Bio
As far as I can remember… I wanted to be an artist. While living in the streets of Mexico with my father, and having a less-than-ideal childhood, my escape was animation and movies of the 90s and early 2000s. This didn’t change when I moved to the United States with my mom and later my grandmother. Much of the entertainment of the time raised me, but nothing was more impactful than video games. As a child, I moved a lot and my family was generally impoverished so the only way I would ever get to play video games or, more often than not, watch kids play video games is when we would meet with friends of the family or acquaintances or whoever had kids and offered to distract me while the adults caught up. These moments were brief, but powerful forms of escape, learning and fun that ultimately gave me a love for entertainment art very early on. This passion for media and art only grew as I grew up and became this obsession I just couldn’t shake off. Games like Mass Effect, Jet Set Radio Future, and Halo, to name a few, shaped my taste. Shows like Breaking Bad, Death Note, and Spongebob, to name a few, shaped my taste. Somehow I always knew I wanted to tell stories and I wanted to make my ideas come to life through art. This obsession would only turn into a full-on passion when I started reading a lot of mangas and looking at graphical novels and actually reading a lot more books in general. I figured the vehicle I would focus on to tell my stories.
As I was graduating high school many aspects of my life weren’t good and I had been set back in many ways. I had to put my vision on hold by joining the United States Marine Corps for 5 years post-graduation. Luckily, I picked a job that would translate well to my sensibilities with that being of Public Affairs (which was later changed to Communication Strategy and Operations) where I shot photography, made videos, wrote news stories, and even got to make a couple of graphics along the way. During my career, I gained much-needed confidence and knew that I would not be able to live with myself if I didn’t pursue my vision of being an artist so when my contract for the Marine Corps ended I applied to OTIS the School of Art and Design, and got accepted.
Since then, my perspective has become wider and grander, not changing my younger ideas but gaining more appreciation for things like classical art, mechanical design, and architecture which I want to use to tell my stories better. I also now love the process of just creating things whether it is videos, 3D models, logos, photography, etc. Anyways follow me on this journey of creation and hopefully, you will enjoy the worlds I bring you to through this ever-expanding thing we call storytelling!
Welcome to my abode of art and thank you for visiting.
-Emmanuel Necoechea