About
The Work
To polite society, the strange and queer are religated to the realm of the alien, the beastly, something other than human. And if we can’t be human, what can we be? How do we navigate existence on the margins, take back the reins, and forge our own identities and futures that are just as good, if not better, than the ones denied to us? Vanishing isn’t an option.
Taking queues from role playing games, the natural world, alternative subcultures, and the online spaces of my youth, I use anthropomorphized creatures and constructed worlds to explore these questions as a form of fantasy for more than just escapism. Through illustration, sequential art, animation, sculpture, and tattoo, I tether these otherworldly ecosystems and their inhabitants to our world, enabling others to join me in this practice.
Me
LJ “Null” Osborne (aka “TOMB of NULL”) (they/them) is a mutli-media artist who dwells in Northern Alabama. Their experiences as an “other” while living in the Deep South informs much of their work, along with the digital refuges and online art communities where they’d hone their skills and creative identity in with a DIY-or-die, trial-by-fire ethos.
For over a decade, LJ has worked with a mayrid of indie, non-profit, and private clientèle to provide character illustration and designs, album covers, animations, product and merchandise design, and now tattoo. Their work has been featured in several group exhibitions in the Huntsville area and various underground publications.
Formerly a studio resident at Lowe Mill A&E, LJ currently works from both their home studio where they conjure and labor on their own original projects, and their tattoo workspace at Atomic Tattoo in Huntsville, AL.
Subjects of interest: flora and fauna, tattoo, anthrozoologoy and ethnozoology, cyberpunk and biopunk, DIY, deep green forests, FOSS, original characters and world building, zines, and snails.
My Tools
Here are the tools I use for my digital art. I do not use “AI” image generators in my artwork.
For tattoo, I use a pen-style rotary machine, sometimes a hybrid rotary. Most of the inks I use are by Solid, Eternal, or Dynamic. For more tattoo stuff, head over the the tattoo portion of the site.
For everything else, I use whatever I can get my hands on.
This Website
This corner of moss-green cyberspace acts as my main home on the Internet: the portfolio, the archive, the virtual studio. It is a mash of handcoding and some help from friends and friendly strangers. This has been a practice I’ve been doing for fun since I was a kid, and in the spirit of DIY and learning new things, its something I still prefer over drag-and-drop WYSIWYG site builders, even if these results are a lot clunkier. That’s that indie web charm I suppose. :]