Aurahack: Findng Yourself Through Art

How this artist battled discrimination and found her voice

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What's your background, and what are you working on?

My background is in illustration. I graduated from Dawson College from a program called Illustration and Design, which historically was meant to train us for editorial illustration, the kind of stuff you see in the New Yorker or NY Times. Fashion magazine illustrations, that kind of thing. Since a lot of those industries moved towards photography Montreal, the city Dawson is in, became a video game hotbed. So the program slowly started shifting towards that.

I got a job at a small indie studio formed by some ex-Ubisoft employees out of college and spent about 7-8 years working in small indie teams around the city, wearing a lot of art hats. The longest I spent was about 3 years on an RPG as Art Director but I also did pretty much everything besides the 3D. UI, concept art, marketing art, etc. I was also working on personal stuff in my spare time which led to a following on Twitter, and a Patreon launch soon after. I left in 2016 from the momentum that gave me and have been freelance since!

Right now, I'm still supporting that Patreon, alongside some other projects. I do album covers and key art for games and music, and have some projects for both those underway at the moment. I'm still trying to challenge myself and learn new things like Live2D/Cubism right now and thats been an experience haha.

What are the biggest challenges you've faced and obstacles you've overcome?

That's kind of two-fold, and honestly both are kind of eternal battles in a way that I wish they weren't. I came out as gay in 2016 and while my close family and friends were kind, understanding, and receptive to it, it's never stopped being an uphill battle trying to just... exist online or in real life. My art has always been a reflection of who I am and an overwhelming amount of people will try and divorce you from that. Separating the art from the artist in a way that lets them enjoy the 'visuals' of what I do while ignoring or outright hating the things that inspire me.

I know a lot of artists who just exist as semi-anonymous blank slates on social media because they just don't see the benefit in expressing who they are. Being honest with yourself is genuinely detrimental to your success, especially if you exist in the concept art world that is overwhelmingly male and center/right-leaning.

People 'come out' as gay or queer or trans because they've spent years, often decades, of their lives hiding their true identity. Having online spaces pressure you into doing that again with the way you express yourself can honestly make you want to quit.

I've seen it happen and it's heartbreaking. I've managed to build an audience that understands how I feel and encourages my voice so that protects me from the worst of it. It still hits me hard some days, the hardest is when I see it happen to smaller artists who are still figuring things out for themselves and trying to voice that.

The other challenges I've faced are probably the same ones everyone faces at some point in their lives. Stuff like burnout, art block, the thoughts of like, "do I really want to keep doing this for a living?". Regardless of how much you "make it" that stuff comes and goes in ways that are frustratingly inexplicable. It can be really hard to get yourself out of that when you spiral down.

Trying to have hobbies on the side helps and my wife has always been there to help talk me through things when she can. If you have really bad anxiety it can get to you and I think having friends that can talk you through how you're feeling is the best help you'll find.

What made you go freelance?

Kind of a perfect storm of things, honestly. I was pretty burnt-out with working on games full-time, I was having a lot of creative differences with my team on top of having little creative control over what I did, my Patreon was doing well enough to support myself financially, our game was just about finished and I had moved in with my girlfriend (now wife) who was working at Ubisoft at the time, giving us a bit of a financial safety net should the move to freelance not work out.

The stuff I was working on then was just so much more inspiring to me, even if it didn't work out in the long run and I needed to get a new job at some point, it felt like the right thing to do if I wanted to keep doing art for a living. Fortunately it really did work out, and the freedom of not having a director tell me what to do has let me explore some really new and interesting styles that have largely informed what I do today.

What motivated you to get started with your art?

Honestly, I'm not really sure there's a hard starting point. I've always doodled and stuff since I was a kid and from middle school through high school I was in art-focused classes but it involved a lot more weird arts-and-crafts stuff in a way that never really accomplished much.

I started drawing profoundly bad anime in my free time and when I got my first Intuos tablet in 2006 tried to do that digitally but wasn't great at it so I did a lot of web design stuff instead. It wasn't until college that I gave illustration an honest shot again and from there I really found the kind of art that inspired me and kept working on it. It's funny to say but I think doing forum sigs and website banners informed a lot more of what I do now than the bad drawings of Rukia from Bleach haha.

How have you gotten your art noticed?

This is a toughie to answer. It's been... a slow process? Like, YEARS. I don't know, this stuff is really hard to pin down and I get asked about it a lot when artists are looking for advice and the truth is that I just tried to be really active in the communities I was in but never with the goal of advertising myself. I was on deviantART for a long time and never made any meaningful imprint there. I started posting my work to the Giant Bomb forums when the site had launched back in 2008 but I did it because I wanted to share what I did with the friends I made there.

I got some very small work opportunities through there but the mark I made in that community lead to me being on some site features as a personality and that put me on the radar for a lot of people. That coincided with me getting started in the games industry, posting a lot of my personal art on Twitter... it all kind of snowballed. In 2016 I started doing a quick sketch every weekday and posted those on Twitter, which got me a lot of followers because people eventually had something they were waiting for every day.

That kind of coincided with the fall of CGSociety and the birth of ArtStation in its void and posting my daily drawings on AS got a good amount of traction, including some Staff Picks, until it kind of turned into this algorithm nightmare full of bad male-gazey art of women or AAA portfolio dumps. I think I got lucky on that one, I have no idea how anyone makes an impression there anymore given how skewed its systems are. I think the easiest way to sum it up is that I don't think there's an easy way to get noticed and I don't think a platform or service is your answer.

How I got noticed, in every time it was meaningful, happened because of the peers I met, the friends I made, and the people I truly cared for. Giant Bomb's community means the world to me. It's been my 'home' on the internet for a long time and the friends I made there I still see multiple times a year and thats always my favorite time of the year. I still talk to the friends I made in the games industry every day. I got married to one of them even! When they elevated my art, shared it or gave me the credibility to have my art noticed by others, it didn't happen because I engineered my way into those friendships.

I drew art and posted that art and worked very, very hard on bettering my art but I also made time to build friendships and relationships and my art always came second when I was doing that. None of it was ever a "reward" for building those friendships and if you see people as potential opportunities you'll never make an impact.

What are your goals for the future?

They're kind of all over the place right now. It's been really hard to have a focused work ethic in 2020 for a number of reasons. After a few years of pure freelancing I'm trying to focus on my personal projects a bit more. I've been doing a lot more NSFW stuff and just trying to learn new software and skills.

I have some things I'm working on right now that are months in the making and it's been really energizing to have those kinds of projects after years of mostly doing one-off illustrations every few days. I try to have my work follow whatever I'm feeling the most and right now balancing SFW/NSFW alongside bigger ideas/projects is what's really clicking with me so doing the best I can with that is my goal.

Whats your advice for artists that are just starting out?

The obvious one is probably just practice and never stop practicing. Even doodling every day without the explicit goal of learning is still practice. The less obvious one I think is... try your best to have a life outside of art. Find interests and hobbies that extend well past your usual interests. Photography, scale models, hiking, gardening, collecting vintage magazines, socializing with new people whatever, it all helps you grow as a person.

You can't just be laser focused on your art or the things that directly inspire it because you just end up recycling ideas. Everyone has something unique and different they can bring to art but you need to have a life for that to happen. Your best ideas will never come from a bunch of ArtStation bookmarks, they'll come from the things you experience around you and the things you're really passionate about.

Not long after I came out, I was working under an art director who took a really big role on a huge AAA game. On his last night in our office, he sat down with me and told me that by and large artists in the games industry are a dime-a-dozen. So many of them have the same interests and the same upbringing and never expand their sights beyond that. He immigrated from Malaysia and the world he's seen and the things he's been through are what informed his truly spectacular art. What he saw in me was the same thing he saw in himself, someone who's walked a different path in life.

The things we've been through change the lens through which we see the world and our art is a reflection of that lens. He said "There is no one else like you, nobody has experienced the exact things you have. I see it in your art and you putting that into your art means there is no art like yours". That's sat with me ever since. Who we are informs our art in its deepest sense and if you're just starting out the best advice I can give you is to practice practice practice and spend the rest of your time trying to become a more diverse, fuller person.

Where can we go to learn more about your art?

I post my art on Twitter and Instagram and post more curated/portfolio work on ArtStation. Twitter is where I'm most active, though, so that's probably the best place to follow me.

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