Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Akshay Tiwari. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Akshay, appreciate you joining 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.
I really enjoy math and art. They both explore ideas about beauty and truth, each in their unique style. There are math proofs that are considered aesthetic and paintings that push boundaries with their mathematical foundations. We’ve moved from pigments to pixels, but has our artistic exploration kept pace? I’m on a quest to find these avenues where math and art come together, showing us new ways to tell stories. As a kid, I drew a lot and was obsessed with depicting forms while also being drawn to the more mathematical ways of describing geometry, forms and space. As I kept working on both these skills, I discovered generative art by picking up JavaScript and using it with Processing and p5. I got the hang of programming basics, but what I wanted to create required much higher visual fidelity than what Processing could handle. So, I started looking into other tools like OpenFrameworks, Maya, and ZBrush. While I grasped how they worked, they didn’t strike the right balance between creating and coding. Then, I stumbled upon Houdini—a powerful design tool that blends art and math beautifully for creative and experimental projects. Its node-based workflow is a game-changer because you can see the process and the result side by side. This visual feedback loop is crucial for designing, especially when you’re working with code. It is paint by numbers quite literally but without losing the soul that comes from immediate feedback similar to pencil on paper. More than skills, what I think was an essential factor was constantly assessing my true intent behind learning anything new. We have access to a digital ocean of knowledge but you would still need to distill it to fully absorb anything. So knowing if some habit or small skill is bringing me closer to what I see in my mind is the litmus test for your personal process. Sounds obvious, but very easy to lose sight of especially if you enjoy learning a lot of things at once!
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
In my personal projects, I follow a similar path, exploring my own ideas and passions. Some of these projects, like titles for NODE festival and a Moon Knight fan film I directed, have won awards at festivals like Promax North America, Applied Arts, and Motion Awards. It is an enjoyable process to lead a team for personal projects and then to see it receive such wide acclaim. Collaborating on projects like Existence has also been amazing where I explored interface design and has also been featured in Stash media. I grew up reading articles and interviews in premier motion design publications like Stash media, Motionographer and Art of the Title- so to be featured in each of them at this point in my career is extremely encouraging for me. As the medium is evolving in leaps and bounds right now, I find it essential to be equally invested in the creative thinking as well as technical know how to execute it in a way that does justice to the initial vision. We are soon entering an age where nothing can be lost in translation as the artist becomes the director.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
The most rewarding aspect has to be the smaller moments in the process where you exactly get what you envision in your mind’s eye, and if you lose track of time while being in that process- that’s a bonus. When the craft justifies the vision, that moment is special to me as a digital artist and brings me the most pride when I can experience those or manifest them. Digital has always had the impression of having infinite options and one magic button but there isn’t any – so it makes the design decisions just that much more special. There’s a universe hiding between those cold ones and zeros and behind every great piece of work are a thousand pieces of play! Which is another reason why I like to compare making art to time traveling- for those few precious moments in the process you completely connect with your inner child and become a stranger to the pressures of time.
Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?
If you are a visual thinker and maker who also likes to solve puzzles, then these are some resources that would give you a lot of visual tools to think aestheticallly: https://thebookofshaders.com/
https://natureofcode.com/
And if you are interested in Houdini related resources for design, here are some that I have covered in an article before:
https://80.lv/articles/005cg-006sdf-finding-your-flow-for-abstraction-with-houdini/
Contact Info:
- Website: https://akshaytiwari.design/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/9_to_phi/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaytiwaridesign/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/9toPhi
- Other: https://vimeo.com/user108396149
Image Credits
Akshay Tiwari