I have loved Japanese culture ever since I was a child, and I take an interest in most things to do with the country. I love silent movies, the jazz age and the art deco & art nouveau movements. I mostly draw fanart, which is slang for “franchise art” – drawings of fictional characters. When I render my artworks, art deco will inspire me much of the time. Some pieces in my gallery are original character designs, most of which are for a client to use. Occasionally I will draw a character design as a vanity project. If you are my client and you have no preconceived ideas about your characters’ appearance or you lack confidence to go it alone, I can step in and give you serving suggestions.
My art style gives the impression of still-shots captured from animation. The linework is refined, connected and clean; the colouring is stencilled and blocky, as I aim to segregate light and shade into pure shapes. People have told me that I have a knack for choosing harmonious colour palettes. I like punchy colours like coral pink and CMYK, but I’m also pretty good at assembling a relaxing muted palette, so I can do both ends of the spectrum in terms of saturation. When it comes to special effects and colour theory, I have learned how to create chromatic aberration as an effect, and colour constancy as a palette. (If you’re curious about what either of those terms mean, I think you should look it up because it’s interesting stuff!) My artwork is a separate entity from real life’s visual medium. I find solid colours to be exciting – where in nature can you find a flat, unadulterated colour? The sky’s the limit unfortunately: a blue sky, a starry blanket or a pink-orange gradient. When I work digitally, I can play hoop and stick with a colour wheel. My love of flat colour comes from multiple sources. The main influences are cell-shading in animation, as seen in Hayao Miyazaki’s films; and MinaLima, the design studio behind the graphic props in the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts films. My attraction to MinaLima probably has its roots in my love for textiles and patterns. The repetition of graphic elements in my work could just as easily have been a textile. As a kid, I was stencilling outfits onto paper dolls from colourfully patterned sheets of paper and this eventually led to me graduating from Clothing Production with a Certificate lll in 2017. If your character is fashion-conscious, you can be rest assured that I know the ins and outs of button holes and yokes.