Interview No. 99
Interview By: The-Great-One
[ PART 1 | PART 2 ]
Q: For those just getting into art, what advice would you have for them?
A:
Flowers10: Well, that depends on why you started arting in the first place. For those who want to create pretty pictures, i'd say : look at your work in a critical way, practice what your bad at. if you cant draw hands, draw a 1000 hands, and they will improve. Don't draw the same thing/theme all the time, you need to experiment to improve and get outside your comfort zone.
Oh and pick up some art books. But if you'd just like to have fun, try to improve its allot a fun
Lucky: Well... its... Don't! Or if you do, make sure you know all the bad sides of art before you keep going! Including lack of job security, insane time schedules, not seeing sunlight, dark eye shadows, losing friends from lack of contact with the social world... you're still with me?
GREAT! Because if you're fine with all that being an artist is AWESOMEEEE!
My biggest advice is to do a LOT of life drawing and a lot less copying of things that are famous like anime or scot pilgrim or whatever's popular right now. I think personal style comes with time and not trying to MAKE it come to you. I've stayed up late nights depressed that my drawing is horrible and nothing special and that's the worst feeling you can have, so DON'T! If you ever feel like you haven't found yourself EXPLORE! Look at real life, look at other artists, not to copy them but ask yourself why their work is so appealing and try to capture that aspect! Every once in a while someone will come along and tell you you've got a great style , but when you've found yourself you'll know! I still haven't completely found myself, but i'm getting closer to where I want to be. The more personal I make my work and the more vulnerable I feel making it the better it turns out for me. And good luck, it's a struggle, but with great rewards in the end!
Morthagg: Practice, obviously. If you want to be as versatile and open to learning as possible, try to understand realism and relatively correct anatomy before you start clinging to one (cartoonish) style, because it will misshape your other styles. Welcome criticism. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Think about a medium (paint, realistic digital painting, pencil, ink, ..) that you think you would suck at and then just try it out until you find a way to make it work. In other words: confront your problems, don't ignore them (this is one I'm still learning myself). Oh, and don't be afraid to imitate and learn from others. Just make sure to move on at a certain point.
Luwano: art101.newgrounds.com has a lot of useful tutorials to get started. When you have done some of the practices, you should post some of your work in the art forum (actually post it in the thread rather than just posting a link to it) and above all, be patient. Don't expect people come running, the forum is slow at times and sometimes people just can't add anything interesting to the piece. Just keep submitting art and somebody will respond. I also recommend asking specific question rather than just "check out my art".
Accept critiques. There are good ones and bad ones, but you won't get anywhere if you can't take criticism. Don't take it personal, they talk about your art, not you. If people are just rude and are not giving advice, you should just ignore them.
Follow advice. People are not giving you tips because they are bored, but (in 95 out of 100 cases) because they think that's what you really need and what can help you improve.
Practice a lot.... and I mean A LOT. And when you have done a lot, do more. Don't be as lazy as I am, seriously.
ZaneZansorrow: Learn the basics from your art classes, if you are not attending art class and looking at Newgrounds for guidance for art then follow and read Art101 http://art101.newgrounds.com/news/post/269181 If you are feeling like being a better artist through photoshop then ctrl+paint is also great on teaching how to use photoshop's tool to its fullest http://www.ctrlpaint.com/
Q: If you could change one thing about the Art Portal, what would it be and why?
A:
Flowers10: I'd make it a requirement that all pictures must have dicks in them. No, I really don't know.
Lucky: I'd make the thumbs smaller and display more art on the art portal page, because i'm too lazy to scroll trough 15 pages and enjoy artsites who have tiny image previews because if a 40*40 preview can grab me, the art's gotta be awesome!
Morthagg: I honestly can't think of any intelligent adjustments to make.
Luwano: I wish more users would actually check the art portal and vote on art. It's already considered a success if a drawing that is not frontpaged reaches 100 votes. That would not even get a flash through judgment and even worse, some pieces don't even get 20 votes. Unfortunately I don't know how to achieve this, maybe this interview helps already.
ZaneZansorrow: I would change how voting on an artwork would also give experience points.
Q: Flowers10 - One piece by you that fascinates me is entitled selfportrait. What can you tell me about the Self-portrait Collab and your contribution?
A: It's a picture of me that i drew. JQB organized the Self-portrait Collab, and since he's the best artist on newgrounds i wanted to contribute to some of his work. Instead of making a normal kind of portrait i choose to make orgasm of colors with my sexy face in the middle!
Q: Flowers10 - Another piece that intrigues me is War. Could you tell us what World War II pic it was you found, describe the picture and what inspired you to draw it?
A: Almost everyday i take a minute and search the interwebz for inspiring pictures.
I stumbled on a thread filled with WWII pictures, there were some blood gushing in there. And the one i drew was the one that caught my attention the most. The scene is so dramatic the way the officer is holding the capitative head whilst pointing the a gun at it, It really makes you question if the nazi were actual humans?
Q: Morthagg - A piece by you is entitled Markerface. You say it is based off of you, but it's not a self portrait. Also you state that you were trying out your kiddie markers. What gave you the inspiration to draw yourself and use kiddie markers?
A: The only reason I drew 'myself' in that drawing is because I needed a basic human face reference and mine was quite readily available. I used markers because I felt I sucked at using colour and I don't like using something as irreversible as a thick marker, so I wanted to confront myself and make something that was a bit out of my 'comfort zone'.
Q: Morthagg - One of my favorite pieces by you is Nightly scene. You said it was for a background for an animation. What was this animation and what was the inspiration or the goal set in mind for the animation?
A: That's really one of your favourites? :D How odd. I made the thing in like 15 minutes almost 5 years ago or something. I was in my first year of studying Animation and the assignment was to make a storyboard, model sheets, and backgrounds for a story we came up with ourselves, based on something the teachers gave us. I wrote a story about a cricket and a sparrow that fell in love against the wishes of either's family, some kind of animal-ish Romeo and Juliet. Since this was early in the year we didn't yet need to make a completed animation out of it, and Nightly Scene is just one of the backgrounds I made.
Q: Lucky - A lot of your artwork has a very interesting caricature style to it. Where did you adapt this style from and what twists do you add to yours?
A: Oh idk, i used to do caricatures on the street, not for a company or anything I just put 2 chairs in the middle of the street and offered caricatures to people , i really love drawing faces and expressions and so I try to add as much expressions into my drawings because I think that's the best way to make the drawing feel more personal to me. I love minimal lifework so i spent a lot of time trying make characters with as few lines as possible, I'm out of that phase now , but I think even subconsciously I still want to show the most in a character with the fewest amount of lines possible!
Q: Lucky - A Bear fighting a squid is quite possibly the funniest yet most badass piece I've seen. How did this friend request come about and what possessed you to bring it to life?
A: It was a fun request from a friend and I thought why not have fun with it?? It took me way to long to make, but looking back it was a loot of fun! It's one of those I cant believe I did that pieces. I really really love making drawings on topics that make me laugh or happy just thinking about, and when i get the feeling of a connection deeper than just a drawing with something it usually succeeds much more than i originally tought it could! Same as my submission for the comic jam this year!
Q: ZaneZansorrow - Cat Knight is an interesting and adorable piece. You describe it as a cat and his knight companion. Where did the idea for this come from and what was the process in making it?
A: The idea just pop in when I was tired on what I was currently arting on and I need to get my creativity flowing. So I decided I wanted to art a cat, then I wanted to do more (the best part in art for me is the urge to do more then what you originally intended), so I added a knight because I love armor. Went about creating this in a casual manner on whether this will turn out good or bad because I started by an eye for the cat and work around from there. I even painted it straight from color because on how fast I want to get the creative flow flowing. Evidently whats done is done, and I was happy enough to even put in the art portal.
Q: ZaneZansorrow - My favorite piece by you has to be Desolate Light Consumer. I feel that there is an interesting story to tell about this piece, would you care to share it with us?
A: The Desolate Ligh Consumer was a piece for the Art Forum's COW (Creature Of the Week)(the theme was exoskeleton) which isn't really a weekly thing anymore but oh well. I started this piece right after I finish another COW (the theme was volcano dweller) so I was already feeling kind of exhausted but I still want to do it because of the theme. Dinosaur pop up in my head but I want the creature to look unique so I slap in some extra stuff like small hands attach to the side of the head and reptilian feeling to it. Did it by painting grayscale then slaping it with a blue gradient then add in colors to give it the right attention.
Q: Luwano - An interesting art form that I have forgotten about that you have refreshed my memory with is in the piece Show me some scraperfoil!. For those who don't know, could you explain scraperfoil and why you wanted to make one?
A: Scraperfoil is the name for those kids toys where you scratch black color off a shiny or coloful background along given guidelines, to receive a fancy picture. Of course that's not real art, but fun. When I was practicing basic forms, I got bored by the repetitive process, so instead I added a black layer above a colorful layer and erased the black to receive a drawing, similar to those scraperfoil toys. It's basically just a form of shading called "scribbling", but it helped me to keep on practicing. I even started an activity thread (http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1181899) based on the idea a long time ago, it never really took off though. lol
Q: Luwano - Green Flash is a pretty piece, made for The Friday Flood. It tells a small little story with footprints leading to the ocean, with a broken heart and "Dear John" written in the hand. An interesting tale to tell, but one I would like to know more about from the story teller. What all can you tell us about this piece?
A: "Dear John letters" is a term used for letters women write to their boyfriends or husbands to break up with them in their absence. So the message of the writing in the sand along with the footprints that lead to the water should suggest, that the woman committed suicide. There are more hints at death in the picture, like the skull face in the moon. Actually, I was testing out composition with this one mainly, thus the elongated format and the transition from more or less light at the bottom to dark at the top. I made some mistakes in the drawing which the reviewers pointed out, so I learned a thing or two from this pic overall.
Q: What can we expect from the Art Portal and Art Forum in the near future?
A:
Flowers10: Dicks, lots of them.
Lucky: Well I haven't submitted in a while , but I'm making a comic at spikescomic.com and have been making it for the past 13 weeks, the stage height is huge thats why i cant make it fit in the art portal, BUT you can expect a lot of production art from my personal projects!:3
Morthagg: Artsy things, hopefully. And probably a healthy bit of bickering and trolling.
Luwano: There are some art collabs yet to be released and I hope we can also team up for some more of those in the future. For the Art Portal, I think Robot Day will be a huge thing again. I can't wait to see what people like keepwalking, Nekow, Mindchamber and all the other great artists around will come up with.
ZaneZansorrow: The art forum will get my personnal art thread bump daily with work in progress (oh look it's bump now) and me participating on the Epic Battle Fantasy fan art collab (if given enough participation and find someone who know how to use flash to put the pictures together) plus I might do some critiques if I can think of any that fits for the right art. The art portal will be seeing my favorite finish pieces, friday floods (because I will participate to flood that portal), and many things that relate to the art forum and Newgrounds.
When it comes to art, I must say that I have learned more than what I thought. Is it subjective? Absolutely. Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Yes. Overall though, creativity and creation is something that takes skill to learn and master. From what I have seen in this interview and these artists works I truly do believe that there is no such thing as talent when it comes to making art... it is something that takes time and dedication, more than probably most people think.
[ PART 1 | PART 2 ]