We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jessica Hewitt a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jessica thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

So I’m a UI Designer, but within the past 6 months or so, I started learning 3D/CGI art. I’ve always been passionate about learning different creative fields – but this one was just on another level in my mind. It was kind of this mythical beast I wasn’t sure I’d be able to take on, for several reasons. I’d always assumed for one thing, that it was only possible to do if you worked in a big design studio and had access to the proper tools. I also didn’t know if it would be easy for me to figure out just from my own limited understanding of it at that time.

I started doing some personal research though, and realized that there were a few main programs out there people used; I had tried Blender here and there, and while I loved that it was free; it didn’t always feel intuitive enough for me to really stick with it. So then I downloaded a free version of Houdini and tried following tutorials for that program. Again I experienced the same problem. Just a little too complex to start.

I’m not sure how I came across Cinema 4D, but that was an instant hit for me. It was so easy to use, and create some really stunning animations and mess with gravity and physics with only a few clicks. That was a big game changer. It led me to start paying for Redshift as well, and now I feel like i’m starting to really grasp some of the power of these kind of modeling and simulation softwares. If I can picture something in my head, or even if I get inspired by something abstract I see on Pinterest, there’s a potential that it could be something I could replicate in 3D.

Overall it’s just been super fun. While I don’t use it often in my UI Design work for my main job, there are opportunities where I’ve been able to utilize my newfound 3D passion for promotional videos we do, which has been really exciting.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Hey, I’m Jess! By day, i’m all about UI Design for the rad tech startup, Wedge! Off work hours, I’m a multidisciplinary designer who makes Youtube content, 3D renders, and AI art in my spare time. Basically a lover of all things digital and creative.

My background is mostly in social media creation and marketing. I got a degree in Digital Communication at Calvin University but I knew eventually I wanted to find something involved in UI Design. Although I initially dipped my toes into the coding world, my heart yearned for the visual side. So that’s how I got interested in UI/UX; the perfect fusion of computer science and art.

Like I mentioned above, I make a lot of content on the side. I have a YouTube channel (‘@itsjess edits’; currently at 25k), where I edit movies and shows for fun (it’s pretty nerdy – be warned), and I also have some instagram pages for my 3D/CGI art, as well as my experiments in the AI art world, utilizing Midjourney’s AI.

At Wedge, I design how our new features will look, curate their social media calendar and content, as well as other print, merch, and web material. I also freelance logo and UI designs for clients. My journey as an artist is an ever-evolving adventure as I find new things to learn and express.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Being able to make what you dream up or imagine! When you can get to the point in your skills where the stuff in your head is possible at your fingertips, that brings a new level of excitement. I think that was part of the hype around AI art when it first started taking off, because people could type anything up, and these machine learning models would put out almost exactly what you’d picture. It’s pretty wild stuff.

But the same can be said for when you master something like photoshop, or cinema 4D, or something of the like. Creating whatever you like gives you a new drive to do exactly that.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

That you have to be the best in whatever you do. This is more an internal lesson I think I took on; but our society’s expectations of success definitely played a part in instilling this notion.

A lot of young folks and creatives alike are drilled that if you’re going to do art, you have to make a ton of money with it; or you have to be super high achieving in it. Trying to figure out my career path in school growing up, I heard this often.

However I felt so much freer once I started questioning this mindset. While I absolutely adore learning new hobbies left and right, I can’t fully invest in all of them all the time. And I don’t have to. In fact, if I try to do everything all the time, my work is bound to be of less quality than someone who specializes in only one or two of those areas.

You can simply choose to create to enjoy something, or to explore. It doesn’t have to turn into a side hustle. Art can just be art!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://itsjess.super.site/
• Instagram: instagram.com/itsjesshewitt
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-hewitt123/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/itsjessedits