About
I'm Eido. By education I'm an engineer, by profession a manager of an engineering group. Both are abstract work, and that has been my world since university.
A couple of years ago, a friend asked me what I do to feed my soul. I asked what he meant. He said that living in such a rational world, I would benefit from something non-rational. That stuck with me. It was the right advice at the right time, because I was drained from always having to achieve something, first in academia and then at work. An athlete needs recovery, and recovery should be active. My brain needed the same thing, something to stretch and recover with, away from the rational, goal-driven world of my day job. I also missed the carefree creating I used to do as a kid, so I decided to explore that.
I started with model building. Working with my hands was therapeutic, but something was missing. Building from instructions is not the same as making things up myself. After about a dozen models, I decided to go to the next level and create something that was fully mine. Then I stumbled across a video of an amazing creation made with polymer clay, and it looked cool. It didn't need anything fancy. I could bake it in my home oven, and all I needed was wires, aluminum foil and clay.
Sculpting became a real hobby, and it truly feels like mental recovery. The process goes from a therapeutic, meditative state to inventing and exploring a fantasy world. In my opinion, that is a fantastic combination.
As for why fantasy and mystical creatures, that is very subjective. I really enjoy the rules of a concrete world, where everything is explicit and clear. A fantasy world is just as explicit and concrete, only different. Even magic and the supernatural need consistent logic to exist. In my pieces I'm trying to capture realism and concrete storytelling, and I enjoy the challenge of that. But I get to do it with the freedom and flexibility of a fantasy world, where I can invent or imagine a world with its own rules.