Being A Self-taught Artist With No Formal Training Is Having Done Art Seriously Since You Were A Young

being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager and only finding out that you’re supposed to do warm up sketches every time you’re about to work on serious art when you’re fuckin twenty-five

Button embroidery crafts

I may need this later, for cosplay reasons...

“A fox’s teeth are very sharp.” (2013-2019) Silk filament on silk-hemp blend with hand-dyed silk chiffon scarf.  Text is Sandman: The Dream Hunters by @neil-gaiman, design inspired by illustrations of Yoshitaka Amano.  Dress by L.L.K.  Photo credit to Kenneth Williams.

Six years ago, my unbelievably talented wife decided to undertake a ridiculously long and complicated project: to embroider a story onto a dress.

We live in a very casual college town where no one ever dresses up for anything, so we began a tradition of throwing formal New Year’s Eve parties, and L being L, she made a dress every year. In 2013, she decided to take it a step further: she would create a dress inspired by Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: The Dream Hunters and then embroider the entire story onto the dress. The dress itself was the work of a few weeks and looked beautiful on her at the party, and then the real work began: planning, mapping, embroidering and embroidering and embroidering. She estimated it would take approximately ten years of doing needlework an hour or two each evening, leaving plenty of time to take nights or even months off. She finished in under six.

I can’t summon words to describe how proud of her I am right now. I mean, I am always proud of her, as she is an exceptionally kind and caring human being as well as a polymath (seamstress, carpenter, baker, programmer, naturalist, and tenured professor of biology), but she has created a true work of art and I hope it ends up in a museum somewhere to immortalize her talent, skill, and patience.

She’s currently trying to figure out her next project.

OH LORD HE’S DONE

I spent 1,025 hours over 3 years making this glitter bomb of a jacket 😭😭😭

wtf do I do now though

3 mice (oil on canvas 12″x12″)

redbubble!