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siguneI'm doing my best to catch up on my flist and came across this meme a few times. So... Why not?
The problem with LJ: we all think we are so close, but really, we know nothing about each other. So ask me something you want to know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away. Then post this in your LJ and find out what people don't know about you.
The problem with LJ: we all think we are so close, but really, we know nothing about each other. So ask me something you want to know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away. Then post this in your LJ and find out what people don't know about you.
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no subject
Date: Sunday, 25 October 2009 08:54 pm (UTC)As a child, I had three great inspirations: Ancient Egypt, Robin Hood and the legends of the Round Table (and the Middle Ages in general) :D. The first time I drew a comic, I was twelve and had just seen Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, which I adored. The comic a Mary Sue (Robin of Locksley's cousin), a Gary Stu, the Count of Flanders, a dog named Ramses (who was a kind of Egyptian god in disguise) and Morgan le Fay as the villain. As you can see, it's not so much writers that inspired me - rather, it was history/legend and then all things I could connect to it, whether they were novels or films or comics.
I devoured comics as a child (and still do :P), and when I think back to the point where I started to draw more than, or differently from, my friends and classmates, I always used comics as examples.
The first comics artist I started to copy was Lucien De Gieter, whose series Papyrus (http://www.egypteinedite.be/papyrus01.htm) I adored. It was about Ancient Egypt (my favourite period in history when I was ten) and the early De Gieter characters had huge eyes and cute faces. In terms of layout and storytelling I based myself on my favourite series, Suske & Wiske (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_and_Suzy). Shortly after, I discovered Wendy Pini's Elfquest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfquest) which became a major influence (again, large eyes and cute faces :P).
Outside of comics, I taught myself to draw at the hand of a book of fairytales illustrated by Edmund Dulac (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Dulac) - a result of my father starting to buy me classic fairytale books and forbidding me to read comics until I'd finished the fairytales :P. I also had a facsimile of an old Dutch retelling of Mallory's Arthur, illustrated by Arthur Rackham (and in which all the pictures got attached to the wrong stories somehow XD). I can safely say that Rackham taught me how to texture trees *g*.