A college student has turned the act of telling someone off into an art form. Lama Ali, who attend school in Virginia, had three final assignments due on the same day for her fashion drawing class. Exhausted after working on painting for seven hours straight, the 20-year-old decided to include a message in American Sign Language to her professor: When your drawing teacher assigns 3 finals so you secretly write "you got me fucked up" in sign language on your final piece. ----Shawty Arabia(@LemAli23) December 7,2016 "You got me fucked up," a bunch of hands in the painting spell out in ASL, in a form of sign known as finger spelling , which uses signs for each letter, rather than for the words themselves. "Honestly the idea just came to me while I was finishing up the piece," Ali toldThe Huffington Post." I was looking at it and thought, 'This could really use something else'. And then the idea struck me: Why not secretly express how I was feeling while struggling at the library at 4 a. m.?" Once the fashion design major had finished her masterpiece, she posted it to Twitter on Dec. 7, where it has received over 113,000likes and 48,000 retweets  . Ali, who does not know ASL, toldHuffPostshe taught herself a little bit just for this particular assignment. "You know it's bad when you have to learn a whole other language to express how done you are," she said. "I remembered seeing a post on Tumblr long ago with a similar phrase by the post, she decided to look up the letters in ASL to spell out the message. Someone on Twitter even did the good work of circling them in the painting. Ali toldHuffPostthat when she finally presented the piece to her professor in her class, he absolutely loved it. "Most of my friends in class actually knew about the secret message, so I was really surprised when no one laughed or blew my cover during critique ." She also admits that her professor still doesn't know about the message, despite her post getting so much attention. What was it that gave Ali the inspiration to use ASL to express her feeling?
Her professor's assignment. Being too exhausted. A post on Tumblr with ASL. Her classmates' encouragement.