Local artisan featured in TIME magazine

Provided.

Tess Wolfe's dice featured in TIME magazine.

Having caught the attention of a journalist working on articles for a Special Edition of iconic TIME magazine, Tess Wolfe, a local Tehachapi artisan, is being featured in the newly-released TIME magazine Dungeons and Dragons 50th Anniversary Special Edition! The article, "Why We'll Always Love Dice" appears on page 66 in the magazine.

Tess, a Southern California native, grew up in Tehachapi. She dabbled in various art mediums throughout her youth, exploring different disciplines while her own unique creativity blossomed. She enjoyed freedom of expression in a nurturing environment as she became more and more confident in her artistic abilities.

Tess moved back to Southern California for college where she excelled in National speech and debate competitions. After earning her bachelor's degree in communications, she spent a year in South Korea teaching English to elementary school children. She returned to Southern California to attend graduate school, earning her master's degree while further perfecting her prowess in speech and debate, ultimately landing a teaching job at a local Southern California college.

Tess' creative soul and artistic drive never quieted as she pursued her education and personal goals. She discovered the art of handmade dice while playing Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) several years ago. She was intrigued by the uniqueness of "polyhedral" multi-sided dice sets which are integral to games such as Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Magic the Gathering and other online multi-player games. In this unique, finicky and demanding artistic medium, Tess found her niche.

Donna Wolfe.

The dice are made with specialized epoxy resins using a wide-variety of colorants, glitter, mylar, organic and inorganic materials, all combined with complex pouring techniques. To achieve artisanal results, the resin dice must then be cured in a pressurized tank for 24 hours and further cured at normal pressure for days afterward. Then the dice are polished in multiple additional steps. Finally, the identifying numbers are painted by hand on every side of each die.

Tess has not only mastered this difficult resin art form, but she has pioneered innovative new techniques and designs, such as framing dice to appear as miniature terrariums, incorporating novel materials and figurines inside the dice, affixing decals to create thematic dice sets, mastering starry universes and planet dice, and hand carving dice to look like crystal geodes. But her popular and original "cloud design" dice may be her signature, giving rise to her studio name "Dreamy Dice."

We look forward to an exciting future as Tess continues to create new and unique styles of multi-sided dice that thrill game-players around the world.

You can explore Tess' dice creations on dreamydice.com, or @dreamy_dice on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

We proudly applaud and congratulate Tess Wolfe, one of Tehachapi's talented artisans, on being recognized by and featured in the Dungeons and Dragons 50th Anniversary Special Edition of TIME magazine!