Want to know a bit about what makes me do all this?
Here’s some blurbs on the things I do and the tools I use to do it
Jewelry
Jewelry is such a wonderfully strange thing. When I was a kid, every piece of jewelry I could get my hands on was a magical artifact (and probably meant I could have a pet dragon).
As an adult, it still feels magical, but more like armor: we put so much of ourselves into the things we love, and especially the things we wear, and slowly an ring or a pendant becomes a talisman to your identity. That’s why I think jewelry should be personal. The way I see it, there’s no person on earth who isn’t absolutely one of a kind.
One of my missions is to make that symbolic armor for people who want something a little new, a little odd, and just right for them. Everyone deserves to see themselves reflected in their ornamentation.
Metal Sculpture and Minis
Oh, my first art love, sculpture. Working with my hands in tactile three dimensional space will drop me into a state of flow like nobodies business, and I honestly can’t get enough of it. There is something very beautiful to me about creating something so solid and real just with a thought and your hands. These days, I primarily do lost wax casting in metal (aluminum, copper, brass, silver and gold).
Combine all that with the fact that I’ve been playing D&D since I was eight years old, and some fantasy elements are sure to come through. I spent many an hour looking over the Monster Manual and trying to memorize the stats for my favorite monsters.
Minis are pretty much my ideal scenario - tiny, detailed, and most importantly, pure sculpture!
Printmaking
My most favorite form of printmaking is “intaglio” printmaking, which involves physically etching or carving metal plates into images in reverse, and then using a press to lift the image onto paper in its intended orientation. There is very much a theme here - I’m a bit obsessed with working in metals.
It scratches some of the drawing and painting itch to portray things beyond the scope of small, three dimensional pieces, but there is metal involved! Yay metal! (My favorite plate for most prints is zinc, if you are curious.) I love the feeling you can invoke in a print: adjust the shading, the scale, the prospective, and suddenly you can conjure grandeur, loneliness, serenity, unease.
Drawing and Painting
Painting, the newcomer on the scene! Honestly, metal work is my career, but painting is a treasured hobby. I am by no means an expert, but is sure is fun to try and put 3D things on paper. It hurts my brain a little, which is part of why I like it.
And drawing, of course, is literally everything you do in art. Every project starts its life as a drawing, no matter what medium it becomes. I have a very love/hate relationship to drawing - sometimes I can make the pencil represent the thing, and sometimes I can’t, but when it works, it’s like an epiphany, and everything else works a little better around the space it created.
The Studio
My studio is a mess. Always. I clean it, and then I have an idea, and then its a mess again. I’m fairly old school in my metal work; it’s all hand-made, carved and crafted with hammers and a fire and knives and I love it.
My lost wax casting set up is the single most used equipment in the studio except for maybe the torch. I make a model out of wax, make a mold of the model, burn out the wax, and then fling molten metal into the mold with a centrifuge! How cool is that?!
You can find me there most days, and often well into the night, making very loud noises and occasionally burning myself.
Me
I am a real life meat robot! I’m queer in almost every sense of the word, disabled in a number of ways, and dye my hair all the time (until I don’t and just let my roots grow for months)
I started down the art path when I was really little, and I love ALL of it. Literally all. Music, writing, all the things on this page, as well as a few more. I tried to major in all of them at once, which only sort of worked. I am a combination of self-taught, formally educated, and whatever you call "learning from the industry, despite the industry’s best efforts”.
I’m passionate about animals (mine and everyone else’s) and botany and history and astronomy and geology and philosophy and most of the universe.