Introduction

My name is Emmy, and I am not a mature, responsible adult.

When you are a kid, most of the time you want to be something weird when you grow up. Superhero, astronaut, princess, etc. I, for one, wanted to be a paleontologist. When you actually do grow up, you pick a more realistic job title and go to college to pursue it. Sometimes you make it into your desired field, but sometimes you end up using that very expensive paper (I mean diploma) to get into some other kind of decent, well paying, adult job. Or maybe you end up stocking shelves while being ordered around by a teenager and using your framed diploma as a dinner tray when you go home at night as you cry softly over your TV dinner. I don't know. I dropped out before I got one.

I am not one of those smart, responsible adults. When I 'grew up' I wanted to be a comic book artist/cartoonist. Oh yes, a very mature adult job. I attended my very first comic book convention in 2008, traveling up to the giant New York Comic Con with my fellow comic book nerd (and the source of my genetic drawing muscle memory), my Dad.

Me at the 2012 NYCC. A seasoned con pro at this point.

Walking through the humongous doors of the Javitz Center, I was immediately overwhelmed. Everything I loved and wanted to be a part of was around me. I remember thinking. "This is what I want to do. This is where I want to work." (Once again, super adult here.)

Wanting to pursue my love of comic book art and become a great artist with the hopes of working for Image Comics or my deep seeded love, Marvel in the future, I decided to go to college. One of the three greatest mistakes of my life.

Attending community college, I was thrown into the fine arts category by the oh so helpful counselor, despite my argument that neither oil painting or photography was within my comfort zone as a comic book artist. Needless to say, after a few agonizing, stressful years of being repetitively told that 'cartoons weren't art' I dropped out of college and sank into a deep depression and self loathing that kept me from drawing for a good two years (looking back at my work before that period, I'm angry at myself for stopping. I was better then than I am now). Unable to pick up a pencil without having PTSD flashbacks of my hard work being torn apart in front of a classroom of fellow artists, I turned my focus to other mediums, like writing, chainmaille and knitting... but every year I returned to NYCC (and later Wizard World Philadelphia) that dream of working with everything I loved was rekindled.

Having opened a store on Etsy back in 2010 called The Rusty Dragonfly, I began to make chainmaille jewelry inspired by my favorite things; comic books and pop culture.

Captain America Scale Mail Bracelet

After two local craft fairs in 2013 and 2014, I'm finally living out the first moment of my dream goal. I'm attending my third Wizard World Philly, but for the first time, I'm a vendor in Artist Alley!! I am selling not only my jewelry and pixel art tissue box covers, but also my cartoon style artwork in the form of 'Dollar Doodles'.

The kind of art I'm offering under
the title of "Dollar Doodle".

Offering 4x6 drawing commissions for $1.00 each is my first step into the actual comic book artist world and I'm both excited and nervous to see if people respond to it well.

Now that I've introduced myself, the person behind this ridiculous pile of nerd babble, "what the hell is this blog about?" you may find yourself asking. Encouraged by a new friend, Marie ( http://gilbertcuriosities.blogspot.com/ ), I dug this blog out of the internet and erased my half thought out useless garbage from six years ago. She was kind enough (and absolutely brilliant enough) to give me the wonderful idea to write about whatever show, book, character, or comic that I'm currently obsessing over, and then show the piece of jewelry I designed based off of it. I'm taking that idea and running with it, but I also hope to chronicle behind the scenes things regarding the growth of my little store, artwork I'm working on and progress on the book I'm writing. I hope whoever reads this will enjoy sharing in all the things I love and I look forward to updating this on a hopefully weekly basis. Being that I love writing, I'm hoping that will be an achievable goal.