Launching My Art Career

For a long time I held onto the idea of being a full time artist: from my first undergraduate animation course, to the webcomic pipe dreams, and eventually the grants that allowed me to get paid to make art. It has been quite the journey to get to the point where I am actually going to try to make money and begin to support my life through my art.

I went to a magnet school hoping to learn to make video games which necessitated computer programming. I took to the rules and systems of computer science quite well. It was nice to solve problems, arrange code in a syntax that could be compiled into a language that a computer could understand. My thirst for learning and skill for high school math added to the basics needed to grasp the concepts. It helped that I was AMAB (assigned male at birth) and that I didn’t start to deeply question my gender identity until after I graduated from my undergraduate studies and had my first few years of professional experience behind me. Many who came out as trans or queer in the aughts or just happened to be AFAB (assigned female at birth) had it a lot rougher picking up those skills and experience.

Had I understood my gender identity and come out earlier, I may have struggled to focus on syntax, compiler errors, and algorithms because of the extra social stress of being trans. As a girl I may have felt alone in my mostly cis male classes and ostracized from my peers. I may not have been accepted by other women due to my focus on STEM. I did attend a magnet school where there was a focus on technology, so that may not have been as big of an issue there. What if I hadn’t gotten the student aide position in my senior year or the paid internship at a local businesses. Would I have continued down a rough path full of friction or would I have abandoned it for something different?

Then even if I did end up having a smooth gender transition with adequate socialization, there was still the queerness of figuring out I was a lesbian. Mean Girls was after-all centered around the premise that Regina George was a closeted lesbian who took out her feelings on Janice pushing her to the edges of the high school social circles. Being a trans lesbian at that same time was bound to come with its own intersecting flavors of trans misogyny, sexism, and homophobia. I guess, though, that if I pursued art from a young age through all of that, I would have had a lot of fuel to pour into my art.

One of the things that always spun me around with art is that I always felt behind in skill. When I finally took an animation course in undergrad, I had only ever copied some drawings creating fan art of video game characters I was obsessed with. I had no idea how to construct original drawings, so I struggled to bring my animations to life like some of my peers. Animation felt like magic though. It felt like whatever I could imagine, I could draw, and with enough practice, I could make it believable. And then eventually I could maybe make people feel things from the stuff that I create.

Around the same time, I was fascinated with web comics. They were trending in the mid aughts when I was figuring out what I wanted to do for a career. I tried my hand a few times at them, but I struggled to keep a regular drawing schedule which were often daily or weekly for most sites. I wanted to tell stories through pictures and convey emotion. Eventually instead of continuing to do web programming which was paying the bills, I got to work on small games projects. Games after all were the reason I had gotten into programming, and it turned out that they were also good at conveying feelings and connecting to people on a deep emotional level. I eventually went to graduate school and entered the game industry following that.

This time I did start to confront my trans-ness and it actually led to some of the work I was most proud of. I made a trans inclusive character creator representing gender as a spectrum in a NASCAR game (NASCAR Heat 3 & 4) and it was really fulfilling and successful. It taught me how important it was to make things that you deeply cared about. I learned it was possible to create change even in places you wouldn’t expect. I went on to give talks about this character creator, what I learned from making it, and how it could be applied to other games. I spoke at Game Devs of Color Expo 2019 and GDC 2021 and eventually I got to make a character creator with a team of women and trans folks for an indie game Witchy Life Story that fully delivered on what I tried to do with that original character creator.

After my first talk, my friend and colleague started talking to me about art grants to fund prototypes and I just happened to live in a state that had significant arts funding. I took a leap of faith and pitched a sexuality project my wife and I had been kicking around and we made a brand new thing based on some science we were excited about. That project was Goddess Grotto in 2020. We got to do a playtest just before lockdown, but much of the grant activities had to be shifted to a remote delivery so the project was a shadow of what it was initially imagined to be. But it got my foot in the door and I was getting paid to make art.

Eventually I got my next grant to make streaming content and a digital gallery about my rollerskating journey. I got another to do a visual novel about love and rollerskating and figuring your way through to adulthood in the mess that is capitalism while following the travel wanderlust. The current grant I am working on is a series of watercolor paintings walking through my trans journey. I have another grant proposal that I am waiting to hear back from and I am finally to a point where I feel like I have a lot to say through my art.

I am now excited to create watercolor, acrylic, digital, animated, games, fiber arts and so much more. While I may have taken a detour into engineering for so much of my career, I never stopped loving or practicing art. There was always this dream that some day I would be able to make a living from it and I think Cozy Witch Art is the way that I am going to seriously poor effort into that dream. I plan to eventually do commissions, freelance, and sell products that I create. But the part I am focusing on right now, is continuing to get grants to fully and deeply explore topics that are meaningful to me beyond what I can just make money from.

Grants give me the freedom to scope a project to exactly what I envision and get paid for the effort I am putting into it without worrying about if it is commercially viable. It allows me to explore art styles or experimental features, or just keep going until the artwork evokes the emotion I was looking for. It gives me an outlet for my voice, and a consistent way to stoke my creative fires to find my voice as an artist. I am so thankful for the opportunities to be able to create this way, and I am very excited to keep creating art that the Minnesota locals and those who experience my work over the internet will be able to enjoy in the future.

So Cozy Witch Art is the company I’ll be creating under. For years now I have identified as a cozy ball of yarn especially in the colder months. I have been growing my magic practice focusing on cooking, plants, and tarot. Animation and art is always a bit of magic, so this cozy witch is gonna be making art whenever she can from here on out!