Who the heck am I?

My name is Athey, and I’m an artist.

My whole life, I’ve always loved to make things.

I oil painted after getting a Bob Ross kit in middle school. I sewed plushes after taking Home Ec. I made dolls and made clothes for them. I had a whole phase as a kid where I made a dozen different dream catcher designs and gave them as gifts to every relative I had.

I built a dollhouse out of cardboard and then built all of the furniture in it out of balsa wood and popsicle sticks. And just to make it that much more difficult, I wired the whole thing with tiny light bulbs and switches from RadioShack.

And I was always drawing.

As a teen, I created a website all about teaching people how to draw, even though I had no business instructing anyone at the time.

As a junior in high school, while being pressured by the councilors to decide what I was going to do for the rest of my life, I came to the conclusion that artists who just draw stuff end up broke and unemployed, so I turned to something more tech-oriented for possible career prospects.

I absolutely adored Toy Story. I loved Beyond the Mind’s Eye. And I loved video games.

When it first occurred to me that I could make art in 3D as a career, I latched onto that idea and ran headfirst into it.

A friend’s dad went to Hong Kong for a business trip and came back with a burned CD full of dubiously acquired software. So I ended up with an installation of 3D Studio 4 for DOS, and I was off.

After high school, I went to the closest college that had a 3D Animation degree, but a year in, it became clear that the school was doomed. (It literally closed one semester after I left.) So I decided to find a college that was what I really wanted, no matter how far away I had to move.

That was how I ended up moving from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest and attending DigiPen Institute of Technology.

After I graduated, I got a job at Sony Computer Entertainment and worked there for eight years.

I loved working at Sony. I loved the art I got to make, was proud of the projects I was a part of, and learned so much from the amazing artists around me.

My husband worked there too, and we had two young kids. The problem was that, when two people both work for the same studio they’re often needed to crunch at the same time. And when you’ve got two kids under the age of five at home, eventually that stops being feasible.

So I left Sony and set my career to the side in order to be a mom. The story of so many women.

I “pivoted” and started an Etsy shop. I never stopped making things. Only I got neater toys and better tools. I had several 3D printers and eventually got a laser cutter. I created original designs and made art in new ways, and sold them from my house while I stayed home with my kids.

I still got the occasional 3D art commission or part-time contract work, but it certainly wasn’t a full-time studio gig.

Then my husband left Sony and started his own indie studio with a good friend. I became their primary artist and made every character they ever needed, as well as a lot of environment and prop work.

This worked well because I could do it from home and at night when the kids were asleep.

In 2022, my husband’s studio got a client that needed a ton of motion capture and animation work, which is what my husband most specializes in. While talking with their project lead, he learned that they needed a character rigger and suggested me.

I interviewed and signed on for a three-month contract as a part-time character rigger. The initial scope was pretty small, and it wouldn’t interfere with the workload I had for my Etsy shop or other commission work. By that point, my kids were in high school, so that was less of a pressure on my time.

But one thing became clear fairly quickly: the studio needed a lot more than a rigger.

They had also just hired a new character artist, and… I’ll just say that he may have misrepresented the scope of his skill set when he was hired for the position.

A couple months after he was hired, he was let go. The project lead was kind of complaining about how she was going to have to go through the process of finding a new character artist all over again when I offered to do it.

I ended up switching over to full-time, and by the end of the first year, I was in charge of dealing with the character department. The other character artists were just there to make clothes, and they were all pretty green. So I wrote up docs and held meetings to help guide them away from so many mistakes and missteps.

In the beginning, I didn’t really want to be in charge of telling other people what to do. There was a switch that kind of flipped in my mind the first time I really realized that I actually knew what needed to be done and exactly how to do it. There was no longer any imposter syndrome. No more flailing around, trying to figure out what or how to do something. I knew what I was doing, and I knew exactly what these kids should be doing to do a better job.

It was refreshing.

I spent the next three years working on characters for Utherverse. The project was really coming along, but unfortunately, “coming along” wasn’t good enough. With very little warning, the investors pulled out in March of 2026, and the whole thing was shut down.

So once again, I pivot. I’m back on Etsy while I search the seas for work.

My daughter has finished college. My son is about to start his senior year of high school.

And I still love to make things.