Pure Imagination: Writing (blog posts)

I've always loved stories, and from a young age I had a cast of characters that I wrote about. Around age 8 I wanted to be able to show others what these characters looked like, so I began to learn how to draw. Fifteen years later, I've been lucky enough to have one book published at age 16, and I'm currently studying Commercial Art. I've got plans for several more books and webcomics, and ultimately I'd like to end up in the field of video games as a character designer. I still have many characters rattling around in my head, and they're all clamoring for their stories to be told.

This series of inked pictures were projects I did for school a year ago. They feature some of my favorite villains that I've created:

I've been inspired by many artists, including Hiromu Arakawa, Tracy J. Butler, and Shamine King.

The first of these, Hiromu Arakawa, is a Japanese Manga artist who wrote and drew my favorite Manga/Anime series, Fullmetal Alchemist.These next two pieces are hers:

I love how she depicts her characters, and her ability to tell a story both through word and picture is phenomenal.

the next artist, Tracy J. Butler, works at a video game studio in the midwest and is also the author/artist of a webcomic called Lackadaisy. I greatly admire how polished her style looks, and how she can so clearly get a character's personality across with how they look. Plus, she also has a lot of extremely helpful tutorials. These next three pieces are hers:

One of my favorite Lackadaisy "Extra" Comics

The last artist I mentioned is Shamine King, who is another art student studying at Lasalle College of the Arts. She is studying animation and character design, two things I'm really interested in. There's a certain quality about her work that I really admire. I love how fluid her characters' motions are, and how expressive their faces can be. It's a bit hard for me to find examples of her work, as her Deviantart Account is on hiatus. These next three pieces are all hers:

Example of Miss King's comics

So, after taking some time to look at which artists inspire me, I realized that they are artists who deal primarily with character design and storytelling. Also, all of them make comics. I'd never really considered comics that much before going to college, but now that I've dabbled in it, it seems like a perfect marriage between what I love to do most (Writing and drawing). Almost every bit of art I do has a story behind it.
Here is some more of my work, all of them either characters I've created for stories or for Pathfinder (a tabletop role-playing game similar to Dungeons and Dragons).