 How long have you been doing these cutouts? I've been doing the cutouts for about five years now. When did you get the idea? Why did you first experiment with it? Well, it was about five years ago. I got accepted to Megacon. I was on the wait list. Actually, this event right now, I was on the wait list for Artist Alley. Got accepted, and I didn't have any material to sell. And I'm an illustrator by trade. Initially, I went to college for illustration. And one night, I was drawing. I ran out of charcoal. And it was like two o'clock in the morning. And I wanted to keep doing art. I couldn't go to the art store. And so I found an exacto knife that was right next to me. And I had some black paper, some black artigan paper. And I cut out a bee. And I loved it. And I just drew it. I just free handed this bee. You mean like an insect? Yeah, it was like an insect. Yeah, yeah, it was just this creepy looking like Tim Burtony weird bee. My exacto knife got stuck on the bee. I pulled it up and a shadow showed from underneath from the light. And I just literally was like, ah, this has to happen now. So I just started framing them and cutting them. And that's it. So an act of desperation turned into an accident? Completely. That's exactly what it was. Exactly what it was. So yeah, I ended up cutting that week probably about 27 pieces. Brought into Megacon. Sold out the first day. And I was like, oh, geez. Okay. So I started mixing my illustration work with this new skill of paper cutting. And just ever since been doing it. Yeah. And I'll be working on movies. I have some stop motion animations I'll be working on utilizing my layered paper cuts. I was going to ask you what was your first big hit but you say they all sold? They all sold. They all sold right away. I think the thing that people were most excited about were my three layered stuff. I did a venom that was really popular right at the time. And then I ended up getting reblogged a bunch because I threw it on the internet. But it really depends on people's fandom. I do a lot of Star Wars stuff because I love Star Wars. However, I'm more of a, I like fairy tale stuff as well. So all my new stuff is transitioning more into like storybook and fairy tale things as opposed to the geekdoms, the fandoms. Do you still cut everything by hand? Yes, absolutely. I like how tactile it is. And it's very cathartic to just, I don't know, cut through the knife. It sounds a little sadistic, I get that, but it feels really nice on your hands. It's destructive and creative. That's exactly what it is. In fact, I have tattoos that say create and destroy on my hands because that's what we're doing every time as artists and I like charcoal work as well because it's messy and when you push down with a charcoal it breaks apart in front of your face. So you create and destroy at the exact same time. And that's sort of everything that I believe in when it comes to theory. Who are your artistic influences, art heroes? Well, my art heroes, my favorite artist of all time is Carvaggio. I love Art Nouveau. You can tell by, I do illustrations and a lot of it is car skewer style. I like black and white. But I also love Art Nouveau. Alfonso Mucca and also Arby Beardsley. Because Arby Beardsley has these gorgeous shapes. It's stark, black and white, which is where I get a lot of my paper cut inspiration from. It's Arby Beardsley because it's graphical and illustrative at the same time. But it's all black and white because he inked. So I'm trying to mimic that as well. What new big pieces are you working on? What new big pieces? I'll be working on an entire fairy tale series. So instead of taking what other people have done through the geek fan stuff, I'm reading the stories and making my own interpretations of these characters. I have a huge Sea Witch and Little Mermaid, which looks nothing like Disney's. But it's my own interpretation of Christian Danderson's. So I did Sleeping Beauty recently, which is up on the wall. And that was a pretty big hit. People liked it a lot and I really enjoyed doing it. So I'm going to do an entire series of storybook stuff. And then I'm going to be going into doing children's books. I want to do children's books mixed with some of my creepy illustrations, maybe a little bit of horror children's books. I think that's about it. Cool.