Life, Values & Legacy: Our Chat with Cassie & Darlene

Cassie & Darlene shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.

Cassie & Darlene, it’s always a pleasure to learn from you and your journey. Let’s start with a bit of a warmup: What is a normal day like for you right now?
A normal day for me right now is a mix of art, routine, and controlled chaos. I wake up on a tropical island in Thailand, make a strong coffee, and jump straight into client work or illustrations for my own brand, OVCHARKA. Most of the day I’m switching between drawing weird characters, managing projects, and answering messages across six different platforms.
In between, I take breaks to walk my dog-brain (that’s me), get groceries, or hunt for something cool in local second-hand shops. Evenings are usually for working on my Shopify store, animating something just for fun, or watching horror movies.
It’s a good mix of creativity, deadlines, and island life humidity trying to murder my laptop.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
We are Cassie and Darlene — the creative duo behind OVCHARKA, an art universe where 1930s rubber-hose cartoons collide with horror, surrealism, and bright, twisted humor. We build characters, illustrations, animations, branding, and merch, all tied together by the OVCHARKA mythology — a strange world born from a “glitch in the system,” where a girl with a dog’s head becomes a cult symbol.

We’re originally from Russia and now based on a tropical island in Thailand, running our studio together and collaborating with clients around the world. At the same time, we’re growing our own Shopify store with posters, stickers, limited drops, and soon even more experimental products.

What makes OVCHARKA special is the combination of storytelling and visual identity: everything we create connects back into one narrative universe. It’s not just illustrations — it’s a world, a mood, and a cult in the making.

Right now, we’re expanding the brand through new merch lines, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and animated pieces that bring our characters to life.

Amazing, so let’s take a moment to go back in time. Who were you before the world told you who you had to be?
Before the world tried to shape us, we were two kids who escaped into drawing as our own private universe. We weren’t trying to “be artists” — we were just naturally drawn to strange characters, spooky stories, and anything that felt a bit offbeat. We were the kids who doodled during every class, built imaginary worlds, and treated art as a survival tool, not a profession.

Before expectations and “real jobs” entered the conversation, we were simply creators by instinct — curious, a little weird, and completely free. In many ways, OVCHARKA is our way of returning to that original version of ourselves: the version that creates without fear, without rules, and without asking permission.

Was there ever a time you almost gave up?
Yes — more than once. When you build something from the ground up, especially a strange, unconventional art universe like OVCHARKA, there are moments when everything feels too heavy: deadlines, instability, financial pressure, burnout, and the constant need to reinvent yourself. There was a period when we were working nonstop, saying yes to every project just to survive, and it felt like our own style was disappearing under client work. We questioned if we were doing the right thing or if this path was even sustainable.

But every time we reached that point, something pulled us back — usually the work itself. A new character idea, a message from someone who connected with our art, or the simple realization that we didn’t want to live any other way. OVCHARKA wasn’t just a project we could quit; it was the only space where we felt fully ourselves.

So yes, we’ve had moments where giving up seemed like an option — but the world we’re building mattered more than the fear. And every difficult chapter ended up becoming fuel for the next evolution of our art and our brand.

I think our readers would appreciate hearing more about your values and what you think matters in life and career, etc. So our next question is along those lines. Is the public version of you the real you?
In many ways, yes — the public version of us is real, just not the whole picture. What people see through OVCHARKA is our genuine creative voice: the weird humor, the strange characters, the mix of cute and unsettling, the love for storytelling and visuals that feel a bit “off.” That part is 100% us.

But like anyone building a brand, there’s also a layer of intention. Online, we show the world we’re creating — the mythology, the style, the energy. Behind the scenes, we’re just two people sitting in front of our screens, arguing about color palettes, drinking too much coffee, and doing our best to keep the universe running.

So the public version is real, but it’s curated. It’s the amplified version of what we already are. If anything, OVCHARKA lets us be even more ourselves than we ever could be in “real life.”

Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. What do you think people will most misunderstand about your legacy?
People might think our legacy is just about a visual style — the rubber-hose characters, the bright colors, the weird humor. But that’s only the surface. What we’re actually building is a world, a mythology, and a feeling of permission: permission to be strange, to create without rules, to turn the “wrongness” of things into something powerful.

Some may misunderstand OVCHARKA as simply quirky or aesthetic, when in reality it’s a story about transformation, identity, and reclaiming your inner misfit. Our work looks playful, but it’s rooted in resilience and in choosing to build your own universe when the real one feels too limiting.

So if anything is misunderstood, it might be the depth behind the chaos — that the cult, the characters, the “glitch in the system” energy all carry meaning. Our legacy isn’t just about the art we leave behind; it’s about the people who see themselves in it and feel braver because of it.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
layerbylayer.prints

Suggest a Story: BoldJourney is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems,
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
Highlighter Series
Life, Lessons, & Legacies

Shari Mocheit Put God first and trust the process. See God in everyone and everything.

Highlighter Series
Are you doing what you were born to do—or what you were told to do?

Del Kary Definitely what I was born to do. Since I can remember, movies have

Highlighter Series
Local Highlighter Series

Sean Glatch Anyone can write poetry! To prove this, well, everyone would have to write