Meet the Artist

Hi! I’m Jocelyn, the artist behind CHERRYGUTZZZ.

I’ve always been obsessed with making things. Drawing, designing characters, making costumes, sculpting, messing with clothes, coming up with stories that somehow become way more complicated than the original idea. If I can turn something in my head into something physical, I’ll probably try it.

My art is a mix of a lot of things I love. Cute and unsettling, colorful and strange, nostalgic and a little disturbing. I really like combining things that normally wouldn’t go together, like bright colors with darker ideas, cute characters with unsettling details, pretty imagery with gore, and familiar things that feel slightly off.

I’ve always been really into horror movies and horror media. When I was around six, I used to watch scary makeup and gore tutorials and then try to recreate them on myself. I was also obsessed with the old horror LPS videos and tried making my own. I definitely thought they were better than they actually were.

A lot of my inspiration comes from anime, old internet aesthetics, 2000s and early 2010s media, video games, music, weirdcore, liminal spaces, nostalgic technology, and just the general feeling of being online when the internet felt a lot less polished than it does now.

I’m also a huge character person. I love designing characters that feel like they have their own lives outside of whatever drawing they happen to be in. I like giving them their own personalities, habits, stories, clothes, little details, and things that make you wonder what happened before you met them.

I have way too many characters at this point, and somehow I keep making more.

A lot of my ideas start really small. Sometimes it’s just a character, an image, a song, or some random idea I have, and eventually I start thinking about what their world would look like or what their story could be. I really like storytelling that doesn’t explain everything. I’d rather leave little details throughout a piece and let people come to their own conclusions.

I don’t really want my work to fit into one specific category. I like making things that are cute without being completely innocent, creepy without being completely scary, and colorful while still having darker elements. I like when something looks nice at first and then you notice something strange the longer you look at it.

Outside of art, I’m usually listening to music, going to concerts and local shows, making costumes, dancing, playing guitar, scrolling through Pinterest, or getting interested in some completely new project.

I’m also working toward making more animations, music, stories, character projects, games, and eventually larger worlds of my own. I want to combine illustration, animation, sound, design, and storytelling into projects that feel like their own little experiences.

One of my biggest goals with my work is to genuinely make people feel something. I love nostalgia, curiosity, discomfort, excitement, loneliness, happiness, and all the strange feelings that are sometimes difficult to put into words. I want to be able to capture those feelings through my work in a way that people can connect with.

If someone looks at something I made and it makes them feel something, even if they can’t completely explain why, that’s what I want.

CHERRYGUTZZZ is still growing, and I’m still figuring out exactly where I want to take it. I have a lot of ideas I want to make into real projects, from artwork and characters to animation, music, games, and eventually bigger stories and worlds.

So whether you found me through a print, a character, something I made locally, or just ended up here somehow, thank you for checking out my work.

I hope you find something you like.

<3

Jocelyn