So…why “Stylus Monkey”?!

Behind every name, there has to be a good story right? Wrong! I chose this name because those pesky peo­ple who reg­is­ter ONE THOUSAND NAMES A DAY in the hope of sell­ing one of them off at some future point for a humon­gous profit had not already reg­is­tered Sty­lus Mon­key. There, end of story.

Just kid­ding =)

You know the old say­ings where you can “train a mon­key” to do some­thing? You can train a mon­key to bang on a type writer. You can train a mon­key to blow holes in walls. You can train a mon­key to do that job. You can train a mon­key to…DRAW!?

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The critic…

Are you try­ing to do some­thing new? Make some­thing of your­self? Travel a less beaten path? Are you not doing as well as you hoped and is some­one putting your efforts down?

You know what they are? A critic — some­one who most likely at some stage had a dream of their own who never had the will to pur­sue it, who blame it on every­thing but their own lack of heart, who live daily under the weight of regret.

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Frustration is a motherf*cker…

You’re try­ing to do some­thing well — cre­ate a killer piece of art, sing a tune, bal­ance your accounts, write an arti­cle (tee­hee!) and despite your most sin­cere efforts it is just not hap­pen­ing for you. You most likely feel the wrath of your inner demon scream­ing, want­ing to devour small ani­mals and you feel frustrated.

In my artis­tic career (rife with frus­tra­tions let me tell you!) when I was learn­ing per­spec­tive in illus­tra­tion, I mean learn­ing it prop­erly, not just the rudi­men­tary stuff — I’m talk­ing design­ing in three dimen­sions where so many things have to come together just per­fectly for you to pull off some­thing worth being proud of, I had a hard time. I dis­tinctly remem­ber what the cycle was like

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Making something look good…Part 2 (Links & Resources)

Alright, thanks for com­ing back, this is the sec­ond part of the a two part blog post, the first can be found here: Mak­ing Some­thing Look Good…Part 1

As promised, here is a list of var­i­ous skills and asso­ci­ated resources that have helped me to improve my art­work over the span of 4–5 years and will prob­a­bly do the same for you.

If you have any queries, addi­tions or just want to say hi, you’re encour­aged to hit up the com­ments sec­tion of this post. I also wrote this a while ago, so if there are errors, gram­mat­i­cal or oth­er­wise let me know and I’ll edit. Remember…caring, is sharing =)

& Resources)">Read more

Making something look good…Part 1

So…how do I make some­thing look ‘good’ in art?

I have been asked this so many times that if I had 5c for every time that ques­tion was raised I’d…actually, I’d prob­a­bly only have about 35c or some­thing, so I guess that point goes out the win­dow as a valid rea­son for me writ­ing this post.

Dif­fer­ent angle then…I know that as a young artist, it was a ques­tion that per­vaded my devel­op­ing mind every time I tried to illus­trate some­thing vaguely awe­some like Venom totally kick­ing Spiderman’s skinny-gaudy-leotard-laden butt.

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So…what is a concept artist?

“I am a con­cept artist for video games…” is the answer I gen­er­ally give when asked the oblig­a­tory “So what do you do for a liv­ing?” when I meet some­one for the first time.

Other times, I will answer “I am a ven­tril­o­quist in a trav­el­ing cir­cus who uses dead ani­mals instead of wooden pup­pets to put across cau­tion­ary tales about the evils of pre­scrip­tion drugs…” if I don’t really want to talk to someone.

Assum­ing I answered con­cept artist, their eye­brows usu­ally raise as if I just told them I ride to work on a uni­corn bare­back “Hey! That sounds kinda cool!” and “My kids would LOVE you!” are typ­i­cal responses which always make think “Do you think I get to play video games all day for work!?” We really don’t, but I tell them I do any­way just to per­pet­u­ate the fan­tasy for giggles.

So then the ques­tion arises, what DO we really do?

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Replace that negative nagging asshole in your head…

We all have an inner self, in fact, many of us have a fam­ily of inner selves and like a fam­ily you have all kinds of per­son­al­i­ties. Some are great and sup­port­ive, some would love to see you fail, some are nags, some are com­pletely obliv­i­ous to you at all! For a long time, I had a neg­a­tive inner self who presided over the rest and to whom I lis­tened to most, he wouldn’t yell, just a snide com­ment every now and then, at the right moments and my con­fi­dence would come tum­bling down. As an artist, whose cre­ative out­put is influ­enced in a big way by my men­tal sphere, I came to the con­clu­sion that this sim­ply would not be good in the long-run. What to do!?

Enter the the­ory of auto-suggestion, a sim­ple holis­tic tech­nique that can help put you at an even keel and keep that neg­a­tive self at bay

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The only famous artists…are DEAD! (Art Shenanigans)

I come from a very tra­di­tional Asian fam­ily, you know the type, full of accoun­tants, com­puter sci­ence types (cough! cough!), psy­chol­o­gists, lawyers and the like — respectable peo­ple with respectable jobs I guess. I sup­pose I was never one to fit that mould and I think even from an early age I knew I wanted to do some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent, trou­ble was I didn’t know what that some­thing was…despite it sit­ting in front of my damn eyes since I was a kid. So here goes a bunch of child­hood memories…

I loved draw­ing! Appar­ently I started when I was around 3 years old, that’s what my Ma tells me any­way. I drew on bits of scrap paper and those hotel paper pads they have in hotel rooms, which my dad made a habit of pil­fer­ing (amongst other things, such as hotel slip­pers, tow­els and the like). My first rec­ol­lec­tion was

DEAD! (Art Shenanigans)">Read more