eyes

Still thinking about Knives In Your Eyes. Pats Val's tum. This boy can fit so many tools inside him.

Spider web collar.

Whoever was in charge of wardrobe did such a great job at making all their silhouettes Very Shape :o

Mark him up, lads!

One of the strange experiences I've had after having a stroke, is that my brain sometimes struggles to interpret what my eyes are seeing. Here's my recreations of some of the more memorable things I've seen over the last few years.

Doodled some fun shapes.

Art Summary 2023!

I made a short film this year! \o/ https://vimeo.com/897307551 Pass: what is Val? (one word, no caps, no plural)

It's based on the characters from Knives In Your Eyes. A little write up about my goals and thoughts on this project below.

I had wanted to see if I could still make a film after having a stroke. I haven't made a film since 2014, so it felt like I was dusting off cobwebs for the first few months haha.

I'm an animator at my day job, so I didn't want to focus on the animation at all. Instead, I wanted to put all my energy into all the other steps of making a film (script, storyboard, layout, backgrounds, fx, compositing, etc), since I'm far less proficient at those things.

I wanted to explore Hunter's fears, mainly their fear of becoming inhuman and of being seen. I love the idea that Dream and Nightmare see the dreams that they're eating, and thought that Hunter's conflicting desires surrounding Val would be a great opportunity to see them feed off a single dream.

I lengthily blogged about my technical goals and process elsewhere so I won't write it all again here, but I hope the 'Val is intensely unsettling, and Hunter experiences what they think is the worst case scenario but is still somehow Into It' vibes comes across ok. I Am Cringe But I Am Free! :D

The cool thing is, I can already spot the areas that need improvement and know exactly how I'd go about making those changes, so I feel that overall my critical observation skills have leveled up a lot :D I'm really proud of myself!

If anyone is curious about software: boards were done in Storyboarder, backgrounds in Clip Studio Paint, and anim/fx/comp in Harmony.

i hope your recovery continues to be textbook! what are your dreams/what is an artistic vision you want realized in your life?

Thank you! Hmm, dreams... I know this isn't what you meant but I'm gonna say it anyway. I have had recurring dreams about a little grasshopper dude who runs a bugjuice shop with his cocoon partner haha. Proper answer, I don't have any burning passion to create one particular project at the moment. I do however have a huge list of techniques and mediums I want to try, but haven't started planning for because I have no story/concept/characters to pair it with. Everything from puppetry to papercraft to programming. So I guess my artistic vision/dream would be to stumble across stories that would suit all the creative experiments I want to try haha. I love collaboration too much to ever want to create a huge magnum opus-esque project by myself :)

I love your art so much it's been inspiring me for the last decade

A decade! Thanks for hanging around for such a long time! It really means a lot that you've found my ever changing work inspiring. Let's keep creating fun things for another 10 years! :D

Thank YOU! I'm very happy that my work has brought some joy into your life :D I create and post to share the things that bring joy to my life, so I'm glad it's infectious.

I'm literally three hard boiled eggs in a trenchcoat, but it's very cool to hear I have faked the Cool Smart Artist persona for long enough to have fooled you hehe. I consider where I am currently in life a success :D

You have so many unique ways of stylizing you characters! How did you come to developed the very geometric one? Also, how do you decide what art style to use for each work? (Rooting for your recovery. Ganbatte!)

There's quite a long story behind this haha. I injured my wrists in my second year of uni and realised I couldn't continue with how I had been drawing up until that point. I had to have a very hard think about the direction I wanted my art to go, since I wanted to be able to create for as long as possible. So for 6 months I went full research and analysis mode into artists who were making minimalist work. Who was currently successful? What parts of their work did I like? How could I switch to drawing completely differently than what came naturally to me while still feeling creatively fulfilled? So I had all my research, and then I spent the next 6 months trying to test out as many styles and techniques as I could, to see what felt right to me. This was around 2012, from memory? Concurrently to all this, at uni we were given all these little drawing exercises to do, and I remember one of them being 'draw a character in 4 lines'. It was meant to be a gestural exercise, but it really resonated with me, the idea that you didn't need a lot of detail in order to communicate what you wanted. So that morphed into my overall goal: minimal output, maximum message/connection. Then in my third year at uni, we got taught the Point < Line < Shape hierarchy, which is how you can control what your eye is drawn to first. It was meant to be used for creating appealing compositions (e.g. draw a bird, a tree, and a mountain in as many different configurations as you can), but I ended up applying it to my character design, and I've never looked back.

I currently am a freelance animator and designer, and no matter the job, there's always a style that I need to emulate, so a fair chunk of my professional work also bleeds into the art I do in my free time. As for how I decide on which style to go with for what pieces, I don't really have a system for it haha. I use my Likes on all my social media as one giant reference folder, so I just scroll through those until I find a technique, a composition, a shape, a colour palette, etc that I think I would like to try. I'm still in the habit of researching and analysing other people's work constantly, so there's always something new I want to test out for myself. TL;DR I injured my wrists at uni and searched for a way to draw without injuring myself further haha.

You had a stroke??

Yeah! Back in May 2021 I had an ischemic stroke while I was swimming on my lunch break. The damage was on the left side of my brain, which mainly affects language. I had aphasia and I couldn't move my tongue/cheeks/jaw or make any noises before I was treated. I had noninvasive heart surgery to close my PFO (patent foramen ovale/hole in the heart that the clot slipped through), but it was unfortunately unsuccessful. I attended speech therapy for about 3 months, and occupational therapy for 6 months. I'm still recovering and I do homework every day, but I've been told my recovery so far has been "textbook" :) I'd love it if everyone refreshed themselves on the symptoms of stroke! Remember: F. A. S. T. F: Face (are facial features behaving as they should? e.g. can they puff out their cheeks? Can they smile? Can they stick our their tongue?) A: Arms (can they raise their arms evenly? (Other tests can include spreading fingers as wide as they can or lifting their toes/feet while keeping their heels on the ground)) S: Speech (can they speak clearly? Can they understand you and/or can they respond?) T: Time (call emergency services as soon as possible!

I read VELVET again recently. I like all the little tales of Orelion and the stag scattered throughout.

In my abstract blobby era

Meet Up • Move In • Make Out

This is the second part of a little series of kagehina comics I made between 2015 - 2017, about kagehina being older, sadder, and almost in love.

If you enjoyed reading, you can grab a PDF of all three comics from my shop over here, or buy a physical copy over here.