I’m Amy DeCaussin and I’m a storyteller. I was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I love traveling, adventure and the great outdoors. I spent a lot of my childhood steeped in the arts, from countless hours at dance practice, to violin lessons, to marching band and musicals; my love for all things creative began before I can remember.

After receiving my Bachelor of Fine Art in Illustration and a Minor in business at Grand Valley State University, I started out specializing in watercolor illustration, animation and design. I began my career after college with a company I established, Funamals LLC, primarily painting custom pet portraits in watercolor. In 2014, my work was featured on MSN Living and overnight my Etsy shop became so busy, I was painting for 12 hours a day, nearly 7 days a week. It was exciting to find success, but I knew I wanted to do more with my work.

After moving to Phoenix, Arizona with my husband Cam, I went on to manage social media content for Laboratory5 Inc. in Tempe, under the direction of Cyndi Coon. I created animation work for projects like Arizona State University’s Emerge and create fun illustrated and animated content to use as social media campaigns and blog posts.

I spent a short time in Los Angeles working at Digital Twigs, an animation studio that I greatly admire. I created the concept art for an animation project for Baozou, establishing the identity for their forthcoming film division.

I also had a great experience working for Scottsdale Public Art on projects like Canal Convergence, where I worked with artists from all over the world, managed 56 volunteers and helped produce an event for 56,000 attendees. I worked with an amazing, talented team, reporting directly to Andrea Teutli, a creative who now freelances in Mexico City and someone who I learned a lot from. Some of my favorite tasks were managing performing artists like Rioult, an excellent dance group from New York City and working alongside talented artists like Héctor Esrawe and Ignacio Cadena, a team of artists from Mexico whose work has a strong focus on community, just to name a few.

My work has a unique handmade, eclectic, whimsical feel to it. I’m known for my watercolor painting and bright colors. I like to cut my paintings out and collage them with other materials, either flat or three dimensional. I build tiny sets in my studio, adding found objects, scrap fabrics and other scraps of paper to my watercolor paintings. Then I stage photoshoots, where most of the time I like to use natural light, outdoors. The final product to my still work is usually a photograph which is finessed in Photoshop. My work also gets animated. It is important to me that the animation has a traditional feel to it. Sometimes the animation is shot in camera in stop motion, while other times it is composed in Photoshop and completed in Premiere.

Photo Credit: Jeremy Spann http://www.blaremy.com