Greetings and salutations. I am still currently painting Aphrael so I do not have anything to show yet. However, I did want to bring up something interesting that I had noticed while I was having a conversation with my younger brother this morning (yes, I have a younger brother, two in fact). This has to do with the evolution of my art style. You see, when I first started to draw back in the day (we are talking about the 90's here) I was heavily influenced by anime. I still am actually. I've been drawing since I was 8 years old and I started by drawing airplanes and my take on Garfield comic strips. However, my love for art truly started when I first saw the advertisements for a role playing game on the Mega CD (the Sega CD as it is known in the States) called Lunar. I was totally enraptured by the art style because it was so clean and beautiful and it was something I haven't seen before. I mean I have seen anime before like Robotech but there was something about Lunar and it's design that really spoke with me. I soon started to emulate the style in my drawings and this started to pave the way to my love of creating characters to populate my own worlds like the one in Lunar.
Now throughout the nineties, my style was very anime-like, but drawn more like pretty bad fan art. My dad pushed me to improve by giving me advice on shading and he even got me my first drawing book. I started to become obsessed with getting better but I could never seem to draw realistic looking characters, so I continued to draw anime-like characters that I enjoyed to make, all inspired by the anime and manga that I consumed. The majority of them were original characters of my own design, colored with only colored pencils. While I loved the works of artists such as Boris Vallejo, Frank Frazetta, Jim Burns and others, I was more interested in anime and it's potential as a base for my developing style. However, 1999 came and a single video game changed my interest.
Soul Edge was an arcade game that had a home console port called Soul Blade on the original Sony PlayStation. I played that game to death and enjoyed every minute of it, including the characters. Therefore, I was quite excited when a new entry to the series was announced and it was a launch title for the very awesome Sega Dreamcast. This was Soul Calibur and when I first saw the 3D renders for the characters, I was hooked. I knew that this is what I wanted to do; create my characters that look like the ones in Soul Calibur. Well, not literally but I wanted to make 3D versions of the characters I was always drawing. I was especially enraptured by the realism of the renders. These weren't 1996 Reboot computer graphics. This was the next wave in a new revolution of computer graphics. Ever since then, I have been striving to reach realism in my work even though I haven't gotten near that level until just recently (training at The Art Institute has helped).
This leads into my point: my brother asked me if I could still stay satisfied with the anime-like work that I had done in the past compared to my more recent work which is leagues better. He asked me this because we were debating about which style of art that we liked better: cartoony or hyper-realism. I was more into hyper-realism while he still liked the simpler but more expressive style of anime. I still like anime, but much of the modern stuff is more like mass produced anime than true classics like Vampire Hunter D or Record of Lodoss War. I still like some modern anime, but it is usually niche stuff like Elfen Leid or Mezzo Forte. I watched Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children but I only liked the CG, not the actual plot. Nowadays I almost don't watch anime at all. That doesn't mean I don't like it. I like some of the Tales series of games (my favorite is still Tales of Vesperia which in my opinion is still the pinnacle of the anime-style JRPG) and I am highly interested in Guilty Gear Xrd: Sign. What Arc System Works was able to get out of the Unreal Engine 3 is just simply amazing. I don't know if they realize this, but I think Arc System Works has really risen the bar when it comes to graphics for anime in any medium, be it television or video games.
At the same time though, I really love hyper-realism, especially in video games. I remember the blocky polygon models of Virtua Fighter and to see video games' graphical capability improve in the two decades since is just mind boggling. Games like Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Rise, and Heavy Rain set the bar for hyper-realism. Now we have game engines that simulate hyper-realism like the Crysis 3 engine. The environments that can be built is astonishing. However, at the same time, I've noticed that many western-designed games that go for a good amount of realism suffer from the same problem as many modern anime do: they seem forced, bland and mass produced. I think the term I am looking for is that they have no soul poured into them. Many of these characters or anime are a product of their marketing department and not of someone actually wanting to tell an awesome story with epic and memorable characters. Sometimes the story is memorable but the characters seem to be missing a spark of life to them. Maybe that's why I like Kim Hyung-tae's work so much because it is highly stylized full of heart.
In answer to my brother's question, I answered that I probably do not like my old style anymore. There are a few exceptions, but generally my past art looks bad to me and quite unprofessional. After thinking about this issue some more, I probably like my new style more because I like the direction my take on hyper-realism has gone. I think this is important because I want to add my anime influence into my version of hyper-realism, developing my style even further into something that is wholly unique. Not many hyper-realistic depictions of characters have style to them even though Final Fantasy and Metal Gear characters are some of the few exceptions. Maybe one day I can match Tetsuya Nomura's realistic but anime-influenced 3D characters. I don't ever plan on completely abandoning the anime style, but I want to take everything that I have ever learned from anime and other sources, including classical western art and its theories, and incorporate them into a unifying, beautiful harmony for my characters while still maintaining a fresh feel for these characters. I hope Aphrael will be the first of these new characters for my professional style. We will have to wait and see for the final result though so stay tuned.
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