Life & Work with Tahnee Gehm of Glendale

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tahnee Gehm.

Hi Tahnee, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I’ve been artistic for as long as I can remember! I went from drawing pudgy butterflies in chalk to art directing augmented reality. Of course the path wasn’t exactly linear!

In my earliest years, my mom attended to my artistic tendencies – plenty of drawing supplies, violin and piano lessons. Super Nintendo, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Rocko’s Modern Life were all huge influences. I saw video games as interactive cartoons, and wanted to make them. If I was going to make them, that meant I needed skills in storytelling, art, music, and programming, right? So I had interests in all these areas! My dad helped me build my first computer in middle school and I made a classic terrible 90’s website, which actually connected me to a lot of really cool people around the world. I wrote comic stories and made a bunch of flipbooks.
Despite being a skilled musician, I craved the ability to create, and leaned into drawing. But I wanted the drawings to do something when you clicked on them, so I got into Flash. I really believe that the interactive story-based Flash websites I made in high school paved the foundation for my eventual career – all the software became as fluent as a first language to me. I became serious about art and it was actually my piano teacher who first told me about CalArts, which I would eventually attend for Character Animation.
As a CalArts student, I made 12 animated films (some won awards), played in their Indonesian gamelan music ensembles, and took a lot of courses in the Music Technology program, where I made an Arduino-based cat that would look at whoever was holding it with LCD eyes and had a haptic purr when pet. I was nominated for an Annie Award for Best Student Film for my 4th year film, “Can We Be Happy Now”, which I digitally painted each frame of in an attempt to blur the lines between 2D and 3D animation, trying to make a statement that medium didn’t matter. Little did I suspect that I’d eventually use 3D on a daily basis for a medium far more dynamic than film!
I wanted to stick to an indie animator route after graduating and made several more animated shorts for clients, but ultimately got the motion design bug and became a senior motion graphics designer at an ad agency. I realized in 2017 I didn’t need a fancy excuse to attend SIGGRAPH, a nerdy convention for VFX and technology, which was hosted in LA that year. It was there that I learned how to make web augmented reality (AR) artworks, which led into making AR filters for big brands for a couple of years. I Kickstarted CoastARs, AR-enabled drink coasters with cute characters. Over the course of the successful campaign, I taught myself Blender, which is 3D software. Failure wasn’t an option! About a year later, a collective called AR House had sprung up in LA. Of course I had to get involved! They accepted me as one of their own and I found a wonderful community of creators from vastly different creative backgrounds there. I have since been working as an ARt director on cool projects for Meta Quest and Snap Spectacles, contributing significantly to two apps that won Best Consumer App Auggies back-to-back, Pillow and Pencil!
I’m currently making art lessons for Pencil, which is a mixed-reality app that teaches users to draw using real paper and pencil, presenting them with digital still lifes and guides on their paper that help them draw. I aspire to explore immersive art with interactive projection mapping, and hope to publish cutesy graphic novels and spooky stories about ghosts and future technology. There is much to make!

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Early challenges were actually blessings in disguise. I received a “nice transfer grade” of a D for an Honors Algebra 2 class in high school, ensuring I’d never be accepted to any formal college. A delightful result of this was going to junior college, where I got to taste-test a delicious array of studies, ultimately where I took my first animation class and learned about how cool ethnomusicology (the study of music in cultures) is. These classes informed the rest of my education journey. I took a very traditional approach to art there, and then got accepted to CalArts!
After graduating, I didn’t want to join a traditional animation studio. I figured I’d open an indie animation studio, but I had no idea where to begin with that– let’s say I did a crash course in bad clients. I followed my love for motion graphics into advertising, which is a pretty rare path to take for a character animator. I was able to bring subtle character into brand identities. My attention span can only stay in one place for so long, and at one point all I wanted was to dig into XR (eXtended Reality, the umbrella term for virtual and augmented reality). Breaking into a new industry seemed daunting, but any time I’ve put serious work into learning something new and meeting people who are already doing it, the results have been fruitful! If you’re enthusiastic about something, that will get other people excited about it, too. I’m thankful that I’ve had friends that have believed in me along the whole way, who saw my abilities and were excited to work with me!
Some of my personal struggles have been family caretaking; my dad passed in 2020 and this past year I helped care for my grandma. Caretaking requires a lot of sacrifice of time, energy and attention, but it has its own rewards. I’m also vax-injured, and while I’m thankfully mostly recovered, it still eats into my energy levels. I sometimes look at others and wonder how they have time for their personal projects, but then remember I must be gentle with expectations of myself when life throws curveballs.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
With a background in traditional 2D character animation, I consider myself an “animagician”.
With a mighty curiosity in XR and tech, I also consider myself an “ARtist”!
My strength is in combining art with tech.
My stylistic flavorings oscillate between super adorable critters to slightly creepy and pensive dystopian/ghost stories, or just very, very shiny abstractions. I adore silly derptacular googley-eyed creatures and have been known to draw a lot of hedgehogs and cats. (One of my older projects is “Snurffles”, a point-and-click animated hedgehog). On the other hand, I have deep musings on what the future of society could look like with AI, and have a collaborative side project called “HOLOGOTHIC” exploring these avenues with spooky motion-photos. But just as much as I’m interested in stories, I am fascinated by patterns of reflected light, and have a painted series of “Shinies” that are explorations of light on glassy flowers or crystalline ribbons in motion. As a Libra, I guess I need balance in my work, between cute/creepy and character/abstract! It’s impossible for me to focus on just one style; I can never get too comfortable doing one thing. There is so much to explore creating in this life! And there are incredible new mediums popping up all the time to play with.
Some people know me for my animated films and characters, others for my AR projects, and yet others for my paintings. Some know me only as an animation workshop teacher! I’d like to think I’m a sort of connective thread between animation and tech.
I am most proud of my later animated films, my independent/collaborative projects (Flippy Flicks, lenticular art prints, Snurffles, HOLOGOTHIC), my AR projects (filters, RC Kaiju, CoastARs), speaking at AWE and SXSW, and my work on Pencil. I’m also proud of projects I have yet to release– which perhaps is bizarre to bring up if they haven’t seen the light of day, but I really believe in them. Primarily the work I want to do in the future involves getting strangers to have pleasant interactions via immersive art spaces.

We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
Success is a lot of different things! Success can be learning what doesn’t work. It can be getting large numbers on a post online. It can be having a tutorial that helps a lot of people (I have a “how to animate in Krita in 30 minutes” video that I consider a great success). When I started working on Pencil, some friends who saw videos of it immediately recognized my drawing style– I considered that a success! I know I feel “success” deepest when I have had creative control over the vision and execution of a project, and it gets widely recognized as something excellent. Receiving an Annie Award nomination for my student film “Can We Be Happy Now” and being a major contributor to two Auggie Award-winning apps feel like great successes, because it’s my own creative contributions that got recognized. But, I also feel “success” in that I’m an employed artist working in XR!
And “success” doesn’t need to be one big prize, either, as nice as the accolades are. It could be finding a cozy rhythm of life and surrounding yourself with good friends, pets either with wagging tails or pretty flowers, and a bookshelf full of what you consider to be excellent books, albums or DVDs. It could be arriving at the ramen shop in time for a bowl of noodles before they close. I felt immense “success” at 25 when I had completely filled a bookshelf with gorgeous art books. Completing an entire sketchbook is a success. If I ever wrote an entire song, I would feel more success in that task than I would spending a year on a sketchbook. So it really scales for everyone, and I think it’s most important that while we strive to push ourselves every day to accomplishing our big goals, that we strive for daily mini-wins and ultimately, our personal and shared happiness! Because in the end, happiness is kind of the greatest form of success.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.tahnee.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tahnmeep/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tahneegehm/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/tahnmeep
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/tahnmeep
• Other: https://bsky.app/profile/tahnee.bsky.social https://www.patreon.com/tahnee