World Emoji Day: Meet the San Francisco-based artist behind 6 of your favorite emojis

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- July 17 is World Emoji Day and, in celebration, Stanford University's Green Library is featuring the emoji-inspired artwork of Yiying Lu.

"I love this one, because this is the girl with pearl earrings with more pearls," said Lu of her re-creation of the "Girl with A Pearl Earring" portrait. Lu's version features the woman holding a boba milk tea, emoji-style.

Lu is actually the person who created the boba milk tea emoji that you can use on your emoji keyboard. She also created the dumpling, chopsticks, fortune cookie, takeout box, and peacock.

"I was invited to go to a dumpling party, and I realized no dumpling emoji on my phone," explained Lu.

That was back in 2015.

Since then, Lu has founded Emojination, a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for inclusive emojis.

For Lu, emojis are more than just a small digital image.

"By introducing these very beloved beverage and food items into the keyboard, it's also expanding what's existing, and also showing the diversity," said Lu. "Basically, it's an organization to help people submit their own ideas."

The next step involves the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit that standardizes the use and development of software and services, including emojis.

"We do a lot of work to make sure they're not transient, long lasting, and have some sense of global relevancy," explained Jennifer Daniel, chair of the emoji working group. This fall, nine new emojis will be released including a landslide.