Hi! I'm Shenna Mae Padayao a.k.a. "Tokii", the artist for CritCreations. I’m a half-Japanese half-Filipino artist residing in America, and I love sharing my culture and experiences with the world. Please join us on this journey!

My responsibilities lie with art, dreaming up base project ideas and concepts, the technical side of project making, networking, communicating with manufacturers for materials specifications and shipping, product researching, and ultimately creating the art. I wouldn't be able to do any of this without my partner- how keeps me in line and is the stable mind of our company.

My history of creating started since I was little, my first memories of creating were from stolen pencils and postits from kindergarten. Dreaming of worlds and creatures far from here. When I got older I got the opportunity to be part of art shows like VASE where I became a 4 time gold seal medalist, and been part of Disney Dreamer’s academy shadowing under Disney artists. 

Since then I’ve picked up art skills in a range of medias including 3D modeling and texturing, using gained skills to aid films and commercials, all the way to creating wargaming scenarios for private defense.

 

I love technology, practicality, and learning, and sharing knowledge to different industries. Now I’m taking the step to bring awareness and educational project ideas to life along side my best friend, manager, and partner- Jacob Brown. 

Hello! My name is Jacob Brown, and my work begins where my wonderful partner’s work ends. I have a love for numbers and a knack for telling stories. I handle finance, research, storytelling, and often I’m the one behind the keyboard in updates and responses to backers.

My experience in the number side of things stems from my experience working as a general contractor for my father. With there being only two workers I was exposed to a lot of the different facets when it came to running a business, especially as I got older and he challenged me with more and more difficult tasks. I like to think that I learned a lot over my 13 years working for him, but no matter what I do he tends to have more yet to teach me whenever we have the privilege of working together.

I’ve always had a fascination with storytelling; I grew up reading stories to my younger sister, and when we weren’t reading them we were often writing them - making little comics with returning characters in always-bizarre antics. Though no soul came as close to the pivotal impact as my adopted grandfather had. He was a retired English teacher and editor for the Blood-Horse Magazine, he taught me a great deal about writing; How to put enchantments on paper, how to hook an audience, and how to wrap it up in a nice neat grammatically correct package. If he could see what I do now I have no doubt he’d be proud… though he’d also most definitely be critiquing my work!

Tokii and I first met on June 9th of 2022 when a dear friend of mine was on the search for new players for a D&D campaign he was running. Tokii was one of the many people who had applied to join, and from that we spent time together theorizing what our Dungeon Master had in store for us as well as sharing progress on our own creative projects. We continued to support our separate endeavors until we suddenly found ourselves less than separate; Working together on the same projects and falling head over heels for each other in the meantime. I am forever grateful to say that my partner is my best friend.

When we first started Critcreations it was on a whim ‘just to see what happens’, but it didn’t take long at all until we were shown just how much it could change our lives. People loved our work! We were absolutely blown away with just how much excitement and support we received.

We were shown we needed to make things official and figure out what exactly it was the CritCreations was about. We decided that we wanted to be more than a run of the mill pin maker, and turned our focus to art mixed with education.

There are so many things to learn in this world, so with each piece we hope to bring with it something to learn, whether that be about the cultures across the globe, the constellations in the sky, or the creatures that live on this planet beside us. We wanted our work to be for the curious among us, the people who see how marvelous our lives really are, we wanted to be by adventurers for adventurers.