Hello, my dear friends and followers. I am back after a long hiatus from this platform. I missed you all so much and I can’t wait to share with you what I have been up to for the past year. I also want to give you a sneak peek of what I have in store for you in the future
You may remember that about a year ago I made a big decision to stop posting my art on most of the social media sites. I used to post very frequently, taking part in various challenges, and showing you a lot of my sketches and drafts. But I noticed that the social media landscape changed a lot, and my content was getting less and less exposure and engagement. It seemed like only a few people could see my work, and I felt like I was talking to a wall.
I understand that social media companies need to make money from selling ads and promoting content, but I think that this made the platforms such as Instagram very unfriendly for small creators like me. I didn’t want to pay for visibility, because I felt like that would compromise my artistic integrity and authenticity.
Another thing that bothered me a lot was the spam and fake accounts that were constantly harassing me. If you don’t know how it looks from the creator’s point of view, every time you post something remotely interesting, you will get a lot of scam messages from “potential buyers” and “art collectors” who are actually bots trying to trick you into paying them money. They usually use some shady platform to “send the secure payments”. To be honest, I don’t think they are very good at what they are doing and I have never fallen for their traps, but it was still very annoying and frustrating. Dealing with the bots on a daily basis killed the joy of real human interaction. And I started to respond more coldly and formally whenever someone reached out to ask about my art. I didn’t like that, because I love having long conversations about this topic, so I figured out that it would be better to avoid this entirely.
And then there is the main reason why I disappeared, which is – to focus. Last year, after countless experiments with my art style, I finally decided to bite the bullet and focus on creating a book, a wordless graphic novel to be exact. A story inspired by The Arrival by Shaun Tan, a very metaphorical, artistic experiment that could take you on a journey inside my head. So I started creating, and boy, I really went down the rabbit hole with this…
Story 1: Lost Control
Let me start with the first story, which is called Lost Control. This is a story that I had in my mind for a long time, and it is about the parent-child relationship, especially the issue of overprotective and controlling parents. I wanted to create a visual novel that would explore this theme in a creative way. So the idea was to introduce a character who is a creator, inspired by the myth of Pygmalion. In case you don’t know it, Pygmalion was a king and a sculptor who made an ivory statue of his ideal woman and fell in love with it. The goddess Venus brought the statue to life and named her Galatea.
In my story, this would be about a father-daughter relationship. The story is about a genius scientist who made a breakthrough discovery and created the first-of-a-kind, fully autonomous construct and loved her as a daughter. I don’t want to spoil too much, but I wanted to explore the complex world of human emotions and the power that parents have (or think they have) over their children. I made a lot of ‘work in progress’ art and only 15 pages so far, but I am very proud of them.
Story 2: Mind Maze
The second story is something based on a dream, or a series of dreams, I had when I was a kid. I was lost in a maze, but the corridors were quite spacious and the sun was shining through the open roof. The whole maze was filled with giant ancient-like sculptures of people in different stages of their life. I think the maze was some kind of metaphor or something, but maybe this is not the right time for the psychoanalysis of me from 20-something years ago ;)
Anyway, the story #2 is titled Mind Maze and it is very experimental, so I think it will be in progress for some time. So far I have got about 4 pages, but they are very detailed and colorful.
Story 3: Akai
And then there is the newest story, which is actually going quite well. But I have no idea why! It is titled AKAI – it means ‘red’【あかい】in Japanese. Why Japanese? I don’t know. The main character, Carmine, is a red-skinned, red-haired warrior and a demon huntress. Why red? No idea. I think I liked the idea of assigning certain colors to traits of character or something along those lines. Anyway, she is on the hunt for the shadow-like demons and during her lonely trip she will encounter many scary foes and a few allies.
So far I have finished about 28 pages and if everything goes well, I will publish the first chapter in the next two weeks.
On top of that, things were very busy and difficult on a personal level. I figured out that creating the stories and organizing my thoughts in a form like this would help me to finish stuff and maybe help you, dear reader, to understand my artistic process. Thank you for reading this post, I hope you enjoyed it and if you did, please come back again to track the progress of my works. All the best!
