For my art exploration, I decided to focus on my favorite artists, Rebecca Sugar and the duo Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dimartino. These three are behind a lot of the concept work that went into my two favorite shows, Steven Universe and Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Between the three, I felt like Sugar’s methodologies were the most outside of what I usually do. When she creates her works or concepts for the show, She tends to approach her art with a sense of freedom. She creates what she envisions and is not afraid of making bad art. She stated that she gets her best ideas from studying the world around her, which is evident in her series in which the hometown of the main characters and even some of the main characters themselves are based around real locations from her childhood and real people that she knew/knows. By watching the video where she flips through her sketchbook, she shared that she works through a LOT of trial and error and her work is created through a series of very loose lines. Lastly, Her main inspirations for her animated series were her home, her brother for whom the show is named and magical girl anime and its form of storytelling.

For the duo affectionately known a s Bryke in online communities, Bryan and Mike have methodologies based around the generation of ideas rather than the actual process of drawing. As people who studied a lot of film production in their college days, I felt like they had a lot of unique insight that could expand my artistic horizons. For their team, They found inspiration in the many films they watched, like Studio Ghibli’s  Princess Mononoke, a film that features heavy subject matter written for young and  old audiences and containing a plethora of fantasy action sequences as well as many kung fu films. In addition to their study of the real world, they were inspired by many different cultures from around the world, one of which became the inspiration for the first sketch of a character for their future cartoon series. They also stress the importance of collaboration with projects. Their most notable example of this is their use of martial arts consultants in their show to make sure that their action sequences were as authentic as they could be. To put it into their words, their big idea for the show was a bunch of smaller ideas stitched together in a way that was fitting for their story, which is encouraging in the idea that a bunch of my smaller ideas could potentially become something bigger.

As for the experimentation, I tries using Sugar’s methods of exploring body types in combination with the three artists suggestions of observing the world around me, so I decided to also incorporate sketches of some objects I had lying around me as a start. The items include my pouch for my handheld systems, my laptop, my pencil case, my drawing tablet, and a Hi-C juice box.