revised artist statement

Rees Edwards is a multidisciplinary artist based in the Pittsburgh area with a broad and constantly evolving skill set for creative design, which includes animation, video editing, music production, game design, and traditional visual arts. Over the past several years, I have sold many of my works at art festivals and completed multiple commissioned pieces, including large-scale acrylic paintings on canvas. These experiences have helped me develop not only my artistic voice, but also a strong understanding of presentation, storytelling, and connecting with an audience. My passion for animation began early in life. As a child, I spent countless hours creating stop-motion animations, primarily using LEGO and clay, learning through experimentation how movement, timing, and framing could transform a still object into a whole story. That early fascination never faded; instead, it became the foundation for my creative identity. Over time, my interests expanded beyond stop motion photography, later into frame by frame animation and key-framed animation of rigged characters. As well as compositing, and animating over live-action footage. I am especially drawn to animation as a storytelling medium because it allows complete control over tone, pacing, and visual expression. throughout my years of learning, I have continuously learned a wide range of digital tools essential to modern creative production. I have extensive hands on experience with various programs within the Adobe Creative Suite, including Animate, After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator. These tools have become integral to my workflow, enabling me to move fluidly between illustration, animation, and compositing. As my current focus has increasingly centered around this love for animation, I have begun furthering my skill set with specialized tools designed specifically for professional animation pipelines. Most notably, I am actively learning Toon Boom Harmony, deepening my understanding of 2D animation workflows, rigging, cut-out animation, and traditional frame-by-frame techniques within a production-grade environment. Overall, I am pushing myself to learn this program so that I can also push my art to be better than my last works, constantly evolving. I hope to eventually have a polished work that can be continuously revisited, such as my workflow with my Animated film Soleil of Earth. You see, all of these skills and influences will be exhibited in the making of Soleil of Earth. This project blends Live action, key-framed animation, frame by frame animation, music, and visual effects into a cohesive experience; one that I am in the works to make more interactive. In the end, my work is driven by curiosity, patience, and a lifelong fascination with movement and storytelling. Whether working with sound, paint, pixels, or motion, I am always seeking new ways to bring ideas to life.