Mickey Miles is a digital artist living in the remote hills of Utah. Inspired by the early days of cartoons and animation, Mikey creates a colorful and vivid world from his fingertips. Mickey’s career in the art field started where it does for most of us: an elementary school classroom. Back in grade school, he made flip books of animated stick figures throwing objects at each other. “I made dozens of them to amuse my siblings,” he says. In middle school, he started working with Pivot to create more intricate stick figure animations. Unfortunately, all of them have become lost in time. (In my head, I’m imagining the cool flash videos of stick figures fighting you’d see on Newgrounds or other sites—anyone else remember that shit?)
Today, Mickey creates art exclusively on iPad. “Each frame is illustrated in Procreate and exported as a JPEG, where they are then uploaded into a simple video editing app and strung together. I’ve used iMovie in the past, now I use this free app called VN, though I fully intend on using Adobe Premier when I can afford that program and a computer”. Mickey is inspired by everything ’70s/’80s, which you can definently see in their artwork. Traces of Sesame Street, School House Rock, and Hanna-Barbera run through the spirit of Mickey’s work.
For future work, Mickey hopes to dive further into the animated realm. “I’m going to try to keep this ball rolling as far as I can take it. Whether that’s exclusively with music videos and small personal projects, or (hopefully) in TV programming. I have a few projects lined up already, one of which is already completed…I’m just excited to share what I make and hopefully inspire others to express themselves and do good”.
Click here to watch the music video for Domino artist Alex Izenberg’s “Our Love Remains” which is fully animated by Mickey Miles. He also calls it his “best work so far,” and we can’t wait to see what else they make in the future.
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