I'm Not Alone!

I'm not alone!

i used to be so good at writing strong, thoroughly-researched, thoroughly-edited essays.

as a kid in hs, my teacher literally came up to me, holding my 40 page essay on the intersection of the European witch hunts and capitalism/exploitation/gender roles (it was supposed to be 7 pages...whoops) and went like "this is literally a master's-degree level thesis. what are you doing?? you could literally use this as your final dissertation in a master's program, what the fuck."

NOW??? NOW?? you'd think I'd be oh so skilled. but alas. i can barely piece together two ideas. adhd skill-regression is so so real. im SOBBING

I don't need to say anything

Beautiful, and thank you so much for taking the time to explain! Now, I have more references to look at and study. I have loved dark fantasy ever since I laid my eyes on it at a very early age. I was watching vampire hunter D and playing castlevania lol.

What/who, were your inspiration(s) that contributed to your art style? Any advice or techniques that you learned to help implement them to your art?

I've been searching for dark fantasy artists that have somewhat the same type of drawing style. I'm heavily inspired and would love to learn how to make my art have the same feeling to it.

Difficult question but I'll do my best to answer it as coherently as possible! First of all - massive inspiration for me is 80s and 90s fantasy, folklore, video games, music, the usual. I always jokingly said that my art style is the result of a person who has been sat in front of Diablo 2 at a way too young age but the game is still one of my biggest inspirations in art. Especially as time goes on I massively prefer those old school late 90s, early 00s graphics over any remaster. Beyond that, campy and colourful 80s fantasy in the vein of Ridley Scott's movie Legend is much more appealing to me than the next gritty and eternally grey HBO series. I'm also a big fan of Sergei Parajanov and his movies tho. As it stands with dark fantasy, I truly believe that while it's also often a core feature of it, it as a genre is not ultimately defined by gore, blood and mature topics, but rather a raw and unfiltered experienced that is not supposed to be palateable to a broad and corporate audience. In my experience, people writing and designing dark fantasy things for the market create the most shallow and boring content filtered through 50 layers of "what is cool and badass" instead of "what is unique and feels honest". This one goes more for writing but writing and drawing goes hand in hand for me - starting in the 2010s I feel like there's a belief that a story can only be mature if people say fuck often enough and if the setting is as grim and hopeless as possible, ultimately resulting in dishonest and shallow writing. You can see it in many things, such as Netflix' Castlevania, which carries over nothing of the games awkwardness that resonated more with me than any cool one-liner. When it comes to designs, give me Blasphemous' Altasgracias, a three-faced bearded and naked woman, over any badass Artstation dude bro design. I massively adore quirky and goofy aspects in darker settings. It took me very long to be interested in Dark Souls because I thought it's just going to be another throwaway epic fantasy game, as this is what people tried to get me into, until a friend told me about dumb stuff like Frampt dangling from the ceiling and Big Hat Logan, which clicked with me more than Cool Badass Boss Fight With Orchestra Number 24. I don't think I can help you much with techniques. I draw massively on intuition alone and describing why I do what I do is difficult. I can give you basic art advice in the vein of composition, lighting, yadayada, but why my style looks the way it does... dunno, I sieved it out of the dirt, then cooked it with all my interests until everything evaporated and this was left at the bottom of the pot. As for the music side of inspiration, I mostly listen to Black Metal, Neo-Folk and Trip Hop. Bands like Bethlehem, Kinit Her, Dead Can Dance, E-L-R, Portishead, Ulaan Passerine, Rope Sect are always on.

This post got long. Have some pictures under a read more, and thank you for the interest and the ask!

Diablo 2

Blasphemous

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors \ Тіні забутих предків by Sergei Parajanov

The Colour of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov

Album cover of Storm of Radiance - Kinit Her

I wanted to add more detail and a whole bunch more gems and hair pieces, but the adhd kicked in lol

I can hear cod zombies sometimes

Helping