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Passion Projects SF

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Welcome to Passion Projects SF 🌉

Passion Projects SF is a platform celebrating the personal creative lives of visual effects artists. These are the works made outside production schedules - driven by curiosity, experimentation, and the need to create.

Many of the artists featured here have contributed to film and television worlds you know well. This space is dedicated to the work they make for themselves: paintings, drawings, writing, sculpture, photography, and more.

This project exists as both an online installation and a growing vision for a future physical space in San Francisco - a place to gather, share, and celebrate independent creative practice.

🔗 Explore the artists:
@joelaron
@johnbellstudio
@spongebarbier
@_j34n_
@coreybnyc
@joeceballosart
@natsh_devaud
@mindydubinart
@jiri65_art
@kljsculptures
@samarronceramics
@kimsmith5363
@joanneungar

👉 https://www.passionprojects.art

We’re just getting started.

#PassionProjectsSF #VFXArtists #PersonalProjects #SFArt #CreativeCommunity #IndependentArt by @passionprojectsart

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7 months ago

PPSF Artist Spotlight: Nicole Samarron

The Community of Making

Nicole Samarron has spent years learning alongside other makers. The shared studio, the common table, people working with their hands — it's part of what keeps her coming back.

Her work spans the full range of what clay can do. Stoneware plates and bowls with dark, speckled edges and glaze that drifts like coastal fog. Pendants made from shattered car window glass collected off San Francisco streets — the city's ugliest moments fired into something luminous you can wear.

Now she's teaching at Sharon Art Studio, leading ceramics classes for teens, and sharing a love she's carried since childhood.

🔗 instagram.com/samarron
🔗passionprojects.art/theartists/nicolesamarron

#PassionProjectsSF #NicoleSamarron #Ceramics #Stoneware #BayAreaArt #PPSF #ArtistSpotlight #SharonArtStudio @nicolevfx by @passionprojectsart

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4 days ago

PPSF Artist Spotlight: Nicole Samarron

Nothing Between Her Hands and the Art.

Nicole Samarron spent her VFX career compositing footage digitally, building final shots in software under the guidance of VFX supervisors. She valued that work, but there was always something between her and the art.

With ceramics, nothing is.

"I'm literally molding the clay with my fingertips, and I find that connection so grounding."

In VFX she brought someone else's vision to life. In ceramics, the vision is hers from first idea to final firing. That ownership is exactly what Passion Projects SF exists to celebrate.

See more of Nicole's work at
passionprojects.art/theartists/nicolesamarron
@samarronceramics

#PassionProjectsSF #NicoleSamarron #CeramicArtist #VFXArtist #SFArtist #TheArtistBehindTheEffect #PPSF #Handmade #ClayArt @nicolevfx taken in San Francisco, California by @passionprojectsart

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8 days ago

PPSF Artist Spotlight: Nicole Samarron

The Lifelong Maker 🍵

As a kid in the Berryessa Hills, Nicole Samarron dug clay from the creek and shaped tiny pots for her mother. They were never fired. They crumbled. She made new ones every week.

Through her VFX years she kept signing up for ceramics classes, learning pinch pot after pinch pot. That persistence tells you how much this practice meant to her. After her daughter was born, she completed her first full class at Sharon Art Studio and never looked back. Nine years of dedicated practice later, she is exactly what PPSF celebrates: an artist and a maker, and she always has been.

"Making is a language for me that forms a connection to the outside world."

 🔗passionprojects.art/theartists/nicolesamarron

@samarronceramics
@sharonartstudio

#PassionProjectsSF #NicoleSamarron #CeramicArtist #SFArtist #VFXArtist #TheArtistBehindTheEffect #Ceramics #MakersOfInstagram
@nicolevfx by @passionprojectsart

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12 days ago

PPSF Artist Spotlight: Nicole Samarron🔥

After years in visual effects, Nicole Samarron stepped away from the screen and toward the shore. The ocean inspires her every day -- nature inspired and city driven. It shows up in her work whether she plans it or not.

At Passion Projects SF, our artists are painters, photographers, sculptors -- and makers. Nicole works in clay, glaze, and fire.

🔗 instagram.com/samarronceramics 🔗 passionprojects.art/theartists/nicolesamarron

#PassionProjectsSF #NicoleSamarron #Ceramics #Stoneware #BayAreaArt #PPSF #ArtistSpotlight #SharonArtStudio @samarronceramics by @passionprojectsart

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20 days ago

PPSF Artist Spotlight: Nicole Samarron

Nicole Samarron spent years compositing the impossible into reality. Minority Report. Star Trek. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Her hands are still busy. These days, in clay.

Nature inspired and city driven, made in the Outer Sunset.

🔗 instagram.com/samarronceramics 🔗 passionprojects.art/theartists/nicolesamarron

#PassionProjectsSF #NicoleSamarron #Ceramics #Stoneware #BayAreaArt #PPSF #VFXArtist #ArtistSpotlight @samarronceramics @nicolevfx taken in San Francisco, California by @passionprojectsart

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24 days ago

PPSF Artist Spotlight: Jean Bolte

A month with Jean Bolte.

Model maker. CG texture painter. The artist who helped build ILM's model shop legacy and then crossed into digital. The same hands, the same eye, across four decades of film. She now makes her passion projects at Marinship Studios in Sausalito, and we couldn't be more proud to have her work in PPSF's inaugural exhibition this fall.

🔗 instagram.com/j34n
🔗 passionprojects.art/theartists/jeanbolte

#PassionProjectsSF #JeanBolte #ILM #VFXArtist #BayAreaArt #PPSF #ArtistSpotlight #MarinshipStudios
@_j34n_ by @passionprojectsart

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25 days ago

PPSF Artist Spotlight: Jean Bolte

The breadth✨

There is no single thing Jean Bolte makes.

Watercolor landscapes of Marin in ink and wash, some spare and minimal, some lush and tangled. A cabinet called "The Archive of Space," a handbuilt diorama with eight hinged panels, each one a miniature world you open like a door. A UV-lit circular terrarium filled with creatures, light, and deep blue darkness.

"My art is at its best when I don't entirely know what I'm doing."

This is what that looks like.

🔗 instagram.com/j34n
🔗 passionprojects.art/theartists/jeanbolte

#PassionProjectsSF #JeanBolte #Watercolor #Diorama #MixedMedia #MarinshipStudios #VFXArtist #BayAreaArt #PPSF #ArtistSpotlight
@_j34n_ by @passionprojectsart

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a month ago

PPSF Artist Spotlight: Jean Bolte

The swamp paintings

Jean calls these her worst fears and nightmares.

Dark water. Skeletal creatures. A lone boat drifting through a forest of hanging skulls.

She spent decades making the impossible look real on screen. In her personal work, she's still doing exactly that, just for herself now.

🔗 instagram.com/j34n
🔗 passionprojects.art/theartists/jeanbolte

#PassionProjectsSF #JeanBolte #Watercolor #MixedMedia #DarkArt #BayAreaArt #PPSF #VFXArtist #ArtistSpotlight @_j34n_ by @passionprojectsart

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5

a month ago

PPSF Artist Spotlight: Jean Bolte

The portraits

Jean Bolte paints the people she loves.

Oil portraits of friends, colleagues, and fellow artists, each one built with the same patient attention she brought to giving ILM's creatures their faces and skin texture. The portrait of Dennis Muren, one of cinema's most celebrated VFX supervisors, looking at himself looking back. Much of this work appeared in Jean's solo show, Bright Lights, Dark Corners, at Mill Valley's Throckmorton Theatre, where she's a board member and curator. Faces that hold something.

This is where the day job and the passion project become indistinguishable.

🔗 instagram.com/j34n
🔗 passionprojects.art/theartists/jeanbolte

#PassionProjectsSF #JeanBolte #OilPortrait #Portraiture #Throckmorton #MillValley #BayAreaArt #PPSF #VFXArtist #ArtistSpotlight @_j34n_ by @passionprojectsart

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a month ago

PPSF ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: Jean Bolte

The "day job" + the artist

Same person. Same creativity. Two artistic identities.

From the @ilmvfx archives: on the left, Jean Bolte in the ILM Model Shop, painting a creature model by hand. On the right, Jean at a Viewpaint workstation, doing the same thing on a screen. Thirty-five years of that. Hook, Jumanji, Men in Black, Star Wars, Iron Man, Pacific Rim, Indiana Jones. That was her day job, and what a body of work it produced.

At Marinship Studios in Sausalito, her hands are still moving. Oil portraits of the people she loves. Watercolors of landscapes. Dark swamp paintings that she calls her worst fears and nightmares. Dioramas with hinged doors that open into miniature worlds of her own imagination. Creatures that glow under UV light.

The passion projects are entirely her own. PPSF is proud to share both sides of this singular artist.

🔗 instagram.com/j34n
🔗 passionprojects.art/theartists/jeanbolte

#PassionProjectsSF #JeanBolte #ILM #ModelShop #VFX #Lucasfilm #MarinshipsStudios #ArtistSpotlight #PPSF #VFXArtist @_j34n_ by @passionprojectsart

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5

2 months ago

PPSF June Artist Spotlight

Jean Bolte.

This month, PPSF spotlights one of the most beloved artists to ever come out of Industrial Light & Magic, now making work entirely on her own terms.

Forty years in VFX. Jim Henson. The ILM Model Shop. Willow, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Men in Black, Avengers. Featured in both seasons of the Light & Magic documentary series, the public face of a shop that shaped modern cinema.

And now: oil portraits, watercolors, mixed media, and a studio in Sausalito.

Welcome to the month of Jean Bolte.

🔗 instagram.com/j34n
🔗 passionprojects.art/theartists/jeanbolte

#PassionProjectsSF #JeanBolte #ILM #VFXArtist #ArtistSpotlight #PPSF #BayAreaArt #MarinArt by @passionprojectsart

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3

2 months ago