2023 Art Minutiae

Before the year ends and my low attention span moves on to other things, I wanted to share a few items I created in 2023. This article exists solely so I don't have to dig through the buried images of my phone!

Exotica Expo at Wasteland Weekend

One of the festivals that I participated in for the past decade has been Wasteland Weekend. As I started to sunset the character that I played, I decided the mythos of his story would be that he would occasionally return with artwork of the strange exotic things he has seen among the wastes. My pal Dominic suggested I do some art related to the theme of 1950's exotica.

As exotica is more of a play on post-war travel, which has an unsavory colonist taste, my take on the theme was more about cryptids and bizarre occurrences that my character had encountered in his post-apocalyptic travels. A ragtag, mermaid, a many-faced creature, and even a rat fink-like mad max hot rod were depicted in my art. It was a very interesting confluence of several genres since the art was inspired by 50's cartoon retro designs, especially Derek Yaniger.

I had also designed a version of my character to look like an old Hana-Barbera character, so pulling that out I used it as a basis for the sign. As I was in a rush I decided to do it with poster pens with an acrylic background, which turned out pretty nice! As my art tends to be pretty sloppy I was surprised that people took everything home.

Art Sales

Art is a hobby for me at the moment, but to make a little passive income I made a font based off of my quirky handwriting. Two years ago I wrote a script that generated designs of every element in the periodic table and placed it in a fulfillment site, Redbubble. As a programmer, I make enough financially that I tend to timebox my art time to not eat up my programming time. So it was surprising to me when I saw that made enough for a fancy dinner this year from the sales of a singular element shirt: Thorium.

Sales for thorium peaked during the summer, so I think it was due to the movie premiere of Oppenheimer.

There was lots of interesting randomness when it came to art for me in 2023!