Meet Terra, Be Necessary and Sarah Hughes of Atomic Pixies in East Aurora

Today we’d like to introduce you to Terra, Be Necessary and Sarah Hughes.

Terra, Be and Sarah, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
We started as a bunch of nerds. As so many do. Terra and Be meet each other in high school, and after a tumultuous start full of high school rivalry, they ended up falling in love and wanting to leave their mark on the world. Terra, whose dream was to be a comic artist, was especially enamored with the artist allies at various conventions, where fellow geeky artists hocked their wares.

In 2002, at the first Phoenix Comic Con (now Phoenix Fan Fusion), Terra bought a table and vended at her first artist alley. It was a bit of a hot mess, but after a few more attempts, got the kinks worked out, and then pulled Be into the fray with her as an artistic partner. Not much later, a few more friends joined in, and together they called themselves Studio Fae X and started attending local shows on the regular.

During one of those shows, at a panel focusing on queer representation in anime, Terra and Be meet Sarah. And they immediately clicked. It wasn’t long until they pulled her in and she became an irreplaceable part of the team. Soon after, the group has some turn over as we started to find our groove. With Sarah, we embraced our strengths, focusing on our art nouveau style illustrations (or, as we call them, our art nerdveaus) and beginning to invest seriously in this idea as our future.

Has it been a smooth road?
It has been pretty much the opposite of smooth. There have been a lot of ups and downs along the way including job losses, moves, projects that have had to be shelved or abandoned due to lack of resources. In 2016 Be was diagnosed with Gastroparesis, a serious and chronic failure of the digestive system, and that has been a struggle on many levels.

And unfortunately, the whole starving artist stereotype exists for a reason. Our culture doesn’t value art as much as it should, and we have only recently achieved a place where our art can pretty much almost maybe sorta support us. It is still a very careful balancing act that takes a lot of work and a lot of side hustles and long hours. That said, there aren’t a lot of regrets buried in the past. We always knew it wasn’t going to be an easy path, but it is so worth while we wouldn’t change much.

We’d love to hear more about your work.
We are the Atomic Pixies, a group of three femme artists working in the Denver metro area who focus on combining art nouveau with pop culture and our modern world. We explore the new mythology of fiction and try our best to show a world that reflects the beauty of our reality. We’re also a big old pack of nerds, and try to match those pieces together as often as we can, especially in our Art Nerdveaus; pop culture characters re-imagined in the style of Alphonse Mucha, the father of Art Nouveau. These are what really created the Atomic Pixies as we are now, and are some of our most well-known pieces. We also do people pets in this style, and as animal lovers, that is always a treat.

In the past year we also dived into the deep end of enamel pins and LOVE it. We just finished kickstarting a collection of ocean themed pins with our nouveau style, and are still sorta in awe of the response. In the last year, especially with the pins, we have started to find our people, and we are so incredibly thankful. We were able to launch a monthly pin collectors club on our Patreon and are super excited to see where that goes. And now that we are finally finding our path, it’s giving us time to work on our passion project, our comic Helion. Following two kids trying to pull together whatever resources they can to save the solar system, we’re hoping to launch it soon!

We always, in our work, want to leave the world a little better. A little more beautiful, a little more accepting, a little more welcoming. But we also want to do that in a way that helps our viewers see that beauty, that welcome not just when they look at our art, but when they look at the world around them, when they look in the mirror, and when they make their own beauty.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
Denver is this perfect little oasis of everything. You have perks of a big city, but an hour out of the city you can be hiking in the mountains and not see another human for hours. We have so many welcoming communities and cultures, such as cool events. But hands down, the thing we love most about Denver is the sky and our gorgeous sunsets. We travel all over the United States, and coming home to Colorado blue skies and mountain sunsets are always the best feeling. The least? The ocean is WAY too far. But you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Pricing:

• Custom Art Nerdveau pieces start at $100
• Enamel Pins are $12
• Prints are $20

Contact Info:

• Website: www.atomicpixies.com
• Email: atomic.pixies.art@gmail.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/atomicpixies/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/atomicpixies
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/atomic_pixies
• Other: https://www.patreon.com/atomicpixies

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