Artist Spotlight: Sirius Crocodile

Today we have the absolute pleasure of spotlighting Sirius Crocodile, a super talented multi-disciplinary, cross-chain artist and animator active on Ethereum and Solana. His work spans the gamut from absurd, minimal gifs to detailed sci-fi drawings and mutability experiments such as the Totem project.

I've been lucky enough to connect with Sirius and get to know him through our Solana community. He's been a guiding light of philosophy and balance in his outlook on art, design and our process. I always learn a new perspective anytime we connect.

Ok, without further ado, let's get to know Sirius Crocodile.

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself?

I am Sirius Crocodile. I am an artist, a musician, a developer, a dancer and a father. I have worked full-time as a web3 artist since the end of 2022. I'm only getting started 🤟

2. How do you get into your creative zone?

I'm always in that zone. For the last 15 years, I have been generating the bulk of my ideas in bed, sometimes actually sleeping but usually dozing between waking up and sleeping in. When I get up, I jot down the gist of the idea and start working. My creative zone is just a substantial part of me.

3. When in the flow, what does your process look like?

I procrastinate from one project with the next project, and at some point, I go full circle and finish them all. The main idea is to never do something that I feel I HAVE to do, I want to always do things that I WANT to do instead, and the procrastination angle seems to work for me because I don't have a habit of passive activities like watching TV or playing video games.

4. Tell us about your Esther piece?

Luke and I have been talking about this collab for a long time, and it took a few different forms in the conceptual stage along the way. But from the moment we decided to do a Platform Perils piece, I knew it would be a lot of fun. This project provides the right dosages of structure and guidance while leaving close to 100% of the creative choices open for the collaborator to take in any direction. I was thrilled to use this opportunity to put my recently acquired blender grease pencil skills to the test. For the animation, I'm using advanced rigging and keyframing techniques readily available in the 3D environment but combined with very basic frame-by-frame drawing offered by the grease pencil objects in blender.

I started with little to no plan and built it step by step, filling in the blanks as I went along. Because it ended up being a pretty fleshed-out piece of animation, it was a shame not putting sounds and music to it, and that's where our friend Plight came in. We worked together on a few pieces, and I'm always impressed by his work. He provided a wonderful game atmosphere with the music, along with the sound effects. I'm stoked at how it turned out.

5. What are you most excited about in web3?

I love everything about web3. The way it empowers us artists to collaborate and make our own way. The technical framework for building a community and a career with close to 0 compromises inspires me to show up and grind every day of the week.

6. What's the most significant learning experience you've had in web3?

Among many other things: trust. Trust is everything. It is the actual value of our work and the currency we build for ourselves as artists. Through our work, we build a relationship of trust between artists, collectors, community members and developers. That is web3 for me.

Sirius, it's been fantastic to get to know you throughout the year, and I am so happy to have collaborated with you and Plight on this Platform Peril. If you want to contact Sirius Crocodile, you can find him on Twitter here.