Artist Spotlight: HyJinx_0x
1. Tell us a little bit about yourself?
My name is Jake; I'm a Dad and an Artist in Los Angeles. I love making 3D and 2D digital art that draws from my experiences as a Sailor and surgeon. Bright saturated colours and crisp comic book lines are my aesthetic.
2. How do you get into your creative zone?
I work full-time as a Technical Writer for an Aerospace company, and I have two young children, so I have to make time whenever there's a free moment.
3. When in the flow, what does your process look like?
I typically scour Pinterest for hours and generate hundreds of images on AI applications like Midjourney or DALL-E. Once I've hit upon a theme or found an exciting visual character narrative, I either start making 3D digital sculptures with the VR software Adobe Medium on my Oculus Quest. Or, if the image is 2D, I'll get out my Japanese brush pens and sketchbook. Then I use the photographs of the IRL sketch to get started using Procreate on my iPad. So I like to mix between lots of things, I guess.
4. Tell us about your Esther piece?
I was inspired by a collab between @TheWhiteKenyon and @lukexdod that reminded me of a Horror Movie poster. So in my search for movie posters, I found an old Star Wars poster from the 70s that reminded me of Luke's graphic design style.
Since Esther is essentially a narrative concept, I was thinking about the movie Black Orpheus, the modern Brazilian retelling of the ancient legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. The idea of flipping the plot and Eurydice as the heroine who had to descend into Hades to rescue Orpheus reminded me of Esther's Escape from the dungeon. Which is also similar to the plot of Star Wars, except what if the Princess was the one doing the rescuing? Then I imagined a kind of darker "Rogue" Esther who had perhaps taken poison and was now possessed in some way. So I finally landed on this image of a haunted Esther deep in the dungeon on a rescue mission.
5. What are you most excited about in web3?
Maybe a world with less financial manipulation and fewer third parties. Probably a utopian fantasy at this point. But honestly, as an artist, the advent of NFTs is enormous for digital artists full stop.
6. What's your most significant learning experience in web3?
I started out in crypto as a degen. The hardest lesson has been accepting how connected defi has become to tradfi. From a development perspective, I created my own Candy Machine for a series of PFP NFTs. The difference between Ethereum using Solidity and Solana using rust was a steep learning curve. Thankfully Metaplex made it possible to use it.
