Beginnings are hard. Blank pages are hard. Blog posts, surprisingly, are harder to write than designing a webpage. Where to start without sounding like a complete pretentious prick? If you sat beside me, you may have seen a few stories, a birthday declaration, some old art...but I don't know that all those are particularly relevant for a hello. Introductions come first, stories later. So, as a small "get to know me", here are five of my favourite movies, five of my favourite books, and five of my favourite artists. The why's will come later--they typically do, with this sort of thing--but for now, a small lesson. I'm a stickler for old animated movies. Films like The Last Unicorn, The Hobbit, Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind, and Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland are all huge influences, and if any of these films are being shown, odds are I'll be dropping whatever homework I have in order to plop down and enjoy a piece of my childhood for the umpteenth time. Books like Coraline by Neil Gaiman, The Grimm's Book of Fairytales, and The Two Princesses of Bamarre by Gale Carson Levine are in much of the same category, though a few newer novels like The Boy Who Drew Monsters by Keith Donohue, and The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss have joined them. They may not be books from my childhood, but damn, if I had the time to re-read them, I would. In the artist category, we have the classic cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay, with his meticulous background detail and whimsical characters. In the more contemporary comic sense, artists Ming Doyle and Emma Ríos are wonderful in that their art is full of thick, expression-filled lines and bold color palettes. Doyle's work in The Kitchen shows her genius perfectly, while Ríos' true artistry is let loose in her series, Pretty Deadly. To really get into the more obscure comic sense, Glyn Dillon's work in The Nao of Brown, a graphic novel about a mixed race woman battling with her identity and mental illness, is to die for, while Nagabe's work in the supernatural/fantasy The Girl From the Other Side is, to be frank, humbling. I don't know that I could ever emulate any of these artists' works, but I hope that through training, one day my artwork and comics will be jumbled into groups with theirs. |
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