Friday, July 29, 2011

How story telling influenced my art

Inspired by Shirley
There were many turning points in my "artistic career" that greatly affected my life and how I approached art altogether. I really only started to develop my technical skills a few years ago. It all started with a few internet strangers that befriended me and introduced me to the amazing world of "roleplay."

Some of you nerds out there know what I mean, but I have found that so many people from "real life" don't fully understand the concept of RP. Basically, you team up with another person (or as many as you can find) and write a collaborative fantasy story together. Kind of like Dungeons and Dragons minus the points and skills. The result was often hours and hours of descriptive writing with a huge array of interesting, made up characters and complex story plots. As a younger person, I was very much into this idea.. I loved anime, cartoons, and comics. So naturally I wanted to make my own.


I think the most appealing thing to me about the whole deal was that I was able to illustrate the ideas from my mind. Drawing pictures to go with my story was important because I had a visual to go off of for inspiration. And inadvertently my obsession caused my skills to improve considerably. I had to push my abilities to the limit in order to achieve the true spirit and emotion of these stories. Some times I was more successful than other times, but my improvements anatomy, coloring, outlining, and over all technical knowledge can be accredited to spending hours of time pining over fantasy stories.



The following drawings were done purely in oekaki, mspaint, or paintchat. I couldn't afford photoshop but I enjoy the "computery" effect of using these free japanese programs. They are all illustrations of characters from stories I have written with people in the past. These pictures took many hours of work and have immense detail in them. They aren't perfect, but they are a charming snapshot from a time when I was first beginning to mature as an artist.

To these few people who inspired me, I really appreciate them...Courtney, Natasha, Jenny, Shirley and so many others... Thanks for nerding out with me :)
OH BTW.. CLICK THE PICS TO SEE DETAILS!

Inspired by Jen
He lives in a horrible fantasy dream world, that's why he's naked of course.
Wow isnt he an interesting one.. I just remember this took an enormous amount of time and was done in purely MS paint. It was my attempt at "pixel art."
I love this piece now (despite it's awkwardness,) it's one of the few pieces I did involving more than 2 characters.

Looking back at these characters now I realize how unique their designs were. Check out Jen's bunny guy character, so cool.
"Jenny Loved Pie" The fence was the whole reason for this picture.
 Inspired by Natasha
Francis really really loved doughnuts. This piece is probably one of the most technically detailed I've ever done with oekaki.
 Inspired by Courtney

She came straight from hell.

These last two were some of the first "uber detailed" pictures I attempted. You can see how much I improved since then :)



A tiny collaboration between me and Natasha I had nearly forgotten about. <3

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