Personal Work

Let's play!

Role

CEO of Fun, Chief Imagineer, Assistant to the Regional Manager

Industry

Art

Duration

Various

My philosophy

Side projects are important. I love creating, and I get a real tangible sense of satisfaction when I make my own work, just for me (and the few people who see it when I decide to randomly post it on instagram).

When I was younger, my dream job was to be a cartoonist. Then I wanted to be a paleontologist because I LOVED dinosaurs. Then, when I realized how physically taxing paleontology is, it was back to cartoonist. I loved drawing and reading graphic novels. As a kid, reading the "funny pages" in my daily newspaper cultivated such a profound respect for artists like Bill Waterson (Calvin & Hobbes), Darby Conley (Get Fuzzy), and Hilary Price & Rina Piccolo (Rhymes with Orange). And I would be remiss not to mention the GOAT Gary Larson (The Far Side). These artists were absolutely churning out amazing work and I couldn't get enough of it.

In my opinion, a cartoon is one of the purest forms of storytelling. A still image, some text, and your brain piecing it together to form a belly laugh, chortle, or smile in real time… That's a beautiful thing. And I think those early days of reading comics and cartoons as a kid instilled a deep appreciation for a style and a format that endures to this day. I don't think it's any surprise that my own personal style involves bold lines and graphic elements, because it's what I know and love.

My philosophy

The Process

When I sit down to draw, sometimes I have a plan. Other times I just wing it. Most of the time it's somewhere in between. An idea that I scrawled onto a piece of scrap paper at some point that then I read and try to recall what I was thinking about and then sprinkling a little animation on top and just a dash of sound design and then all of a sudden *voila* I have a video. Or sometimes I will be trying out a new software and want to put something together to help me learn it better. I've found techniques or workflows in my personal work will occasionally bleeds into paid projects and those are the often most fun and fulfilling projects to work on.

In general, I love to create. To me, it doesn't feel like work when I'm creating something just for fun. It's just play. And so often, we lose our sense of play in our work, even if it's something we genuinely enjoy doing. I'm trying to keep it alive, and more so, I'm trying to feed it, fuel it, foster it.

a pair of cell phones on a concrete block

a cell phone with a yellow rectangular screen

One recent short:

This was an experiment fiddling around in Cinema 4D and learning the software. I like to make "very short films" for social. This one in particular was inspired by Corridor Crew's "slightly offensive bowling animation" series — this one is more like a "weirdly wholesome bowling animation." You can see the others on my YT Channel or Instagram.