Bye Bye "CanineHybrid Creations"

Hellloooo Creatureneer!

It's finally happening! I may have been hinting at this a tiiiiiny bit here and there. But this is what I've been working on since April. At the beginning of August I officially registered the new business and have been working slowly but surely on my new website,

Creatureneer.com

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Now tomorrow, October 1st, I plan to make this information fully public and from here on out, I will be known under this new business identity. Don't be alarmed when everything goes crazy tomorrow!

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Long story, but sadly my domain name CanineHybrid.com was stolen from me in April when I accidently let it expire. Please avoid visiting my old website because it redirects you to an inappropriate domain and some sort of scam. You can thank my GoDaddy for screwing that one up. I had owned the domain for five years and it was on automatic billing, which became outdated, but they never alerted me or contacted me about it before it was too late. My life revolved around that domain, and when someone bought it out from under me, everything painfully broke. Although the information is secure, I can no longer access my email or anything attached to that domain name and couldn't even get into to my webstore until just last week I finally got the account unlocked.

I immediately secured CanineHybrid.net (which my old site has been re-uploaded to) but this was just a temporary solution. The damage has been done. And after consulting some of my peers, professional artists, and my school's instructors, it was determined that the best course of action was a fresh start. A new name, a new face, new work, new direction. And boy what a relief that's been for me!

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So let's talk about my new identity!

"CanineHybrid" has a history behind it as both a personal name and a recognized name. I can never separate myself from this name nor do I plan to. I am and will always be CanineHybrid, but this will remain for my personal accounts and artwork. As much as I love my name and logo, I was never truly happy with the "CanineHybrid Creations" for my business... I went with it because I figured it was a smart move to build off of the brand myself and my work was already recognized for online. But it has a strong tie to the furry fandom which I didn't want to limit myself to. And I learned that outside of the fandom it's very confusing. Funny enough, whenever I told the average person that I was "CanineHybrid Creations" and I made "creature suits", about half of those people thought that I made costumes and clothing for dogs to wear! As humorous as that is, it did present a problem with my business' communication. So I knew my new name and logo needed to show exactly what I do in a unique and interesting way.


It took me a few months of brainstorming and tweaking, but I finally did settle on a choice I am proud of. A huge shoutout thanks to my friend "Sir William" for coming up with the word Creatureneer; he's an engineering student himself working to become a physicist, so he's kinda brilliant like that. And I had a lot of help from my roommate Xander for polishing name ideas and my logo. Couldn't have done it without some support :)

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Why "Creatureneer"?

It should be reasonable enough to assume you've already figured out that it's a portmanteau of the words "creature" and "engineer", because that's exactly what I do! I make creature costumes, love coming up with character designs, and occasionally make creatures come to life through animation too. I'm not a certified engineer myself, but I do approach my work with a very technical mindset more than a lot of artists. I don't freehand things- I meticulously plan everything out and draft blueprints and consider weight, structural integrity, maneuverability, etc to ensure my projects come out exactly how I need them to. I want to take things to the next level, learn some cool new technical skills like 3D printing, and bring in some outsourced help from REAL mechanical and electrical engineers too! And engineer doesn't always refer to the engineering industry, it can also be a verb to plan, build, construct, create, to skilfully and artfully arrange something or be the driving force behind it.

The logo was the easiest idea to come up with, but proved to be a lot lot harder to actually execute properly- I knew I wanted to keep my animated business card idea, so I thought of a person transforming into a creature; that's what my artwork does to people and I wanted to find a way to represent this visually. My werewolf pawprint logo for CanineHybrid did a great job at this, but everyone and their mom has a pawprint logo so I needed to come up with something different. And I knew I wanted either the logo or the name to be dinosaur-related. I remember distinctly the first time I came across the name "Designosaur" and finding myself in jealous awe at the idea. I didn't think I'd find a way to rival that but I think I have now!

When I was little, I wanted to grow up to be a dinosaur. (Also a paleontologist or artist were top choices). I would run around the house or playground at school pretending to be a velociraptor and dinosaurs were (and still are) an obsession. As I got to late middle school/early high school, I started becoming interested in animation so I obsessively analyzed movies and watched all the behind the scenes footage. I owned the special edition DVD box set of the Jurassic Park Trilogy that had a bonus disk called Beyond Jurassic Park that I adored. So of course the logo is a big hat tip to one of the biggest influences I've had as an artist: Stan Winston and his team for building the raptor suits.

In the transition from high school to college I not only started making creature costumes, but I also created a dinosaur-inspired original character that helped me win a scholarship: Theod (pronounced like "they-owed" in case you were wondering). He's been with me for a long time and I even attempted making a costume of him at one point that embodies everything that I want to achieve with Creatureneer. His costume requires digitigrade stilts and animatronics, and was going to be used in a short film about my journey as an artist that I originally wanted to do for my graduation project in animation school. And I'm not giving up on that dream either. So the logo concept started out as just a normal raptor (which made the person inside look extremely uncomfortable and off-balance) but then Xander suggested I personalize it and make it more "creature-y", so naturally I turned it into Theod. I cannot think of a better way to represent everything that Creatureneer stands for!

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This is long enough as it is already so I won't go on, but I wanted to give you guys some extra-special exclusive info so you know what's up. I have already secured the name Creatureneer across every social media platform I could think of, so I invite you to be among the first to follow it. I'll talk about some of my future plans for the new business soon!Thanks for reading :)