The first piece of art i ever made was a drawing of my dad. It didn’t particularly look like my dad and was not wearing any piece of clothing my father ever owned. To describe it more accurately, it was a crayon drawing of a man with brown hair only on top of his head, a red bow tie, and a tuxedo. It was not anything to write home about, but at the tender age of three years old, I was so proud.

From that age, my tastes in art began to develop, and my influences shaped my art style heavily. A year earlier than I began my artistic journey, I began a journey toward my true passion; video games. I was playing The Legend of Zelda, Mario 64, and Castlevania: Dracula X when I was two years old.  Soon thereafter, my siblings showed me the show Dragonball Z and I was hooked. I sought out any and all forms of anime from that point and developed my artistic voice and find more of the things that influenced me.

Through my adolescence and high school, I continued to develop in a similar fashion. More anime and more video games streamed through my life faster than anyone could count. My parents viewed it as a problem but I viewed it as a solution to my own problem. These silly medias began to be less of a casual hobby and transitioned to more of an emotional reprieve. Then, something during high school clicked in me. These emotional journeys I was feeling through video games and anime could be something I create. I could create my own emotional reprieve. Since then I’ve been trying to make my art be something I could communicate emotionally through. The characters I make are largely very personal, even to the point of being aspects of myself personified.

Character art is one of my most passionate points of creation. Creating a story, leading an emotional journey, creating actions and reactions, all those things became the most effective way for me to communicate my meanings and understandings to someone else. Working traditionally was all well and good, but once I began working in digital everything felt so much more important. Through the early days of working with a stolen copy of Photoshop CS2 to now working with the Creative Cloud, Maya,  and Medibang Paint pro, my skills have developed in quite a steady incline.

Much of the work I do begins as a sketch with pencil and paper. From then, depending on my intention of the piece, I will try to recreate the character or idea in a drawing program. If i’m looking to draw a character sheet or a scene I’ll usually do a simple drawing with simple cell shading. From then, when I feel I have achieved a sizable handle on the idea, I will move it to the program I intend to finish the project in. Most of the time I will use Medibang Paint pro to do the sketch and painting, then move to Photoshop to work with color, levels, contrast, and any filters i might want to add.

While I don’t believe I have a distinguishable style, I have received testimonials to the contrary. I have always wanted my own style, so I hope them to be true. I’ve always found it very easy to adopt someone else’s style and play around in it, and through that I’ve hoped to take pieces from everyone else’s style and form it into an amalgamation I can call my own style. The themes I tend to work in, however, usually follow a similar vein. Since my work comes from an emotional place, it is usually art of emotion. Much of the time, my stories and characters have terrible or heartbreaking things happen to them, and I try to capture that feeling or even those moments in my art. My ideal is that if I can make someone feel something, I have succeeded as an artist.

My biggest influence as an artist comes from the visuals of the artist Ayami Kojima. She has worked as a concept and character artist on many video games and her style is superlative. Her most famous works come from the Castlevania series, a series I have always held close to my heart. Her work on this series greatly shapes the aesthetic and feeling the series gives off.

These pieces always give me a nostalgia for a time long past, a time I have never experienced in my lifetime. There is a feeling of unease, a very tangible sense of uncomfortableness  that comes from the macabre nature of much of her art. But that unease is immediately combated by the sheer beauty of the figures and lighting of her art. The lighting in particular is very evocative of Baroque artists such as Rembrandt or Caravaggio. This weird, standing on the edge feeling of her art is something that I find very unique and hard to replicate. Not many things give me the same sort of butterfly feeling that i get from the elegance and horror of her art. Not much information is known about Kojima other than her work. She is seemingly reclusive or very private, to the point of her birthday not being publicly known. She has no art collections or bodies of work showcased in anything other than the video games she has worked on. These factors work to form a kind ethereal feeling around her work. Kojima  is still working today and I look forward to see her every new work and watch as her style develops.