AMA Meme: artist edition

[aragarna]

Come on, let's play another round! (Snagged from kanarek13).

Ask me anything about creating art.
or videos.

Comments

[nieseryjna.livejournal.com]

Art! Where from you usually get ideas for your art? Is it very specific or just vague idea usually?

[aragarna.livejournal.com]

It depends. Sometimes I just see a particularly nice shot of Tim and I want to make *something* of it, so that I'd have an excuse to stare at it. Which is how I end up doing wallpapers generally.

But if I'm doing a cover art, it can be specific. And I actually like that. I like being given a "prompt" and then do art to illustrate it. Which is why, as an artist, I love doing the BB and the RBB.

And in between you have The Great Book of Little Neal, where sometimes I just find a cute pic and want to make it Peter and Little Neal, and other times where I have a specific idea "I want Little Neal dressed as a pumpkin for Halloween" and I look for good pics.

[kanarek13]

How about your most difficult project? One that has given you a lot of grief but then the end result was epic?

[aragarna.livejournal.com]

Wow that is a tough question! I had to go through all my fanart on LJ LOL...
I guess the most difficult project is The Great Book of Little Neal, because each photo presents its own challenges. And among all the pics I've done, 2 gave me particular grief, both on the left side of this page:
http://i.imgur.com/bv7fjaw.jpg

The top one, the original kid was too small, and crying, and his hair too clear, and freaking sunny... For some reason, I wasn't thinking about doing a head transplant for Little Neal.
There's also the bag, which I thought would be a funny addition (and more appropriate than the talkie), but of course there was no good pic of a bag with the right perspective...

And the bottom picture, well, you know about it, and how I struggled to find the right proportion and making a latino kid look more caucasian... *rolls eyes*
That one, I wouldn't say the resutl is epic, but it's okay, and the idea was just way too good to give up.
The upper one is one of my favorite of the whole series (might just be because Peter looks damn good...)

But interestingly as I was going through some old stuff, I was feeling more like "oh that one was a challenge, but I found something and I'm pretty proud of myself" So, I rarely think about it in term of grief, and more being proud that I managed to overcome the difficulty.

[kanarek13]

Oh, believe me, these came out great :D And LOL, yeah, finding a pic in the right perspective - THE grief of all photoshoppers, lol

[aragarna.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think the main grief rarely comes from actually doing the art itself but from finding the right pics.

[leesa_perrie]

What type of art is your favourite - wallpaper, icons, picspams, digital manips (like Little Neal), cover art etc? Or does it depend on various things, like your mood or the caps you've just come across?

[aragarna.livejournal.com]

Oh good question. I think the more fun are the digital manips and cover arts, because they're the more complex, and with potentially more elements to play with (like for a cover, you also need a title, how do you integrate it with the piece? etc...)

The Little Neal manips are particularly satisfying because I get to create images for things we don't have, and it makes it all more real. I'm (sort of) creating their future. (Ok, said like that it sounds terrible pretentious LOL).

[leesa_perrie]

Yes, they can be the most satisfying to make, though I tend to be more icon and wallpaper orientated at times, as they're easier to do and I find them relaxing :D

[aragarna.livejournal.com]

Oh yes definitely. And also necessary to make your journal/computer pretty. ;)

[pipilj.livejournal.com]

Does the song inspire you to make a fanvid?

[aragarna.livejournal.com]

Yes, in most cases, I hear a song, and I feel like it's fitting and would make a cool vid. And it definitely works best like that. It's easier to fit the video to the song than trying to find a song to fit your vid idea (though the fact S6 promo I did worked pretty well)

[sheenianni.livejournal.com]

When did you start making art and fanvids? Do you rememeber some of your first projects?

[aragarna.livejournal.com]

I started making art almost as soon as I got a computer. I kinda doodled with Paint when I first got hands on it (it was my grandfather's computer, somewhere around '98 I'd say)
Then, I think when we got our second computer, my brother downloaded Photoshop, and I started playing with it. Basically, since it was Windows XP, we could each have our own session, thus our own desktop backgrounds. So I started with very basic stuff. Cropping, rescaling, just to have an image I liked fit my screen.
There was also this first elaborated project we did with my brother, where we "fixed" a torn photo of George Clooney. God we were so proud. It must have been 2003-2004.
I think I posted it a while back, but in case you missed it, here is the original:
http://i.imgur.com/U3CvIeA.jpg
and the result (also cropped to fit my screen back then)
http://i.imgur.com/zx7Y0.jpg


How about you?
As for vids, I started when I moved to the Gabriel Byrne fandom, which was when I discovered In Treatment, so around 2009 probably. Funnily enough I did my first (bad) vid because I was trying to circumvent Youtube's copyright thingy, and I thought that if I, like, "summarized" the movie and kept only key scenes, it'll be okay. That didn't work, but I had tried my hands at editing.
Then I did a few real fanvids, based on different Gabriel Byrne movies. The vid on The Man in the Iron Mask was one of my biggest hits.
I also did a couple NCIS vids.
Apart for that first vid, all my vids are linked in the masterpost, old ones at the bottom:
http://aragarna.livejournal.com/43183.html
In case you'd want to see.

[sheenianni.livejournal.com]

I'm really quite new to this digital art thing. I doodled with Paint too, but that wasn't particularly satisfying, and I played around a bit with IrfanView, but that's pretty much good only for fixing photos and so.

So unless you count these, my first "art pieces" were my propts for this year's RBB - I made the initial "FBI Sara" propmt (later "The Boston Affair) in Paint, and the Inception prompt ("Extraction") in PowerPoint.

I'll have to check out those vids at some free moment :)

[sapphire2309]

What's your pre-arting thinking process like? Are you a planner or a pantser?

[aragarna.livejournal.com]

A bit of both I guess. I mean, it's hard to properly plan art. I usually think about it before starting, picturing it in my head. But it rarely goes as planned, does it?
I don't know. I don't think I consciously plan things much when I do art.

Fics and vids, yes. Art, not as much. Not sure *how* I could plan it, really.

[sapphire2309]

That's true. I've never tried to art, but of the few icons I've made, some of them have gone off track so beautifully, like this one.