The Evolution of Trinket as Muse, Branding, and Beyond
Date :: 2016 - Present
Over the past decade, my sweet (unfortunately now departed) cat Trinket has had an immense impact on my life. He was a steady presence between moving across coasts, between relationships, and stages of development. When I began Twitch streaming, he was a beloved fixture, always sitting in my lap, often bringing entertainment to his audience. His appearance and identity has been linked to my business ever since his first barfing emote on Twitch, and I will share some of the different ways he has influenced my art and growth.
Back in 2016, Trinket had a 3 day long span of puking that was both frightening and relentless. He seemed to be fine after an expensive and uninformative vet visit, and it caused me to create this short animation in photoshop that became the originating inspiration for my eventual branding.
As I grew my presence on Twitch, Trinket became my first emote, directly inspired from this animation. and he became several other emotes, inspiring many iterations of him in other media as well. Here is a sample of some of those emotes:
The emotes evolved into a bot slots game that led me to create a magnet based on the emote, which eventually became my logo, This magnet developed further into the Trinket Enamel Pin design as well
This logo is great for collaboration as well, for example, when Bethany Maxfield and I tabled together at Twitchcon 2019, we created a mashup of our two brands that was quite successful at grabbing people's attention:
additional Trinket Artwork Featured at Twitchcon:
Trinket has been a muse for so much more art during his lifetime and even beyond it. He graces the portrait animation I use for much of my current online presence, and after he passed, I made these two complementary animations of him in life and death while processing his loss and his impact on my life.
Twitch was also a playground for me to figure out some of my personal aesthetics that hold emotional significance to me, while not every element is always a perfect consistent fit, I have a lot of fun experimenting to see what I ultimately love. and let me just say, what I love is creative solutions to puzzles I make up in my head and creatures in jars. My favorite discovery was how I could design transparent pngs to shift form based on twitch being in light and dark mode. I first started with my subscriber badges:
but eventually moved on to the panel designs on my twitch page as well, creating a different experience for those who held a preference between light and dark mode. I still have not yet seen anyone else execute a similar concept on twitch.tv yet, an accomplishment that I am very proud of, although I imagine I just haven't come across them yet.
Here is the comparison of the two views:
Here is the comparison of the two views:
This also inspired the concept for my animated train car in the Artist Back Alley hyper train art project. Which I tried to play with my sub badges, the shift in theme between light and dark, the duality of Trinket's death but continued life as my mascot, as well as squeezing in some references to media that I love.
Beyond my digital presence and branding, Trinket appears in much of my traditional artwork as well,
as a muse for much of my new endeavor, Ceramics:
The original inspiration for that planter, coming from this digital illustration, and of course, puke.
Thank you for taking the time to look at this entry, Trinket means so much to me, and I hope you also enjoy the sweet mixture of cute and gross that he has inspired in my artwork!
