Pronouns: he / him
Email: hello@tjtrewin.com

Hey, I'm TJ!

I'm a trans pixel artist and award-winning worldbuilder currently living in Buenos Aires, and I help creative introverts figure out how to get un-stuck, fend-off burnout, and feel good about consistently showing their work to people.

I provide quiet coaching & accountability, without the pressure of having to "hop on a call" (or having to explain what spoons are).

Where it all started

I grew up playing Pokémon Yellow (Gold was my favourite) and when I wasn’t glued to my GBC I was drawing dragons. My bedroom walls were *covered* in them. And I really do mean covered - the Blu-tac stains never came out when it came to redecorating xD

When I ran out of wall space for dragons, I started drawing art from the game manuals and box art of my favourite games: Knights & Merchants, Age of Empires, Thief: The Dark Project, and TLoZ: Ocarina of Time.

Link showed me that even quiet people can be heroes, they just need to find their inner courage ▲

TJ Trewin (Age 11)
Link in Kokiri Forest - 2002
Coloured pencils on printer paper.

TJ Trewin (Age 30)
Corvidan parent and child bonding - 2021
Digital painting, Photoshop.

My art teacher later put that courage to the test (without warning) by having me stand up and teach *my own class* how to draw in different kinds of perspective 😱😱 which, as a shy gifted kid, was fucking terrifying. But, despite being a stammering red tomato, I loved it 😍 (thank you Mr. J, you're a legend)

I went to college & uni, kept learning art and then doubled down on design & typography.

I often finished my coursework early, so I'd switch into teaching assistant mode and help my peers to learn the Adobe suite and walk them through it.

And it just kinda… became my thing?
Ok, well - it took me a silly amount of time to realise this is my thing 😆 because my late-diagnosed ADHD led to a career of bouncing between roles (and art styles) in a way that can only be described using the unforgettable SFX from 3D Pinball: Space Cadet.

What I’m up to these days

Personal projects:

🌎 Worldbuilding in my bright fantasy world, JOY
🤓 Making crazy-cool shit in Google Sheets templates
👀 It’s highly likely that I’m working on another font

Skill development:

👾 My goal for 2025 is to master pixel art animation!
📝 Apparently I’m also learning copywriting now?
🧉 I’m still learning Spanish and I can understand conversations (más o menos), but it’s like back to being childhood-levels-of-shy when it comes to speaking. Hey if you’re also in Argentina lmk!

Offline hobbies I enjoy with my nerd-of-a-husband:

🦆 We like watching birds (crested caracaras are so coooool)
🥗 Cooking different dishes - our current favourite is lentil dhal
🐇 Raising rabbits together - oooo genetics!!

FAQs

  • TJ Trewin is pronounced “Tee-Jay True-win”.

  • TJ stands for other people who need his seat on the bus- oh right, the name!

    Ok, backstory:

    So, before I was born, my parents weren’t sure what gender I’d be (authors refer to this as foreshadowing) - so when friends & family asked how the bump known as “Trewin junior” was coming along, that got shortened to “TJ” 😁

    Everybody loved the name and it stuck with me, so now I just have two letters for my name on my birth certificate 🤣

  • The spoon theory is a metaphor that’s often used by people living with chronic illness, chronic pain, or disability.
    A spoon 🥄represents a unit of mental and physical energy.

    I prefer to think of it as stamina points rather than spoons: 😅

    • Not everyone has the same capacity in their stamina bar

    • Some people got their regen nerfed so heavily that it takes months to refill

    • Some builds need way more stamina points for even the smallest actions

    So when someone says they’re low on spoons - it means that they don’t have the mental and physical reserves right now, and the task at hand either needs to be significantly smaller, or they need to rest & recharge for a bit.