Hey, Im Marky!

Creativity has always been how I understand the world.

As a kid, I drew, painted, sculpted, designed, built things, and took absolutely everything apart.

That last part occasionally got me in trouble.

I had an obsessive need to understand how things worked. If I could take something apart and understand the individual pieces, I could reverse engineer it. Eventually, I realized I could take ideas from completely unrelated things and see how they might work together.

That became the foundation for almost everything I do today.

I've never had a traditional education in art, design, or engineering. Instead, I've spent my life teaching myself whatever the next idea required.

3D modeling. Electronics. Circuitry. Soldering. Programming. 3D printing. Laser fabrication. Woodworking. Painting. Sculpting. Graphic design. Product development. Photography. Filmmaking.

The list keeps growing because I never really learned how to stop being curious.

That curiosity eventually took me somewhere I never expected.

I taught myself enough engineering to build a career in aerospace manufacturing.

By most traditional measures, I had made it.

But I still wasn't doing what I knew I was supposed to be doing.

Art gave me somewhere to go when life got dark.

I've lived through parts of my life that I don't talk about publicly very often.

There were periods where I lost my sense of identity completely. Creativity became one of the few constants I could return to.

Toys, art, making things, taking things apart, and disappearing into an idea had gotten me through difficult moments since childhood. At one of the lowest points in my life, I returned to them again.

I discovered artists like Steve Casino and Jason Freeny, whose work helped challenge something I had unknowingly believed for years: that art had rules I needed permission to break.

Seeing people take familiar objects and completely reimagine them flipped a switch in my brain.

Maybe the strange way I saw things wasn't something I needed to suppress.

Maybe it was the whole point.

That realization started a journey that would take more than a decade.

I kept learning.

I kept making.

And slowly, I built the skills to turn the things I could see in my head into things I could actually hold in my hands.

Then life changed again.

When my son was born, I was offered another opportunity to move up professionally.

Instead, I walked away.

I decided to bet on myself.

I revived an earlier business of mine called MarkyPi Gaming, where I designed and built custom retro gaming devices around Raspberry Pi computers. That's actually part of where the name MarkyPi came from.

Then circumstances outside my control made that business increasingly difficult to sustain.

Around the same period, physical problems I'd been fighting for years progressed until I lost the ability to walk and found myself navigating life in a wheelchair while simultaneously learning how to be a new dad.

So once again, I had to figure out what came next.

And once again, I had art.

This time, I decided to show people.

Instead of keeping my strangest ideas to myself, I started sharing them.

I stopped worrying quite so much about whether something made sense and started making the things I wanted to see in the world.

Weird things.

Funny things.

Functional things.

Things inspired by toys, technology, engineering, pop culture, packaging, nostalgia, and whatever bizarre connection my brain happened to make that day.

Things that look like they fell out of an alternate '90s universe or were discovered in the back of a toy aisle from a timeline that doesn't exist.

Somehow, people connected with them.

A lot of people.

My work has now been watched hundreds of millions of times, and hundreds of thousands of people around the world have chosen to follow along.

What started as a way to rebuild my own life has grown into a community, a business, and something I still have trouble believing I get to call my job.

Today, MarkyPi Studios is my little factory for impossible ideas.

My studio is packed with 3D printers, lasers, electronics, fabrication equipment, paint, cameras, tools, prototypes, and an unreasonable number of unfinished experiments.

Most importantly, it gives me the freedom to work across disciplines.

I can dream up an idea, design it, engineer it, prototype it, fabricate it, finish it, package it, photograph it, film it, and share the entire process with the world.

No single label has ever fit what I do particularly well.

Artist. Designer. Engineer. Inventor. Maker. Storyteller.

They're all pieces of it.

At the center of everything is the same kid who couldn't stop taking things apart.

I just got better at putting them back together.

Why I keep doing it

Art has given me far more than a career.

It gave me an identity when I struggled to find one.

It gave my brain somewhere productive to put an intensity and curiosity I spent years trying to understand.

It helped me connect with people when connection wasn't always easy for me.

And now, incredibly, it gives me an opportunity to do the same thing for someone else.

Maybe somebody sees one of my ridiculous inventions and laughs.

Maybe they learn how something works.

Maybe they watch me build something and decide to pick up a soldering iron, paintbrush, 3D printer, camera, or whatever tool speaks to them.

Maybe someone whose brain works a little differently sees what I've built and realizes that the thing they've spent their life trying to contain might actually be worth exploring.

That's bigger than anything I could sell.

I'm still learning. I'm still experimenting. I'm still taking things apart.

And there are a ridiculous number of things left to make.

Welcome to MarkyPi Studios.

Goods from the multiverse.