@GloomFlower - @Aalasteir (Q) - Index
Q: What is it like living in the Finland? Do you feel happy? Fending off marauding bands of polar bears and Soviet invasions?
Hard to contrast, obviously. While I've visited other places, I've never stayed for that long. I suppose, at the very least the state here tries to take care of everyone, I'm at the bottom rung of society and can still get treatment for my numerous ailments. Over at US I'd be dead in a ditch.
Having all four seasons, including winter with heaps of snow for now - the climate change is working on that one, winters are shorter each year - has taught me level of cynicism about the white shit covering everything that seems to often shock folks living further south.
Q: How do you feel about this place? How do you discover and what made you create an account? (Newgrounds)
Newgrounds has been on the edges of my awareness for a long time, as the place with all those funky flash videos. I joined back when Tumblr banned boobs, as part of the artist exodus, but then they withdrew the boob ban and everyone was left feeling silly.
I'm incredibly bad at community interaction of any kind, I'm exactly the kind of artist in the Sarah Andersen strip about social media presence - which handily explains my lack of audience - so it always takes me completely off-guard when the staff here frontpages some of my art every now and then.
As for how exactly I feel about the place? Well, with my aforementioned lack of community interaction, my evaluation of art sites tends to start and end with the ease of posting and viewing art, and how violently it gets compressed, so there Newgrounds scores quite high. You get to high resolution file without having to jump through hoops, and the scrunched-up previews aren't terribly compressed.
Q: How do you feel being a self-taught "bottom feeder art whore"? How did you become self-taught? What does it take to learn to create art?
Undiagnosed ADHD through childhood, elementary school and the margins of school notebooks. I taught myself a marketable skill by pure accident and dumb luck. But because I never considered art to be anything special - I just doodled and eventually got decent at it - I had no ambitions regarding it, and never considered myself that good, me getting a few dozens, at best a few hundred clicks per piece doesn't really stress me out. I've seen how some folks freak out if they get only 1000 clicks, and that seems terribly stressful.
As for what it takes to learn? Fuck I don't know, I stumbled into this ass backwards, and have no useful advice. I've known a few people who were inspired to get into, got frustrated and stopped trying, and watching the process made me a bit sad. I guess, you need, like, find some sort of joy in the process of creation, and not be discouraged by your stuff looking like shit? Beyond that, I got no clue, I still have no idea what gesture drawings even are, and have only the broadest grasp of color theory.
Q: When did you become a Mercenary artist?
As I said before, I had no ambitions regarding art, and I studied to become an engineer instead. Then got employed below my education level, and spent a decade as a grunt electrician in a job I didn't care for, but it paid the bills, so fuck it.
When the company went under around 2018, I had no idea what to do with myself, and on a whim I just tossed out the question, if the perverts on the internet would like to pay money for my doodles. And to my shock, they did! So I've been banging on the commission grind ever since.
Vast majority of my output is commissioned work, I find very little time for personal art, which leads my portfolio to be kinda all over the place. I still of course put my own spin on whatever clients ask of me, and over last couple of years, I've taken more a practice of not publishing every single piece, to keep some kind of consistency going.
Q: Your art advice, and why do you feel people shouldn't do what you do? I see your art and I think you are skilled
I learned such horribly bad habits on my own. I watch real artists publishing their recorded timelapses, and it just looks like fucking black magic to me. I spend far longer on each piece than they should take, and often the more complex color pieces can end up with 100+ layers, with raw files sometimes exceeding 1 gig in file size.
Occasionally I try to noodle around to try different techniques, and while some of them end up being useful, for the most part I fall back to my rigid lineart, flat color, shading and highlight layers setup.
Q: Why do you feel you are too open with talking about your interests to the point where you get kicked out of Discord servers?
That's the autist brain talking. I tend to be shy and quiet to start off, but if I start talking, I have no idea where the line goes, and having no idea how to do small talk, it just quickly spirals into private topics.
Add to that, my parents were huge crystal-hugging hippies in my childhood, and sex and nudity aren't much of a taboo in Finland to begin with, so my upbringing tended to be very open about sexual topics. Of course growing up I caught on how hilariously twitchy most of western media is about any sexual matters, but as a response I ended up assuming this aggressively sex-positive attitude.
Combo that all together, and when my mouth starts spewing out words, it'll either end up with me going on about flight sims, or the time at the kink club they spliced needles into audio cables, plugged those into a mixer and created on the fly weird terror noise with this masturbating girl's nerve impulses, forgetting one of these topics might be considered not safe for work.
Q: What did you think about Discord?
It's another chat interface, another in a long, long line. I've watched these things rise and fall so often I've kinda lost count. Just kinda waiting for Discord to kick the bucket for one reason or another and another one to spring up, leading to another mass exodus and more communities dispersed.
All the while I'm still on in IRC with some of my buddies.
Q: How do you feel about social media?
It's weird. It's fucking weird, y'know? My take on this is very much "an old lady yells at cloud" kind of thing, but back in Internet 1.0 days, there were community sites, but they were communities gathered around for the love of something. Which, of course, were entirely capable of being toxic, gatekeeping asshole clusters, but even those were isolated.
With modern social media, the positives of the ease of reaching anyone, is countered by the harm of the ease of reaching anyone. I don't want to condemn it, for it gives voice to the voiceless, it has been a channel for social change, but then there's the ease of spreading misinformation, the loud gaggles of angry manchildren, and the general lack of media literacy. It's all a damned mess, and I just sit quietly in my corner, posting art every now and then.
Q: When should an artist do commissions?
Fuck I don't know, when you need to make rent? I am barely making ends meet, and almost feel like I've trapped myself in this grind, but at the very least it's a grind I like doing, even with the fiftieth Final Fantasy 14 character commission in a row.
I suppose I feel, if you're financially secure, have time and energy and passion to do art, there's really no reason to start dealing with weirdos insisting you to watch a 10-hour Bionicle lore recap so you can properly capture emotion on the funky lego men.
Q: Why do you feel you're interested in drawing cyberpunk and mechs?
It comes from interest in technical stuff all the way from childhood. I like figuring out how things work, and reflecting this in my art - to an extent. Of course there's essays you can write about how mechs would and wouldn't work, and the 80s cyberpunk horror aesthetic I'm so in love with isn't exactly realistic, but there's still more space your brain can tinker in before running into the accursed suspension of disbelief.
Q: How did you become interested in drawing women?
Stone cold lesbian. I absolutely love me some tiddies. The curve of the hip, the bow of the lip, the subtle topography of a toned stomach, I adore the female form. I feel many people don't really catch how horny much of my art is, because it tends to also be dark and broody, but just give me an excuse to draw a cute armpit and I'm a happy hippo!
Q: Have you experienced the commission landscape changing over the years?
Honestly, not that much. The change I more track is how much business I get, which has been gradually rising, and certainly hasn't gone down. The rise of the atrocious AI garbage hasn't affected my business, but it seems I have lost a sect of clients asking for generic dull shit you can get out one of those machines, and, really, good riddance. Heck, if anything, the average client has had more interesting wants after the AI image generation started to become a thing.
Q: Food and drinks you enjoy
I'm not much of a food person. Just give me a cold Coke and warm takeout pizza and it's a feast.
Q: What are pieces of Media you have enjoyed?
My all-time favorite things that keep sticking with me after decades would be 1995's Ghost in the Shell, System Shock 2, and Tsutomu Nihei's manga Blame. I keep devouring new stuff all the time, with fresh subjects of obsession coming and going. More recently stuff that has stuck with me would be Signalis, Nier Automata (that stupid horny stabby game actually helped me deal with old trauma, and subsequently 2B has become the totem of buried grief in my confused emotional pantheon), and the book series The Expanse - the TV show of which was okay, but with a severe case of The Book Was Better, So, So Much Better.
The connecting tissue thorough all of this seems to be, melancholic, somewhat philosophical approach to science fiction, with certain horror edge. Which, yeah, sounds like me. Also, lesbians.