This is a fun question to me that I’ve heard narrowed down by some pretty interesting ideas of place.
Honestly this post is more just some background info about me that has some relevance to my business and art.
The first way I’ll answer this is some IRL background. Granted, I don’t like sharing a lot of personal detail so it’ll be pretty basic.
I liked art as a kid, had a competitive personality, pursued that skill in high school at a collegiate level, and went to art school (common mistake). I went to school for game design and got a BFA. But I work like maybe 11 different jobs running a business so this is more of a result of the ‘I have to figure out Something’ task. Not that I don’t enjoy it, I do. But games was the main thing I wanted to do in Some capacity.
The far more exciting way to answer this question is essentially ‘what part of the internet are you from?’ I’ve heard it amongst younger friends of mine as ‘what Discord server are you from’ and as someone who potentially has more hours in Skype it’s kind of funny to hear it in that way. I think where you started on the net kinda has some intense influences on your art subconsciously (obviously there are outliers to this experience).
So that history is more interesting overall. My alias comes from my experience as a 10-year-old who couldn’t afford (single parent couldn’t afford) a graphics tablet doing pixel art on trackpad on my laptop. That’s the “PNG” though I’ve recently returned to doing pixel art again. I wanted to make digital art and pixel was the medium that ended up being the easiest for what I had.
One of the greatest incentives to make pixel art was my time on Gaia Online. Signature images were a commodity that took a lot of the virtual dress up seriously. Having a cute pixel animation after your thread comment was appealing. I designed so many in exchange for the fake currency that made my avatar look like hyper-clutter and it made me the happiest kid alive. Gaia Online and DeviantArt are definitively where I ‘started.’ I made a ton of icons and tiny sprite animations on DeviantArt, nuked a few accounts over time, eventually settled and took on some ‘point’ commissions which was amazing to me at the time since those points could be converted into USD. I eventually got a tiny graphics tablet and hopped between DeviantArt and Tumblr in my teens and just kept drawing.
Now what I would answer as the ‘where did I come from?’ question with is a niche, furry, micro-community within the adoptables category called “closed species.” Yep, collectible, tradable, recreational character designs that ended up making me a decent buck where commissions did not draw enough appeal. I spent so many years curating a group for trading “Pacapillars,” these caterpillar-like creatures with various designs. And there’s still people today that will come up to me at conventions and mention knowing me from that era. And as much as I get wide-eyed, I can’t really be that surprised given how much they took off.
They are still running to this day! (This day being the blog post’s publish date).
Doing adoptables between 2015 and 2020 really had me grinding a faster pace for rendering and understanding of color and thematic design. I’d say that experience definitely influences how I design even today. I drew nearly 1000 of these worms… not exaggerating in the slightest.
Teens through college I was mostly always coming back to DeviantArt in some way, which, it’s a shame we don’t have something like it today (current day DeviantArt is ass). I’d love to see more community/communication based platforms for art in the future where comments and collaboration are far better than likes and silent sharing and big number.
Those are the humble beginnings I had, thought it would be fun to share!