I’ve always felt a need to create original visual content. That’s the thing; I need to. Sometimes people are surprised to learn that I make art, because I’m pretty technical/analytical a lot of the time. But the need is always there. I’ve always cared about aesthetics, and I’ve always generated my own aesthetic ideas, which I’ve felt compelled to put out into the world.

Most of my work has been purely for my own enjoyment and expression, though sometimes I’ve used my art in projects at school and work.

If there’s any niche I can confidently say I occupy as an artist, it’s that I like to use images from my dreams, combined with the fact that I use a very technical medium. Most technical-minded people don’t seem to have very vivid dreams (that they can remember, at least)—I imagine that’s a pretty small Venn diagram sliver, but that’s where you’ll find me.

Media

I used to draw a ton: Since I could hold a pencil, I’d draw for hours at a time on my own. And in class I’d doodle constantly, sometimes seriously frustrating my teachers. But as I was growing up, I became absolutely fascinated with 3D video games (as they were just starting to hit the market) and Pixar films (as they were just starting to dominate that genre of movies). I really wanted to make art in virtual 3D space.

I was thirteen when I started teaching myself 3D modeling, animation, and rendering on Blender. Blender is a free, open-source 3D art application, famous for its huge array of features and its absolutely brutal learning curve. I found it to be the most engaging medium of art I’d ever used, because it required technical rigor as well as creative vision. I got over the learning curve through pure enthusiasm (seriously it was a really hard program back then, especially for a thirteen-year-old), and I’m still using Blender to this day. That’s also because Blender has had a very healthy development lifecycle and is incredible nowadays—basically the archetype of what open-source software can be.

Through Blender, I’ve dabbled in many different kinds of art—3D printing, 3D animation clips, 2D animations, 2D graphics, image editing, game assets, etc. But my favorite medium is 3D still rendering. That is, I model a virtual 3D scene, add texture information to the virtual objects, add light sources, and then I have the program calculate all the lighting interactions to render a 2D image of that scene.