My Journey With Art
For as long as I could remember I've loved drawing and have had a supportive (though somewhat ignorant) family in my endeavors. My biggest inspirations as a child and a to a lesser extent now were children's TVA, feature films, and video games. High amounts of cartoon radiation throughout my artistic career have left me with a very deep appreciation for cartooning as an artform, and the skills of abstraction inherent to the creation of art. I'm rather serious about the silly, that is to say.
In my earliest artistic memories, I grew up on Looney Tunes Anthologies and Disney DVDs, as well as public access television and the few Nintendo DS and Wii games I got my hands on. In 2013 however, I fell in love with MLP which had a huge impact on my style due to its strong art direction, and the window it gave me into the world of independent internet artists (for better or for worse). In 2015, Splatoon was my whole world and I was forced to incorporate humanoid characters into my artstyle, but I wouldn't truly reach a stride with that until 2019 when I started designing Kirby gijinkas. But back in 2015 and 2016, Undertale and Yo-Kai Watch's cooky monster designs taught me flexibility outside of the thick-lined sterility of MLP, and the wonderful world of Warrior Cats independent animators helped me develop my anatomy. In 2017 a soul-consuming Sonic the Hedgehog fixation did a lot to help me work on heavily stylized and fluid character designs, which in 2018 was refined by a few months of studying Golden Age animation artstyles.
Since finally learning to draw humans (ironically for a series with the most simplistic character designs imaginable), my general grasp on anatomy has skyrocketed for creatures of any body-type. But one more major development of my style was in 2020 when I became incredibly fixated on an elusive aesthetic from my childhood, the original "CalArts" or Modernist limited animation style - that which was pioneered by studios like UPA. I've always enjoyed playing with different styles out of my deep appreciation for cartooning, but studying such a treasure trove of cartoony beauty has given me fluency in stylization I can't be grateful enough for. And which I hope to some day compliment on the other end of the artistic spectrum with studies into realism and detailed rendering.
Quite little of this journey can really be cataloged on a website due to the vast majority of my artwork before 2020 being in paper sketchbooks, but I hope from what is on display you can follow a part of this!