Look at me, now I have a Blogger thing too. Aren’t I just moving up in the interweb… Not sure what I want to use this place for yet, I guess I’ll just talk and leave things for people to look at, you know, the usual.
For those of you that don’t know me and have perhaps come across this page by some freak accident, you’re not in for much. I’m long-winded with not much to say. I’m also a weirdo.
Currently, I’m at work. I work for the admissions office of my college; I’m an art student and future concept illustrator – hopefully –maybe… At the moment I’m studying Illustration and graphic novel-ing(?), just working my way toward the big goal of working for myself. At this point I have a long way to go… I’m all right with that though, everyone’s on a long path and I’m just here with them, the people I work with, fellow classmates, friends and family. We’re all headed somewhere; guess the question is: where the hell are we headed?
At this point I’m not sure which direction I’m heading, but I’m finding myself unhappy in my illustration course for the fact that, granted, I really don’t want to make a living being hired by writers and companies to do art for them for small sums of money and never really expressing my ideas and interests as I’d like to do. My professor is hell-bent on commercial illustration as the only thing and the only way, and I understand that it’s a good introductory to the world of illustration at large, but it’s teaching me that I really don’t enjoy that kind of work… My dream-come-true is to have this idea, this idea that people will one day back and fund and help me get it out there into the world, and I want to entertain people. I want them to feel love, compassion and excitement when they read or view my work. I know I don’t have any of my work up yet, but if I were to try and explain it to you, it was best described by a comment made by one of my fellow illustration classmates in response to an assignment I did for a class workshop. She came up to me before critique: “is that character there a boy or a girl? I can’t tell.” I replied: “They’re androgynous really.” She perked up jokingly: “Oh, cause I want to date them.” We laughed and she went off to her own workspace and it hit me then, THAT is exactly how I want people to feel about my work. I want people to have that kind of emotional pull, I want people to fall in love with them, I want people to see them and feel their heartstrings pulled, I want them to have that relationship with my characters - no matter who they are or what part they’re playing in my stories – a hero, a villain, a fall-out-guy, a random peddler on the side of the road asking for change – I want people to love them. With that focus in mind, I feel like I have a clear goal for my future, everyone has their own reasons for “doing art” they all want to evoke some kind of feeling or message, that’s why art is done, and I now know what my reasons are.
With this little revelation, I’m now wondering how to go about fulfilling this new sense of duty. How does one go about making people fall in love with fictional, cartooned characters? I’ve been doing it fairly easily thus far… but with new sense of conscious deliberation, now I have a mission to undertake. What she said made me think back to my youth – I remember my relationship with characters I really enjoyed in childhood do have been almost crush-like, a puppy love connection. Perhaps I’m odd, but when I’ve asked friends if there was ever any characters they’ve “had a crush on” I was pleasantly surprised to hear that “character crushes” are a little more common than I thought. Granted, my close friends are similarly minded nerdy-artists, I should really investigate further and ask some people outside my mind-frame of gamer, otaku, wannabe-philosopher and general dork. So if anyone lands here and actually took the time to read any of this, leave a comment. Did you ever have a crush on a fictional character (cartoon character, videogame character, storybook character etc.) please share.
Well, I guess I should stop fucking around and finish some work; I might post more crap you don’t care about later. Thanks for reading.
-A.V.
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