A little about me
I’m Seamus, a self-taught, working-class artist from the North West of England. I came to painting the long way round, after years of making things digitally and eventually falling for the much messier pleasure of paper, paint and making something you can actually hold in your hands.
I like the push and pull between careful ink lines and freer washes of colour, keeping some parts tight while letting others breathe a little. I’m after character, texture and all the small details that give a picture some life.
How I Got Here
I’ve always drawn, although for a long time that mostly meant doodles in sketchbooks and on whatever scraps of paper were nearby. Around 2010 I picked up a drawing tablet and suddenly found a whole art cupboard hiding inside Photoshop. Paints, pastels and proper paper weren’t things I could easily afford to experiment with at the time, so digital art gave me a way in.
Years later, an iPad and Apple Pencil took over, but most of what I made stayed tucked away on a hard drive. It wasn’t until I had a crack at streaming on Twitch (with mixed results and a sneaking suspicion I just wasn’t built for it) that I started putting my work in front of other people through emotes, graphics and stream assets. I streamed as “Shimmus”, the way my Belfast family have always pronounced Seamus (usually with a faint undertone of frustration), so Shimmus Studios became the obvious name for my creative work online. I made odd little illustrations, turned some into cards and stickers, opened an Etsy shop and generally treated the whole thing as a hobby that had accidentally escaped into public.
Eventually I did the sensible thing and went back to a proper job working with spreadsheets. For a while, I more or less stopped drawing. By 2026, after spending far too much of my life staring at a computer screen, I bought myself some actual art supplies and started creating traditional art again by hand. I had to relearn almost everything, but I loved the mess of it: mixing colours, making mistakes, getting slightly better with each piece and ending up with something physical at the end.
Then later that year, out of nowhere, I was made redundant from my data-analysis job and AI took over the work I had been doing.
Being replaced by AI at work has made me more protective of the human touch behind the things I make. There’s something increasingly special to me about an original drawing or painting that somebody has actually sat down and made. It takes time, patience and care. There’s no undo button, and even the mistakes belong to the person who made them.
Losing my job was stressful, but it also felt like a second chance. I didn’t want to disappear behind another screen and let the creative part of me go quiet again, so Shimmus Studios was reborn. I wanted to give it the focus, attention and love it deserved, and see what might happen if I treated being an artist as the proper job.
Want to see what I’ve been making?
Have a look through my finished work, or drop me a message if something here has sparked an idea.