Meet the Independent Mixed Media Artist Behind GDY’s Gemtones Stop-Motion Animation

Every shade in our Gemtones Collection is perfectly unique while belonging to something bigger. At GDY, bold color has always been a universal language of self-expression that we share with our creative community every single day. Multidimensional color. Signature shine. Unmistakable quality. Members of the GDY community can always spot each other in a crowd like diamonds in the rough.

There are so many hidden gems in our creative community. We are excited to partner with LA-based artist and director, Luc Duggan, on a beautiful stop-motion project that embodies the unique, handcrafted spirit of our Gemtones Collection. At just 22 years old, Luc is a CalArts graduate who specializes in animation, illustration, and printmaking. He is most inspired to make art that engages with his experiences of illness, disability, and transness. You can learn more about Luc and explore more of his art by checking out his portfolio or following @_leeseel_ on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

Tell us a little about yourself: where are you based, where did you study, and how would you describe the kind of art you create?

I’m a mixed media artist and director based in Los Angeles. I studied Experimental Animation at CalArts and graduated this past May. I write and animate short films that act as absurdist personal mythologies based on my experiences with illness, disability, and transness. I also really enjoy animating in collaboration with people on music videos or projects like this one. I find that working with paper in particular allows me to explore the intersection of animation and printmaking, as well as book making and binding.

Your work has such a distinctive, hands-on quality. What do you love most about creating things physically by hand, and what keeps you coming back to that process?

It’s super important to me to see the artist’s hand present in any piece. In my own work, I like to lean into shaky lines, imperfection, “messy” textures, and the spontaneity that comes with making labor-intensive physical work. Why not see the process laid bare? A large part of my practice is allowing ideas and images to come to me intuitively and I feel that paper, paint, and any grounded material really act as a conduit for that. I’ve done exclusively digital work in the past and I just feel it doesn’t resonate with me or the feelings I want to invoke. The lack of natural textures in the digital world is also a big deterrent to me.

What are a few of your favorite projects you’ve worked on so far, and is there one that especially shaped the way you approach your work today?

I learn so much with each film or project I work on, it’s hard to choose just one. Within my personal work, I just finished a film, Leptocephalus, that will be premiering at the Chicago International Film Festival this October. This film feels the most “me” in terms of story and visuals, but I also learned so much and adjusted my workflow during production on it. I started working smaller, with 4 frames (each frame being 1/12th of a second) per page rather than 1. This felt like a revelation to me in the way that I was able to capture more texture by working smaller and letting go of perfection. Stopping the search for perfectly fluid, clean lines lends a certain energy and life to the characters and scenes that I work on. This film was also my first time writing dialogue and directing actors, and it was a great experience.

Quite frankly, working on this project has been my favorite freelance job so far. The artistic brief and color palette had so much overlap with my personal artistic interests, particularly the experimentation with scale, and it’s been a blast to work on. It’s also been nice how immediately the work is being released. Some of my past work has gotten caught up in various stages of production and it’s always really nice to see something make it into the world, especially so soon after completing it.

For Gemtones, you were asked to interpret the collection through your own creative lens. What inspired the concept for the piece you created, and how did the colors, textures, or story behind the collection influence your approach?

When I first met with the team to talk about this project, the way that they described each gem’s vibe really inspired me. I immediately felt like the project wanted to exist in this series of little worlds inspired by the colors and gemstones. In the spirit of “unearthing your hidden gem” and colors “crafted to catch the light,” I envisioned introducing these vignettes by allowing the gem itself to invite you into its world with a shining glint. Some details mentioned in the brief, particularly a possible interest in playing with scale as well as overall apothecary vibes, acted as the launching point for designing the inner world of each color. When I first heard the brief, I was immediately so excited about the color palette. It’s a palette that meshes very well with colors I usually tend to work with, and it just felt like the whole brief aligned perfectly with my artistic voice.

Can you take us behind the scenes of creating the piece? How long did it take from concept to final frame, and what part of the process was the most intricate or unexpected?

Animation is such an intense process! There were many steps before getting to the final frame. After the team picked one of 4 ideas I pitched, I created an animatic, which is essentially a timed storyboard. Working with printed cut outs of models is not something I had done before, so I had to create a new pipeline for those shots. I decided to work on these shots first so if anything was more labor intensive than I expected, I could adjust my schedule. For these shots, I designed the backgrounds for each gem world, drew them 3 times, and painted them to create a boil (a short loop of a still image to create wiggling lines and color).

I spent some time deliberating on how to attach the models to the background paintings, and decided to print materials and scan them in again. I printed a bunch of copies of each background boil to get that printed look on the backgrounds in addition to the models. From there, I broke down videos of the models into staggered movements, cut out a copy of each frame 3 times, and pasted them onto the backgrounds. Cutting out the models was probably the most intricate part, especially cutting so carefully around the hands and pieces of hair. It was a new process to me and took some adjusting. Those frames were then scanned again and composited into a sequence on an editing software. I also animated sparkles, candle flames, and smoke as pencil on paper, then overlaid them digitally on top of the gem world shots to create the finished look. For the shining shots of the gems, I animated a rough version digitally, printed out the frames, and redrew them. I then painted the shots, scanned them in, and composited them in an editing software. From there, I did some minor color correcting and edited all the shots together.

Animation takes so much time, especially given that each second consisted of 12 paintings complete with overlaid cutouts and extra animation. I’ve been trying to get better at keeping track of how long I work on something. Once the animatic was finished, the actual animation and editing took about 3 and a half weeks. The hourly amount is somewhere in the range of 95-110 hours.

So much visual content today can be created instantly or digitally, especially with the rise of AI. What does it mean to you to collaborate on a campaign and with a brand that intentionally celebrates craft, individuality, and work made by hand?

I really appreciate GDY’s dedication to working with real artists and designers. So many brands these days are using AI visuals and it’s extremely disappointing and disrespectful to all of the artists that AI nonconsensually trained off of. It’s really refreshing to see a popular brand such as GDY value handmade work. The team was an absolute pleasure to work with and you could tell how enthusiastic everyone was about individuality and human creativity.

Luc x GDY