I Found My 2003 Website and Lived to Tell the Tale
Reconnecting with my roots—and also relaunching my site.
✨ Quick Notes
Launched my new website! → Headexplodie.co
Fairyland at 75 Exhibit opens April 5th at OMCA
Animation is for Everyone, my stop-motion workshop is happening April 19th at Clayroom SOMA
Lately, I've been feeling a quiet kind of time travel through the work I’ve been making—and I’ve been noticing how much of it connects back to earlier versions of myself.
🖍️ What the #The100DayProject Is Teaching Me
I started the 100 Day Project this year because I realized I was freezing up every time I faced a blank page. The sketchbook—once a space of play and curiosity—had become filled with self-pressure, especially if I was trying to concept out new ideas for an upcoming project. I knew I needed to rebuild that relationship, so I gave myself a structure: one page a day, for 100 days.
That’s it. One page. It doesn’t have to make sense, and it definitely doesn’t have to look good. Like Julia Cameron says when addressing the creative spirit: “I’ll take care of the quantity, you take care of the quality.”
At first, it was fun and novel. By Day 13, it got hard. I got tired and wanted to skip. “No one will care!” But instead of quitting, I changed mediums from pen to oil pastels—and the joy came back.
Now it’s become a kind of ritual. A meditative wind-down. Something I do not for Instagram or even a finished product, but just for the quiet pleasure of showing up. It’s teaching me that creative peace lives in the process, not in how pretty the results are. Filling the pages is a simple, achievable challenge—and it brings me the same satisfaction I felt doing this exact thing in high school. I’m so glad I still have those old sketchbooks to remind me of who I was back then.
👩💻 Website Overhaul & Digital Archaeology
I also just did a total design overhaul on my website: Headexplodie.co. Going through years of work to sort, curate, and decide what stays (and what doesn’t) was… a lot. Overwhelming at one point. But also strangely affirming. It reminded me just how much I’ve made, and how my creative path keeps expanding.
There are now new sections for things I’ve grown into—like workshops, teaching, and public speaking—sitting right alongside my animation and personal projects. It feels more like a whole picture now.
Somewhere in that process, I had this flash of memory: me in high school, hand-coding websites in HTML and seeing it as this weirdly joyful act of building a little home on the internet. Here’s a screenshot of the original Headexplodie index page from 2003—yes, that’s an image map for navigation! I kinda miss the days of just one simple splash homepage. As you can see, I have always been into mixed media :P
I wish I could find the very first site I ever made—it’s probably lost to the digital sands of time. But this new one feels like a continuation of the same instinct: carve out a space that reflects who I am (at the time!), what I make, and where I’m going.
🐉 Recreating the Happy Dragon
In another life, I was head of the Art and Restoration Department at Children’s Fairyland, and one of my first projects was leading a team of artists to repaint a giant concrete dragon sculpture in the park. I remember kneeling on the ground, neck tilted sideways, carefully painting dozens of golden scales.
Fairyland is now celebrating its 75th anniversary, and I’m honored to have contributed a piece to Fairyland at 75: A Legacy of Magic, opening at the Oakland Museum of California. I chose to recreate Ching Lung, The Happy Dragon—this time as a small-scale sculpture.
It was a surreal full-circle moment to paint those scales again, just… smaller. A sweet, strange return to a piece of my personal and professional history.
👀 See You in the Sketchbooks
What started as a sketchbook challenge and a website refresh turned into a quiet little reunion with all my past creative selves. The dragon-painter. The HTML-coder. The teenager filling sketchbooks with doodles. It’s been nice to re-meet them.
I’ve completed 38 out of 100 days so far, and if you’re curious to peek inside the process, you can follow along in this Instagram Story Highlight. It’s messy, colorful, and totally imperfect—the way it should be.
Thanks for following along through the time travel. If you're local, come say hi at the OMCA show or the stop-motion workshop later this month. And wherever you are, I hope you’re finding your own ways to reconnect with what made you love creating in the first place.
Till next time,
Annie
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