Meet Paige Turncliff in Mesa

Today we’d like to introduce you to Paige Turncliff.

Paige, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Ever since I was little, I wanted to draw cartoons, and my adult style has very much been shaped by that. I’m trying to capture something very specific in my head.

I have always had an eye for detail and a good sense of visualization, and I took those skills and taught myself to animate in high school. Since then, I’ve animated television commercials, designed murals for businesses, and am self-publishing a comic zine every year called Cooties!

I earned my bachelor of animation from the Queensland College of Arts in 2010 and moved to Mesa, Arizona two and a half years ago to live with my husband, Phil, who is also an artist.

Last year, I held my first art show, Cosmogyny, at the Fine Art Complex in Tempe, and plan to do many more!

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
The internet is a great place to share your work but it’s also open access to the untarnished opinions of anyone with access to a keyboard, and my art isn’t necessarily to everyone’s tastes.

I have a subjective experience of the world and the internet that hurt my ability to share my work for a while, or even work on my work – I have mixed feelings about the spotlight. But I persisted and over my artistic life, I have made a lot of fans, many of whom told me that my work had touched them or influenced them or even just made them laugh. It really does make it worth it and I don’t regret my decision to become an artist for a second.
The other major hurdle was the ocean, but that was frankly easier to get over.

What else should our readers know?
My tastes are certainly a talking point, I have a weakness for fashion and sexy monsters. Cosmogyny got some very interesting reactions, and we even had a video room in the back where some videos I created got a lot more laughs than I was expecting. I honestly believe the valley is a fantastic place to revel in your underground nature – the people here are hungry for weird, so I have the liberty to express myself as freely as I want.

I currently take commissions and freelance jobs to fund my own artistic endeavors, which span across every medium I can afford to experiment with. I have a lot of pots on the boiler, but I love hopping between projects and seeing one thing finally come to life at a time, or many all at once.

I like to illustrate album covers (seeing your work cropped onto vinyl sleeves, CD cases and cassette tapes is really validating), but I also like to make my own music. Most of the time, it’s for my animations and games. The interesting thing about animation is, almost everything creative that you learn can be applied to it, but every medium has its strengths and weaknesses so I like to stay fresh.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Animation and digital media have already transformed our world completely in the last twenty or thirty years, and when I first picked up a copy of Macromedia Flash 5, the internet was a much simpler place. Monetization of youtube channels doesn’t really work for animators (it rewards regular, consistent uploads which is impossible in that line of work), so I am looking into platforms like Patreon to support me along with the commissions, as it provides an alternative to ad revenue.

As far as the future is concerned, I believe the ease with which an individual can now sit down and create a desktop movie, video-game, or graphic novel means that we are no longer as reliant as we used to be on the big studios to publish us and get our work out there. My hope is that independent creators will be able to flourish online in the future. And even if you want to go through a publisher, technology makes it a lot easier to get good at it than it used to be.

For games, I have a particular interest in VR. I don’t currently own a setup, but when I get one I will make sure to immediately start developing for it in Unreal Engine. I think we have barely scratched the surface of what this technology can do.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://paigeturncliff.wixsite.com/portfolio
• Email: paigeturncliff@gmail.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ice_age_paige/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Naughty-Imp-Studios-366214303391330/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Xer0_Paige

Image Credit:
Photo of me on our horse Ted with carrot, and me in front of my paintings, by Phil Turncliff. All others (c) me, Paige Turncliff

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