4 Years: Sculpture Student
2 Years: Glassworker
6 Years: Custom Display Fabricator
2 Years: Aspiring Luthier
2 Years: Aspiring Artist
5 Years: Exhibit/Event Designer

2 Weeks: Creative Twitch Streamer

Protean @ Twitch.tv/ProteanProjects

I am 33 years old. Age is not a significant fact, but it does provide context for the journey to where I am. And where am I exactly? Surrounded by microphones and cameras invoking my inner Bob Ross for hours every day, and hopefully exploring what design has to offer.

Life has provided me an opportunity to pursue something that I truly loved to do professionally. I was so shocked by chance that I didn't know where to start or even what “love” has to do with professional. You work, you get paid, you try to keep your original self from becoming something you don't recognize. The grind was my life from college to today, 15 years of surviving a creative professional life.

Preparing a project of the day. Currently the channels focus is on leatherwork and template design.

Back to the cameras in front of my face. I have been watching streams for years and never once had the urge to become a broadcaster, but once Bob Ross streams and the creative channel found their way into my follower rotation, I discovered a sliver of creativity that was uniquely mine. The list at the start of this article are all the pursuits I have set out on in the last decade and a half, some overlap some don’t, but they all inform who I am as a designer and give me the tools to take on my next endeavor.

Currently, I am pressing pause from the daily streams. Broadcasting for me will be a structured release of thoughts and processes, success and failures. I want to harbor a community of open and free makers who are striving to understand as many things as possible.

The goal is to find out precisely what it is I want to say to the world. It’s an interesting problem that I want to pursue, and in doing so hopefully, reveal what I love doing as a designer.