ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) –
Step up to the table and you’re welcomed into the imagination of one of Asheville’s promising young creators.
Ayran Lee reaches over and introduces you to a fearsome-looking pair of dragons from his 3-D printed menagerie. One is bright red. The other is blue.
“This is Helios and this is Aqua,” Lee says. “They’re twins, but different. He’s like fire. He’s hot, easy to anger. She’s like water. She is cool and calming.”
When Helios gets upset, Aqua is the only one who can calm him down, he says.
These aren’t just original, flexible, brightly-colored collectables. The artist’s stories bring them to life.
Lee, the 22-year-old creative dynamo behind Lee-Magination, was keeping a steady stream of customers enthralled on the first day of this weekend’s GRINDFest on Saturday at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College. (CLICK HERE for a full schedule.)
Part carnival, street dance, symposium and summer feast, GRINDfest (which continues on Sunday) also is a showcase for Black entrepreneurs like Lee, who is trying to turn his fertile imagination and 3-D printing know-how into the next big thing in fantasy collectibles.
His mother and sales assistant, Stephanie Lee, remembers his first creative flourishes when he was 5 years old.
“He was infatuated with Thomas the Train. We’d bring home toys. He’d take them apart and redesign them,” mixing this piece with that piece, she recalled.
His imagination grew and grew. At one point he started making intricate and fragile origami designs with paper. But he went to a whole new level when he took a computer-assisted drafting class at T.C. Roberson High School and was introduced to 3-D printing.
“I started playing with my programs and doing some things of my own,” he said.
That includes the dragons. Dozens and dozens of dragons, each one with a unique back story, personality, skill set and appearance, painstakingly designed, printed and assembled by one young man who’s trying to give some fellow named Pokemon a run for his money.
“I take inspiration from anywhere,” Lee said. “And then your imagination generates the possibility. Try to generate anything from nothing.”
Lee’s skills went to new heights studying graphic design at North Greenville University, and now he’s hoping to build an audience here in his hometown of Asheville.
He’s backed by that imagination and a powerful army of miniature dragons.
He introduces a visitor to a frightening looking dragon named “Firmis.” “It stands for strong, sturdy and steadfast,” Lee says. “I made him specifically to be a heavy hitter…to back you up in a fight.”
He and his family know the art world and the business world are competitive. That’s why GRINDfest is such an important showcase for Black entrepreneurial talent, participants said.
Nicole Lee, “The Doula of Entrepreneurship,” credits Black Wall Street AVL for boosting her own success, and now she tries to give back as a mentor to budding entrepreneurs.
“We support each other. That’s how we’re able to be successful,” she said. “We can’t do it alone.”
One of the people she has coached, Jazmin Whitmore, 37, proprietor of More to Love Plus-Size Consignment on New Leicester Highway, said the lessons she has gotten through Black Wall Street AVL have helped her business get to new levels, including on social media.
“I’ve just been growing like crazy,” she said.
She summed up the importance of GRINDfest in one word: “visibility.”
“That’s because you know Black businesses are around. They have to be,” she said. But GRINDfest helps the public learn who they are, where they are and what they can do for people.
“I think more than anything, it’s the exposure of the culture,” and a way to highlight businesses of “other people who look like me,” said Marquez Williams, a former Jacksonville Jaguars and Cleveland Browns fullback who once studied at Mars Hill University and now lives in Athens, Ga. “I just think community is the biggest thing.”
On Saturday, he was doing a brisk business at his colorful Pop’s Socks booth, ringing a giant bell every time someone purchased even a single pair of cartoon-adorned foot coverings.
Williams shared advice for young entrepreneurs: “Be bold in what your business is and what you’re selling. Be you wherever you go.”