Introduction: 

“Well my name is Alex and I’m from the United States. I grew up in an apartment in the Suburbs with my mom, dad, and sister. I’m a graphic designer for a custom apparel business.”

Question 1: What was the first thing that drew you to art? And what movie/TV show made you want to make stuff like that

“The very first thing I can remember as a toddler was that my father drew our family on a little notepad. It wasn’t anything special, it was just stick figures! But I was just somehow entertained by the neatness of the lines and thought to myself I wanna do that too! So that’s when I started. But it wasn’t until high school that I wanted to turn it into a discipline and learn the techniques and theory. I can’t remember exactly, maybe it was Pokemon or Digimon, or maybe it was just anime in general that made me want to draw. Anime was exploding into the scene so my childhood was heavily influenced by it.”

Question 2: How does art impact your life? And how does art impact people’s lives?

“Well, it inspires me to create. As someone who does art for a living, I’m always looking to incorporate into my work what I consume. As for other people, who knows? That is kind of the beauty of it. Anybody can extract what they want from art.”

Question 3: What do you think of ideas? And how do you pick poses, colors, etc to incorporate these things into your art pieces? 

“My ideas usually revolve around my characters, any thought that comes into my head that involves them I try to draw. It could be anything like going to the gym, lounging in bed, eating food, etc. It’s like I want to give them lives of their own so I draw them doing these day-to-day things. From there, I can already imagine what pose they’re going to be depending on what activity I’m imagining. I do some thumbnailing to figure out the angle and composition of the scene. For colors, I think of where my focus is and use things like saturated vs unsaturated, warm vs cool, and dark vs light to establish a visual hierarchy. I try to keep those in mind.”

Question 4: How do you overcome art blocks?

“Art blocks can come from different sources such as stress, lack of inspiration, self-doubt, etc. So it depends if it’s stress, then that’s easy just take a break! I play some of my favorite games or go spend a day with some friends. I have a friend that likes to take walks in the woods so I’ll join him. These experiences can also double as inspiration! For things like self-doubt or if I’m just fatigued, I”ll do gesture/figure drawings. I don’t have to worry if they turn out bad cause no one is going to see them.”

Question 5: How do you develop your art skills? And how much work do you put into your art?

“Well, the first steps are to learn the basics like anatomy and perspective. I learned to get those down before color and lighting. I always try to do studies of the fundamentals or try to incorporate a little challenge involving them into my pieces. I also try to work on speed and execution. Some pieces take me a couple of hours to finish, some take several.”

Question 6: Mention a specific critique you have received about your work. And what have you learned from it?

“I used to draw hands and feet way too big. Now I always keep it in my mind to make sure they’re proportioned correctly.”