I started calling myself Amanda Tea because I needed an alias name … It’s just the initials of my first … middle … and last name backwards … thats where the Tea comes from … I used to be called Anthropix … It was my first original modeling name … but that was also the name for my artwork … Because I also do a lot of digital work … so I didn’t want them both to have the same name because they were obviously two different projects … My modeling and my digital work … and … I’m not eighteen or sixteen … I know … (laughter) … I look really young … Oh yeah … I’m from Chicago … Just been in Chicago the whole time … never really gone anywhere else … I want to collaborate with other people outside of Chicago of course … It’s not that I’m limited to Chicago … I’ve gone to Wisconsin and Indiana and I like to go out West a lot … so I’ve collaborated with people in Oregon and I plan to collaborate with others in California too … Anywhere … I like to travel … I’d like to travel more … The most … favorite thing I do is Victorian style … I really like to … I do a lot of vintage clothing … and I pick this up from random places … people have given me cloths in the past … so … I really like  that vintage style … I started off modeling my cloths just to give people a sense of this is who I was … and this is  what I like to wear … It was cool to wear those things in a nice setting and take a photograph with them … It was like getting good use out of the cloths that I collected because I just collected such strange things … that I couldn’t wear to work … or I couldn’t wear on a normal basis … My fashion style always was victorian and then I got into Lolita …Lolita has that dolly victorian look and then I also just like the punk look … goth … So I dabble a lot in those styles … Your attitude changes with each clothing that you wear … If I’m wearing Victorian I try to look glamour-us and elegant and dainty … and if I’m wearing Lolita … I’m definitely more cutesy and you just have different poses and styles … Just the way you carry yourself when you’re wearing those cloths … It’s fun …. It’s fun to dress up … so I’ve always done that since I was a kid … I’d put on the renaissance clothing and go out to the renaissance fair … and just do fun stuff with that … Yeah… I consider it to be an art form … putting an outfit together … the thought that goes into it … it can be pretty difficult … It’s not just about buying anything you that you see on the internet … It’s finding the right cloths that you want … yeah it’s definitely an art form I think to put an outfit together … a lot of people sew their own outfits … I’ve dabbled a little bit with sewing… I’m not great with it though … It is something I want to experiment more with … creating my own outfits … I know that’s why a lot of people look at my work … they want to see what I’m wearing … It’s definitely a big part of what I do … I want to do wardrobe styling for other models … so if they want to become something that they never thought they could be … If they wanted to wear Lolita … but they don’t have Lolita wardrobe then I would want to put that on them … It’s part of playing dress up and having a fantasy world … There’s lot’s of stuff I want to wear at a photoshoot but I just don’t own it … I’m not going to buy a really huge Alexander McQueen gown or something …(laughter) … just because I want to be photographed in it … I kind of have to wear it outside … or at least a couple of times … everyone want’s to be photographed in something like that … you know … you just can’t afford it … or… what’s the point of buying it if you’re  just wearing it for the shoot … which I’m sure some people do … nothing wrong with that … I like to wear … what I wear for the shoots outside … Yeah … I can only go by the persons portfolio and what I see … If I really like what they’re doing in their work then chances are I’d want to work with them … I’ve never really been too picky … I don’t usually go up to artists and photographers and ask if they want to work with me … I feel they need to approach me if they see me as somehow being a part of their artistic project … I’m always just really flattered if anyone wants to work with me and approaches me about it … So just about anyone who asks me to work with them … As long as they seem cool … I’ll work with them… I … Of course … have run into some not so great situations … only a few … thank god … I’ve run into a couple of people where I didn’t get any of the photos … What were they doing? … Why did they want to collaborate in the first place if they didn’t have any plans? … there’s also that feeling of trust or you’re not knowing that person … That’s another reason that why I usually … If there’s a photographer who’s worked with a model I know or that I’ve met … then that usually helps because I’m “They’ve worked with so and so” … Which means they’re probably not flaky … they’re reliable … most of the time I usually ask other models … “So … how’d you like working with that person and how was your experience” … Definitely knowing other models or other photographers that you’ve worked with or someone else has worked with is good … I never try to be to picky because you never know what that person is going to open up to you … I usually accept … any … If someone comes to me and is like … “I have this project and I want you to be part of it” … Then I’m usually like … “Cool … awesome” … The most negative response  I get from my modeling is probably the nude work that I’ve done … with the fetish and nude work … that is always been something that I struggle with or something I did struggle with at first when I started modeling because … as I mentioned earlier … I do mainly focus on the fashion aspect of things … but I also really really like the nude work and fetish work and I appreciate it … So … I look at that kind of work online all the time … so I get inspired by it … but definitely … I feel like … kind of switching subjects a little bi t… but … I do feel like modeling with the art … with the artistic very important … the model is very important …  I’ve been reading on Deviant Art where this guy said … “I really don’t think the models should have their own account because it’s not their work and I don’t think models should be posting their work” … and I’m like … “Well … We’re part of what creates it” … That girl did a certain pose and that photo is famous now and that photo gets a lot of response … not just because of the photographer … but because what the model conveyed … What she did … because it is like a performance … it’s like acting or dancing … I think there’s a lot of negative response towards models out there … that they’re really vain or that I’m just doing that because I want great Facebook photos or great Myspace photos or something … (laughter) … But that’s not why I started modeling … I started doing it because I wanted to make art … and that’s really it … you’re not going to see my face on a billboard somewhere … I’m not an agency model … I’m doing it because I really want to create artwork … because I’m not like the average model … and that’s what part of alternative modeling is … Yeah … most times models get a bad rap just because not everyone understands what they’re doing or why they want to do it … The best … simplest way for me to explain it is I really like to be part of creating an image … creating an image that gets a response out of people and that’s why I also do a lot of my own artwork because I just really like creating something … creating something beautiful … It’s beautiful to me … but may not be beautiful to everyone  else … but it’s always been my goal in life … to be able to create images that touch people or portraits that get a rise out of people … They go … “Oh … Wow … that looks pretty intense … or that looks really nice” … and thats the same with my modeling too … and it’s also just a way for me to collaborate with other artists … I wouldn’t have learned as much about photography if I wasn’t constantly working with photographers … I wouldn’t have learned as much about other art and composition or painting if I wasn’t working with other artists … Definitely modeling really helped get me in touch with other people out there … Probably the bad thing I do … and my work … or what I do … is that I’m not using social networking that much … I’m just now getting into it … I was always just kind of bad with networking … but those sites really do help … When I got on Model Mayhem … when I signed up for it … I didn’t expect anyone to contact me … but somehow people … people found my site … I do like writing and commenting on stuff … but I wasn’t adding a bunch of friends on there …I still don’t have over a thousand friends on there or anything like that … The people somehow still found my work and that … that was pretty crazy … So the fact that people were actually going out of their way to contact me to do shoots was pretty cool … So yeah … I got the most response from Model Mayhem … I’ve also gotten more response from Facebook lately …. which is really interesting because I didn’t expect anyone actually to find my portfolio through Facebook … but it just goes to show that all of these sites probably help so I just recently put up a Deviant Art account for my modeling … I used to have one … but there’s been times … throughout my modeling … that I‘ve gotten really discouraged and I just kind of gave up on the whole thing … It’s kind of like when you’re modeling you’re  also marketing yourself … and you’re marketing something you can do … and this is how you look … and for me … that wasn’t … I felt like that wasn’t what I was doing … I was just creating artwork … So I wasn’t … I kind of felt like … Oh… people were kind of expecting me to … you know … I kind of felt like what people were expecting me to do I wasn’t doing … so I kind of just felt like really discouraged by that … but … I realize now that I do have people … or I did have people supporting me in what I was doing … It’s mostly been through the Afro-Punk community actually … The Afro-Punk community has definitely helped me out in terms of networking … A lot of people that feature my work are other black artists that kind of just appreciate what I’ve done over the years … Yeah I mean … the more you network the better you’ll probably be … those sites are all really great if you know how to use them … I agree that all of them are really  great ways to meet friends … I am a pretty shy and introverted person … on my own … people look at me and the last thing they probably think is that I actually do any modeling … But I just … I … I would like to do acting and I like really just being able to transform myself in front of the camera … People make jokes … and they call me queen chameleon all the time … because I’m able to pop on a new wig all the time … pop on a different outfits … I’m very versatile in my work and actually because I’m really versatile in my work it actually confuses people a little bit … and I don’t really get that much response from the fact that I’m really really versatile … Like I think people think … “Oh … that’s kind of weird” … because I don’t have one set look in my work … but that’s just what I like to do … I really like to fool around … play around with different outfits … different hairpieces … actually I’d like to do even more outrageous weird things … It’s definitely not my every day persona … I’m not always walking around the house dressed up … I’m not always … I don’t know … I think in some of my photos I give a bad ass … a bad ass presentation … and in other photos I give this really sweet presentation … and it’s not saying that I’m one or the other … I’m very … you know … I’m just kind of like multi … multi talented … (laughter) … I guess … I just like to give people a different sense of the fashions that I work with … It is different … but it’s also just me … it’s just how I am… so some people think I have a multi personality problem… but this is me … it’s like how I’m talking right now … this is usually how I am … but … I do like to play around with that … Actually giving people a sense of not really knowing which person I am is also really fun … It’s also just a part of what I do … It’s a part of my artwork …