Above all things, I– Lydia B. Philips– am a storyteller. Before I was an artist, before I was a writer, I was obsessed with creating worlds and characters. For longer than I can remember, I would fill notebooks with doodles and notes about the worlds that they resided in. As someone with an admittedly overactive imagination, art is the medium I use to get ideas out of my mind. The power to make the intangible physical is a remarkable skill, and that is the might of the artist and the storyteller.
I work in three primary mediums– illustration, animation, and digital sculpting / model painting. It is my desire to someday lead projects of my own design, and I believe wholeheartedly that I need a wide range of skills and mediums to do so. Furthermore, this is not exclusive to artistic skills. Management and production is another area which I have been cultivating. Over the production of my thesis film (Grand Guardians: Creation Myth) I have rapidly learned project management, and the power of the spreadsheet. Skills that will suit me very well when I am running my own projects.
In my work, I explore themes of fantasy and human connection. Inspired by the likes of Tolkein, as well as the fantastical multiverse of Dungeons & Dragons, I enjoy seeing very real “human” stories in worlds inhabited by dragons and other fantastical concepts. The otherworldly is made more rich by the grounded. And it is the power of the storyteller (and the artist) that they can marry those two ideas.
To build worlds and the souls that live in them– that’s what I yearn to do above all else. And to be surrounded by others with that drive? That would be an unbelievable privilege.