The year was 2013. I sat quietly in the back corner of my family's office in a small secluded work space. I had become perhaps the least productive employee in the building. At the time I was the only person that knew how to operate AutoCAD and their only hope to finish a years worth of backlog "as-built" electrical blueprints. Funny thing was that I didn't exactly know how to use the program. The previous drafter quit after a drug induced mental breakdown, before he could explain how to use the program. Now I can understand why. That job is for robots. No human should be subjected to that kind of torture. No amount of reimbursement is worth being a draftsman... I was also using a lot of amphetamines.
I was a real shit bag. My typical day consisted of waking up late. At which point I would drive into work, sitting in traffic that I would have otherwise missed if I had I woke up on time. That would give me time to check coins prices. Once I arrived I would immediately login to 3 different exchanges. Trading everything from KanyeCoin to Doge to LTC to Redcoin to Weedcoin. I'd open up a blueprint and leave it in the background in case anyone came into my office. Before leaving i'd log my computer into cgminer which I would moderate using teamviewer. At home I had my own rig plugged in pumping out about 13 LTC a day. At the time it all seemed like fun and games rather than serious money. I traded huge amounts of coin daily as if it were nothing. Then came the drugs...
My sleep patterns were eternally fucked. I hated my job and had come to terms with quitting. After sleeping for a few days straight and of not answering their calls I was FINALLY fired! Lost my apartment... and my car... and a majority of my stuff. It was the best thing that could have ever happened to me!
From that point there was about a year that I just didn't really care about anything. I sold all my coins to a friend that was more deeply involved in crypto than I was. Pushed everybody away and legitimately just wanted to die. I had put my entire identity into a career that I absolutely hated to please my family. I was an artist and had spent the last 6 years neglecting that. Everybody I knew thought I was crazy because I was always jacked up on amphetamines talking about digital funny money. I began to think I was actually a crazy person. However, I also knew that I was no fool, so for me to admit that would be absolutely unheard of. Lots of head games...
I decided to quit using after seeing everyone around me spiraling out of control and abusing heroin. I held up in a room at my parents place for about 3 weeks and slept it out... they insisted I went to rehab so I checked myself in... Then checked myself out a week later after they kept referring back to, "Nobody can fix you besides yourself"... In that case, why am I here? amiright? Saved like $17,000 in the process.
Since then it's been a long recovery. I didn't really know what to do or where to start. After all I had lost my motivation and presumably my mojo, my imagination. All I knew was that I wanted to create rather than consume. I had been consuming all my life and it never made me any happier. So I started to make shitty music and draw crappy drawings. This led me to taking crappy photos. Which actually started to look like pretty decent photos... so I ran with that.
I offered to start taking photos for a guy I had met in high school. I had nothing better to do and, as a rapper, he benefited from free photography. Eventually I went on tour to SXSW and up the entire west coast with this same person. Concert photography has opened up a lot of doors for me but at some point it lost it's novelty. I decided I didn't like taking photos of people. Something about developing someone else's image with my creations felt weird. The clubs all started to seem the exact same and you wonder why people waste weekend after weekend doing the same mindless ego walk.
I started focusing on print material going under the name Thousand Word Visuals. My latest photography endeavor involves ink in an aquarium. Pointless, yes, yes... Such is life. After doing weeks of ink drops I discovered that I could do something similar with CGI... and it's been a wrap. In about a week I taught myself 3d modeling, character rigging, UV unwrapping, virtual studio setup, hdri lighting maps, and liquid/smoke particle physics on both Cinema 4d and Blender software.
So finally, before showing some of my latest creations I just want to say that
- I'm tremendously happy creating and sharing pointless art that most people will never see.
- No amount of drugs could have fixed that fact that I was working towards a future I never wanted.
- As much as I want to be known for my creations there is also freedom in being nobody.
- Art (music, drawing, photography, digital) saved my life.
- I'm not a good writer so this is just going to be the format of this post.
RENDERS
VIDEO
Barbie Ink Drop| Tʜᴏᴜsᴀɴᴅ Wᴏʀᴅ Vɪsᴜᴀʟs
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