What is this all about?
Coffee and Creatures started in 2016, as assistance to my partner’s professional game services. I’d fix broken minis, draw new monsters for him, build terrain for his players’ adventures, and this led to painting minis.
Long before that, I attended Parsons School of Design (NYC) and Mason Gross at Rutgers (New Jersey), switching from a painting major to a sculpture major on the way. I wasn’t satisfied.
Long before that, I was a child who made things from scraps of fabric and paper, cardboard and glue.
Fast forward to today: I took all of that experience and smushed it together to make a way to deal with some aspect of waste, of landfills overflowing with things we buy and discard, as a society. The monsters I make all start from thrift store and garage sale junk, basically. They’re not handmade to start with – that comes later.
When I find them, they are sloppily painted, and clumsily proportioned, because their main purpose was to be churned out cheaply, shipped cheaply and then sold to us, the consumers. They come from distant factories where beauty cannot thrive, and human beings are slowly broken, because the emphasis is on speed and profit.
So, they’re ugly and tacky….and my heart still breaks for them, the discarded and unwanted misfits of commerce. I use a small amount of Apoxie clay, and an epoxy known as “green stuff”, as well as acrylic paints. I make a lot of teeth, and a lot of eyeballs, then modify my finds.
They stop being misfits, and become wonderful monsters.
There are 3 main kinds of monsters: mimics (shape-shifting monsters who can look like anything, even your Christmas tree), beholders (think of an angry, snarling, ball of eyes who can really mess you up), and Krampus (the terrifying European mountain spirit who has started appearing in pop culture/movies). Sometimes there are others, based on a unique thrift store find that doesn’t belong to any of these categories, but who would make a great displacer beast, vampire, etc.