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Hoang Tran is a self-taught, professional artist known for the wax sculptures he carves on the tip of Crayola crayons. Tran’s art career started the summer of 2013 when a friend named Shiu Pei Luu, now an art director at Facebook, invited him to participate in a one-night, pop-up show at the a.Muse Gallery in San Francisco. “It was just a pop-up, one-night-only art show, and she [Luu] invited a lot of her artist friends to do stuff,” Tran says. The question was: what would Tran do? In grade school, Tran drew comics to entertain himself and his classmates. And in undergrad, he contributed a weekly strip to the college paper, but his artistic urges were tamped down during the three years he spent in dental school. Tran dropped out at the beginning of his fourth year of dental school. But not before he learned how to carve wax. The theme of the pop-up was Game of Thrones. “I wanted to carve the animal mascots of each house, like the wolf, lion, dragon, etcetera,” Tran says. That was his idea for the show, but at that point, he’d never done anything like that before. Tran did a test run before the show, carving a horse out of a pink Crayola crayon using his dental tools. He liked how the horse turned out so he decided to keep going with the Game of Thrones mascot idea. “After that first show, I realized I enjoyed doing it and it seemed to get a good reaction from my friends.” Over the next few months, he kept carving, tweaking his technique and broadening his subjects. Eventually, he decided to sell his work online and started posting photos of his carvings to Tumblr. The carvings were well-received online. Some photos he posted of his work would receive thousands of likes on his site. That gave him a little bit more motivation because he knew that people liked what he’s doing. In August of 2013, only a few months into the crayon sculpture game, he set up his Etsy store and the next month he sold his first carving. A few websites profiled him and featured his work. He reached out to galleries in L.A., like Gallery 1988 and the Hero Complex Gallery, and they decided to show his work. Tran’s carvings started to gain some traction. Then Instagram contacted him and asked if it could share a photo of his art on its official account. He went from 20,000 followers to 40,000 almost overnight (now he’s at more than 91,000) on his brand new Instagram account. Orders to his Etsy store spiked and he started getting interested from brands to do advertising work.