Inspiration Sparks Flames

Inspiration: the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.

Every artist has their own form of inspiration, but none can compare to the heart of my inspiration God and everything He's created. A few years ago, roughly six years ago, I found this thing called a "moodboard" and what it was a grid to show off our inspiration at that current time. I do believe that inspiration just like art and time is constantly changing.

Now keep in mind that this is about 6 years old. At the end of high school, I had a friend teach me how to draw an anime style eye after he saw my notebook (binder), which had some of my Digimon drawings on it. This launched me into my art style. As you can see there's a few different anime/manga series here: Bleach, Naruto, FairyTail, and Getbackers. On top of that there's a few video game series that had their own anime and manga too: Digimon, Pokemon, and .Hack// well I've only played a few Digimon and Pokemon games, since these were big at the end of my childhood. Other things include color pencils, a Kimono (traditional Japanese dress), pink hair, the kanji for fire, a fox, and the icon for MS Paint (which was the first digital art program that I played around with).

    In my other blog FoxCat's Art Block, which was an assignment for my Painting class in college, I showed off my inspiration in the form of other artist. Most of these were the pros of the manga world, one pro of the anime world, and a few other artists. Now this is still 5 years old, so as you can gather my inspiration has still changed. Yet somethings remain: music, British stuff, Japanese stuff, and a handful of geeky things.

 Music: This inspiration has been around since I started my life as a Band Geek in 6th grade. I've always had a sense of enjoyment from it and I guess it just started to blossom. When I started to draw in college, music was my go to. I could just pop in my headphones and tune out the world. Now one wouldn't normally think that I listen to the music I do. As a quite person, you might go towards oldies (50's-early 70's) or pop music, but that's not always the case as I'm more of a rock person. My main go to music genres: Rock, Christian Rock, and some J-Rock/Pop. As for bands & musicians? Well, the Beatles is the top of the list, I got into them at the end of middle school and it's carried on through high school earning my nickname, or rather chat name, BeatleFan64. Others include but not limited to: Thousand Foot Krutch, Skillet, Flow, Maroon 5, Stereo Pony, Newsboys, Rolling Stones, Red, and Disciple.

 This is one of my music inspired pieces, it's a anime style drawing of the lyrics and idea of the song "Monster" by Skillet.

From my love of the Beatles came a love for the British culture. I still feel this inspires me as I created a Union Jack flag curtain for my old room. Likewise, my love for anime and manga gave me a love for the Japanese culture too. These two places have found a way onto the top of my bucket list of places to visit someday. Various things have come out into my art, including food in my challenge making humanized versions of various food and drinks. 

Geeky Stuff: Wow were do I start with my geekiness. Let's see you have anime, manga, cartoons, comics, video games, sci-fi stuff, etc. I would say the start of my art style really began with Digimon and Pokemon, as I stated in some of my other blogs I used to pull out my cards of both of these and start drawing. After college, I got involved in the anime club where I fell in love with various anime/manga series: Naruto, Getbackers, Bleach, FairyTail, Full Metal Alchemist, etc. This wasn't my first dive into anime or manga for that matter, I started watching anime with a few Saturday morning "cartoons" which I didn't know at first were anime and with Toonami on Cartoon Network. In my freshman year of high school, my best friend left on a month long trip to her home land. During this time I really needed to step out of my comfort zone, in order to find myself and some new friends, since I felt that I didn't really fit with my old friends from middle school. I spotted a fellow classmate sitting alone reading comic books, and now while I hadn't read any myself at that point I did have a small knowledge of some superheroes from watching cartoons with my oldest sister. So I joined him and we started talking and became friends. This friendship sparked a liking for comics, which didn't grow until I started dating my husband. Video games sparked inspiration in me when Pokemon came around, this really was the video game of my generation. As for sci-fi, my family has watched various shows that sparked life into my art with the strongest being Star Wars.

Now I started creating characters to role play with, and these helped me to create friendships. These characters show my top inspiration from my geeky things since I only created characters for things that I'm familiar enough with that I could place them into a storyline/alternate universe to the original canon story: Kimiko Haruno (Naruto), Kimiko Shizuka (Digimon), Kat Fullbuster (FairyTail), Hikari "Kari" Okami (Bleach), Pyro (Pokemon), Xenestra Zara (Star Wars), and BlackRose (my superhero character).

As you can see many things spark my creative flames. Till next time
-FoxCat ya later