Photography courtesy of Voz Perkins
Photography courtesy of Voz Perkins Handmade Diamond Painting
Voz Perkins has always been a maker in some form or other. Raised in a house of quilters and artists and crafters in Pennsylvania, Perkins is genetically pre disposed to artistry. While taking art classes in college, she was creating large-format figurative oil paintings, but when she became a mom nearly twenty-five years ago, her maker’s mentality shifted into high gear. She had also moved to Rhode Island and needed to shrink her canvas.
“Those early, early years (of parenthood) where you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s all blurry, your kids just constantly need things and you’re constantly trying to figure that out and then once you learn it, it changes,” she recalls. “In the midst of that, I just had this need to make stuff. So that’s when I accidentally became a business.”
Painting watercolors at her kitchen counter in Providence one day, she started screenprinting her drawings onto postcards and selling them at the Art Supply Warehouse, where she worked in the early aughts. Then she began attending craft shows which she says were “super bananas” because there were few of them, but they were intense, real DIY-crafting scenes. This was the inspiration and community she needed. She painted then screenprinted her first monster on a little patch, which was the beginning of the monster era that has endured, she says.
Photography courtesy of Voz Perkins
“The genesis of it was just very simple. My first design was this little tentacle creature, and he’s kind of goofy and smiles and just says ‘I’m weird.’ And I wanted it to be a positive thing, to take ownership of my weirdness,” she says. “It was about normalizing emotions and bad days and anxiety and depression and stuff like that. So I think it was a very simple statement of how you feel.”
She has expanded her monster artwork and products to include silly fish, animated jars of pickles and juice boxes, and weird dogs on everything from notepads to coffee mugs, zipper pouches and more. Thanks to excessive amounts of random fabric in her house, she started making plush stuffed animals like hedgehogs, capybaras and — of course — monsters as well as a pufferfish pillow. Her quirky characters even appear in books that originated as a daily doodle blog that was “loads of fun and full of nonsense.” And she makes most everything with her own two hands, painting, sewing, printing or otherwise creating from scratch.
Photography courtesy of Voz Perkins
Cartoon Diamond Painting “My main motive is always to get out the things in my head,” she says. “But part of my success has been that I’m not thinking about my audience. I’m just making art, then my audience finds it and relates to it.” fishcakes.shop