Photo by Scott Garrison

Photography/Concept by Scott Garrison

About Me

Hi. I’m Tom. I am a multidisciplinary artist living in Seattle. I graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 2007. I studied Film/Animation/Video with a focus in 2D Animation.

After college, I had 2 jobs: one was at an ad agency, and one was at a software company. I kept a sketchbook in my pocket for all those years. Eventually the work inside my little sketchbook became more important than the work I did at the jobs.

In 2014, I quit my job. It was a good thing to do. I had more time and freedom to make the work I wanted to. I also freelanced and the jobs kept growing bigger and bigger. In 2017, one of the jobs was so big, I got tired of how big it was, and I decided to switch focus back to my projects.

In 2018, I began building an experimental animated live-stream on twitch.tv/tomthinks called Cartoon Mess LIVE! The gist is that it is live cartoon improv. I built and control digital puppets with my keyboard/mouse. Currently the channel has about 30K followers, and I broadcast 4 times a week for 2 hours each. Some call it “magic,” but it is difficult to explain.

It is now 2024, and I still don’t know how to reconcile all of these different mediums I work in. I am an artist/animator/musician/puppeteer, which sounds absurd. I am still devoted to portraiture, but most of the portraits I make are on Painting with Borb!—one of my livestream characters who paints live portraits in a style similar to mine.

Oh, and I’m married to designer/Illustrator Jess Phoenix and I have two cats: Roscoe and Reuben. 

My Portrait Technique

My colored ink portraits are my most prominent style, but most people don’t know how I make them. After drawing a light pencil sketch, I press pen ink onto my fingers and stamp/smear my fingertips onto the paper. I cut my own curvy paper stencils to help mask areas of color. This results in a lot of natural hatching (fingerprints) and rich gradients of color.

I created this fun video that demonstrates the process:

And here’s a much older art profile video from 2015:

Video shot and edited by Brian Oh