Tinfoil Gremlin

Patrick Tsao

Tinfoil Gremlin, Digital illustration, 3 x 3 inches

Interview by C. VanWinkle
March 18, 2023

Would you please describe for me the piece that you responded to?

It’s an animated GIF of a man crouching on a little table, with tinfoil completely covering his head and his hands. He’s squatting on the table, and then when he moves as if to start getting down, the tinfoil falls off of his head and face. But it's backwards. The GIF is reversed.

So these foil things fall onto his face.

Yeah. He's a little bit off the table, and then he sort of shimmy-slides onto it, and then the tinfoil slips off the ground and onto his face and covers it. Oh yeah, and he's in his boxers. Aside from the tinfoil, is just him in his boxers. It’s got some real gremlin energy to it. It felt a little gremlin-y or goblin-y, a man in his boxers, squatted on a table, with tinfoil on his hands and face. [makes a goblin noise and laughs]

Was it the weirdest thing you saw that day? I don't know what your typical day is like!

I spend a lot of time online so… [Cody laughs] Yeah, it was pretty weird. It wasn't what I expected. But you’d said someone could do cooking, they could do animations and GIFs and video recordings, and that prepared me for the level of weirdness that came. I thought, “Okay. Indeed this is what they described. Got it.”

So what did you think of this GIF? Do you remember your first impression?

It mostly seemed kind of fun and off-the-cuff, just something that they thought would be fun to do. “Alright, let’s go set up a camera and put some tinfoil on my head and see what happens.” “Hey, that looks pretty cool. What if I did it backwards?” “Whooooooa!”

When I experience things that I'm not familiar with or that are unexpected, I tend to go into observer mode. I just take in what’s in front of me. Even though I was prepared for this, so I wasn’t taken completely aback, it also wasn’t what I was expecting to have in my day either. So I ended up observing. It reminded me a little bit of some of the weirder YouTube videos I've seen, where I can't even imagine the inspiration behind that mode of thinking. All my art is done digitally in 2D, so I'm not really accustomed to thinking from a performance perspective where my body is the medium, with a camera and whatnot. I'm not used to thinking in those terms. So when I see something like that, like this GIF or one of the stranger YouTube videos, where there’s clearly something they're going for even if it's weird as hell or grotesque or macabre, I can't process where that comes from. And it becomes fascinating to me for that reason. It's cool, it's interesting, it’s fun. But I'd have to really think about it in order to touch some greater emotionality to it. That also felt like the point a little bit to me, so it’s not like I’m mad that ‘I don't get it.’

Yeah, I think you had the right attitude. How did you get started on your piece?

I have a Cintiq tablet at home, which is a tablet monitor that you can just draw directly onto. So you just run your pen over it and lines appear. I do comics for a living, so it's extremely easy and familiar for me to open up a file and just go. On Instagram, I've been doing a drawing-a-day challenge, where I just open up a black brush and start drawing something that comes from my emotions or what I’m thinking about that day. It's a mindset that I've been pretty familiar with. So for this, instead of reflecting from me, I just reflected from the energy that I got from the prompt in order to do that. I just popped it open and started drawing.

The process ended up being very familiar and easy. The attitude of the work that ended up coming out is a space that I'm very used inhabiting, this surreal, grotesque, heavy black lines sort of space. I typically do a lot of what people might call darker art, more surreal art, in my day-to-day when I'm not doing comics.

I noticed that. I looked over your Instagram and it looks like you're not unfamiliar with taking your work to dark places or other worlds. What kind of world is this piece in? What's the context?

I couldn't say, but it's a world where such creatures like that exist. I'm very fascinated with this Lovecraftian idea. You know, the enormity of seeing a creature like this has implications. If this creature can exist, then there must be somewhere that it can exist, and things must have been in place for this thing to come into being. Nothing too specific, but a dark, strange, perhaps not terribly happy place. It’s unknown if they're even capable of knowing what a concept such as happiness is, because it's strange and there's no parallel level of thinking.

I like that. You responded to an animated GIF with a digital drawing. We’re seeing contributors use more and more technology in Bait/Switch, like coding, AI, digital music, stuff like that. Are there other techy media that you would like to work with? What's your future?

I'm really comfortable with 2D digital art. It’s my most effective mode of expression because I'm so familiar with it. I think if I want to do the due diligence to both this project and the thing that I'm responding to, I'm going to be doing something in 2D digital art. That's how I see the future for me.

Do you like traditional media also or do you prefer to keep it digital?

I like traditional media; I don't know how to use traditional media. I grew up on PhotoShop, drawing stuff with a mouse. I started using the pen tool and pull handles in order to make comics and drawings when I was in high school. Eventually I got tablets and things like that, and it changed my life. I think the only physical media that I know how to use is pencils on a sketchbook, but in terms of paints or anything like that, I don't have any formal training. I don't know what the hell I'm doing when it comes to any of that. I'm entirely digital.

I also was never trained in most traditional media. I’d had a little experience, but I dabbled a lot during pandemic lockdown, and I found that there was a lot of freedom in not knowing what I'm doing. I don't know any better! I don’t worry about doing it wrong if I don't know what right is. So if you get a wild hair and you feel like playing with it, no one needs to know.

[laughs] That's really good idea. It’s something that I'm constantly forgetting. My work is like my approach to art. You've seen my Instagram; my work has to be very directed. If I strike upon an idea or an emotion or a vibe, I try to capture it. And that ends up simultaneously being both very emotional and very cerebral in how I want to do it. That total freedom is something I forget about. So thank you for that reminder.

Sure! I need to be reminded of that, too. Do you like working from a prompt? Did you find it to be more freeing or more limiting?

It made it easier, particularly since it's supposed to be part of a whole. I’m more open to responding to something if I'm contributing to being part of a whole. If it's for myself, I've historically been pretty resistant to prompts. You know, there are all those exercises like Inktober and Mermay, all those challenges with 30 prompts for 30 days. I always end up going off book and just doing my own thing for those. But if I'm contributing to an active whole, then give me the thing, I want to respond to it.

I did one of those once. I only wound up doing 10 or 12 pieces for it, but they were 10 or 12 that I really cared about or had something to say about. I was very picky choosy.

I know how that feels. I've attempted to do it over the course of six or seven years, and I've probably only successfully actually done all 31 drawings twice. And the first time was the first time I ever did it, and the last time was last year. There was a huge span in the middle where I barely got three drawings, maybe 10 drawings, something like that. But I always petered out. I totally understand.

Do you ever participate in our Hourly Comic Day?

I want to, but it's all day! It’s also a mindset to get into, being reflective on your own life in that sort of intimate way. I realized that it comes very easily to certain artists who kind of already do that, like slice-of-life comics. They’re used to addressing topics that talk about themselves. Me, I end up existing in this space that doesn't really exist in our world, or it's an extreme, macabre version of it. It takes active effort to pick and choose something in this fucking life that I live and draw about it. “What did I do in this hour? Oh, I worked out.” I can’t draw myself working out. It’s weird! I don’t want to draw myself having breakfast. And sure, “That's the point, Patrick,” but it's also like [petering out noise]. I start losing energy because it's not the mode I'm used to thinking in, and also, for my own self, I don't think it's that interesting. Perhaps that’s something I should push past, but that is what it is right now.

The challenge becomes: How do I care enough about me eating breakfast to draw a picture of it?

People do a lot of introspection with it, diving through their thoughts and what they're reflecting about. But that's something I'm not used to doing either. So it's a challenge for me. I tried it once and I got four or five comics out of the 24-hour day. I managed to sort of make it fit the whole day by having a few comics span like three hours. These three hours, these three hours… That's the closest I ever got.

And what is your advice to any other newbies coming to this project?

Just go with it. However your heart is most comfortable, whatever the instinct is, just go with that. If you want a comfortable approach, an uncomfortable approach, just roll with it.

Call Number: C95VA | C97VA.tsaTi

Decades ago, Patrick Tsao was born a screaming mass of black hair in a hospital in Los Angeles. Since then he's tried to bring that energy with him to everything he does, particularly creatively - which is why he finds himself these days living in Brooklyn, working as a comic artist, designer, illustrator, and game maker. His work can be found on his site at patricktsao.com as well as on his instagram @machiavelli33.