Hey there, friend
The challenge:
It started in Oaxaca, while I was kind of burned out. There were cacti everywhere… still, tall, patient, unbothered by the heat of the sun. They give me a feeling I can't quite name… something encouraging, grounded, somehow alive. I've always read my own plants like a mirror, so seeing these ones so calm in the middle of the vast desert, doing their thing even when everything around them was so dry. They stayed gravitating with me, so I wanted to make something that felt like that. Something that felt like hope.
The approach:
Initially, it was meant to be simple, just a few colorful illustrations, a reminder that stillness doesn't mean emptiness. But somewhere on that trip the idea wanted a voice, so I wrote to my friend Michelle. A few days later she sent me a script that opened with a cactus going, "Hey there, amigo. Pardon the intrusion…" and inmdiatelly I knew we had something! Everything about how it moves comes from the plant: super calm, almost still, in no rush, almost like a meditation. For me the cactus holds two things at once, resilience and protection. A reminder that it's okay to have spikes, to guard what's precious inside.
(the initial illustrations)
The project turned into a 3D piece, and I had to learn most of it as I went. Modeling, texturing, lighting and so on, exciting and painful, in equal parts… sometimes I felt as stuck as something planted in the middle of the desert too, with no idea how to move forward. But it kept reminding me: you can't rush a cactus to grow. Time is your friend… so the project took me almost a year to complete it.
A love letter to oneself:
It's not perfect, and there's still stuff I'd love to fix, reimagine, polish. But it's honest… a reflection of where I was: learning, growing, trying. It sat on my hard drive too long, I didn’t want to publish it and I guess at some point I just wanted to close the loop. Or I don't know, maybe I just couldn't leave it sitting there anymore. Perfection can wait, but expression shouldn't. Really it's a love letter to oneself, a reminder that maybe we're already blooming, even when we feel stuck, or on autopilot, or just in survival mode. And perhaps, more often than not, it's just a matter of… perspective?
Credits:
