundreds, which included multiple Brooklyn Bridges, water towers, pizzas and other BK-centered iconography — including some by non-Brooklynites who tried to sneak into the competition organized by the borough president’s office.
But Borough President Antonio Reynoso said the graffiti-covered car was a clear standout.
“It’s a great piece that combines art and creativity in the graffiti with one of our defining modes of transportation for New York City, which is the MTA subway car,” he said. “It’s just very smart. Very Brooklyn.”
Melezhik’s handiwork will be formally unveiled at Reynoso’s “State of the Borough” address Thursday as the first-ever constituent-designed pin.
The tradition was born during BP Marty Markowitz’s tenure from 2002 to 2013, when he was known for handing out thousands of gold pins styled after the Brooklyn Dodgers’ classic script to constituents, including ones he’d take right off his own blazer.
During his time as borough president from 2014-21, former Mayor Eric Adams continued the trend, but it wasn’t until last year that Reynoso decided to revamp the design, to one by his office’s Arts Ambassador, Colm Dillane.
Melezhik’s design will serve as the next iteration and will be the first that isn’t only the typeface of “Brooklyn.”
The teenager had nearly refused to submit a design for the competition, but was encouraged by a good friend biology teacher, Ms. Del Ponte, she said.
Melezhik took on the contest head-on, thinking of it as a “challenge,” even if she didn’t end up winning. While she loves drawing, the young artist prefers to work on world-building digital illustrations rather than tangible designs.
Her train pin was chosen by Reynoso’s team without the beep’s office knowing whose submission it was, but the revelation that it came from the teen daughter of two Ukrainian immigrants from Kazakhstan made it a perfect Brooklyn tale, he said.
“It couldn’t be a better Brooklyn story!” Reynoso told The Post.
“It’s reflective of who we are in Brooklyn. Our creative energy is running deep in this borough. We didn’t choose the design because of the person, but it just happened to be the perfect person who made the design,” he said.
“Transportation is so central to who we are as a borough and to have the train car is real Brooklyn and nothing more Brooklyn than graffiti on a train car,” Reynoso said.
The pins themselves will be coveted, Reynoso warned — the only way to get one’s hands on one is to volunteer in the community or to shake hands with the BP himself.
“The majority of the pins get to people by seeing it on my lapel, and I take it off every time,” he said.