I grew up the youngest of four children on a farm on the outskirts of a blinktown named Franklin in Georgia until I started college at an early entrance program. When I turned 18, I transferred to SCAD, now my alma mater. Shortly after graduation with my degree in illustration, I moved to the other end of the country to lovely, mild Washington, where I am a short trip to the Puget Sound.

 

This style I use for my artwork is called myrn, and I created it during the summer before I started my first college. It was originally an attempt to learn to draw in the tribal tattoo style, but like most young artists, I looked at my reference only once and went at it. When I showed it to my mom, asking how to save it, she said she preferred it over the original. That was enough for me to keep trying the style. 

 

You might elsewhere see the myrn being used by some person by the name "Itsuyaya." Rest assured, that's me. It was a nickname I got a couple of years before I started making myrns. As is common in Georgia, I am an ever so small percentage Cherokee, but since I wasn't raised in the culture, I'm not part of the tribe. It's for this reason that I felt it inappropriate to have a Cherokee name, so I took the first name I could find that meant "coyote." At the time, my animal of choice was a wolf, but I'm blonde, so yellow wolf, so coyote. Itsuyaya is Blackfoot. 

 

Myrn - "mihrn"

Itsuyaya - "it-soo-yah-yuh"