A long time ago, I used to frequent the Art Forums That Shall Not Be Named. While it undoubtedly fomented toxic cultural norms around art making (study till your arms fall off! no fan art! anime is for nerds! et cetera), I had a sketchbook thread like a lot of other young aspirational artists. It functioned like a blog, more or less. You would post a bunch of art and a bunch of your— if you were an emotional teen— feelings about it. Or, you would post no feelings and only art so you could be cool.
But there was an etiquette and a purpose, and some pretty-okay habits fell out of that. Currently, I’m trying to come to grips with how social media and art industry inside baseball have sort of warped my brain chemistry. I can feel my fingers reach for my phone involuntarily. For all the good it does me— it keeps me connected to my community, introduces me to diverse voices and perspectives, and challenges me— it is also deeply, deeply toxic in ways that are hard to tease apart.
So my ambition is that I can change things up a little by giving myself a more productive outlet that isn’t at the mercy of one of the major tech companies (sorry Squarespace) or a platform like ArtStation. Hopefully I can start to reclaim some agency over my grey matter chemicals and floss some of the brain plaque that is the algorithm driven infinite-scroll.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and Fan Art
Over the past several years, I’ve had a real big trouble “finishing” games. I will find myself on my phone for hours, not even remembering when I put the game down, losing interest. But a few months ago I bought Persona 5: Royal and shortly after, XBC:3, and resolved to finish both of them.
By the end of both I was extremely fatigued with them. I loved both of them though, but the last 10-15 hours of each was me just speeding through it as fast as I could. Persona 5 particularly seemed to just last… forever. I found Xenoblade’s end pacing much more forgiving.
Interestingly, after rushing through each game, the days after it would just sit in my head. I would feel the desire to keep playing, which isn’t something I’ve felt for a long time. It was really exciting to feel that, honestly. I thought for a while I would only ever want to play games from 2006 and earlier. Whew.
Anyways; Fan art.
After many younger years looking down on it, I’ve really come to appreciate fan art. In my mind, it’s very similar to painting from life, except instead of having visual subject you are recording, you have an emotional subject and context that you are exploring. You don’t have to make one up- and so you can immediately access much deeper, richer layers of emotional thinking than if you were drawing a random portrait. That’s how I feel anyways.
Sadly, this Xenoblade “fan art” falls short of even that- it really was a spontaneous visual design riff that found it’s way under my hand while trying to sketch more idly. I’d really like to push myself to start doing more fan art of characters though. I don’t avoid it for any reason, so much as it hasn’t been part of my artistic diet almost ever- so there’s some taste acquisition that needs to happen.
Anyways, that’s it for now!
-J
Drawing of a made-up Xenoblade hero, complete with hi-tech air jordans inspired by Eunie’s.
A design exercise: taking a visual wrapper (Faberge Egg) and fusing it with a subject (Knight). A fun exercise, but I would like to get in the habit of spending more than one sitting on exercises like this.