Carmine Magazine

I'd like to illustrate children's books. I love borrowing them from the library to discover new illustrators. The way you can make a story your own by creating the images fascinates me.

Carmine Magazine: What drives you to create? Also, what inspires you and your work?
Jinx in the Sky with Diamonds: I’m not a person who talks much, but that doesn’t mean I don’t make my own thoughts about things. I’d rather say I think too much and often in strange, complicated ways, that words can’t express. So I have the need to paint to express my feelings and thoughts about life. Dreams are very inspiring to me. I have the ability to remember my dreams very detailed and if a dream is especially interesting I write it down in a dream diary that I keep beside my bed. I love reading it from time to time because it is so very surreal and otherworldly. Other sources of inspiration are: The underwater world (mostly because being under water triggers lucid dreaming for me when I’m asleep), mythology, music, fairytales…

CM: Were you formally trained in art or self taught? Do you think it has
helped you or hindered you?
JitSwD: For the most part I’m self taught but I studied art at school until graduation at age 19. It wasn’t all there is to know but it helped me enough to get interested in Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and many other great artists of the Surrealist movement, which I discovered to be my sort of direction.
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I am vengeance, I am the night, I am Batman!

To say that I am excited to see the next Batman movie brought to the big screen next Friday, here in the states anyway, is a bit of an understatement. The Batman franchise had a huge influence on me as a child and while it wasn’t my favorite cartoon based on a comic from the early 1990s (that prize goes to The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) it was definitely in second place. The movies from the 80s and 90s were also quite dear to my heart. Michael Keaton as Batman, Jack Nicholson as Joker, Danny DeVito as The Penguin, Michael Gough as Alfred and Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman? I really don’t understand why people are talking so much trash about the original movies at the moment.
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I wasted years of my life on a degree at school totally opposed to what it was I really wanted to do, and that’s definitely hindered my development as an artist.

Carmine Magazine: What drives you to create? Also, what inspires you and your work?
Julie Dillon: This really isn’t the sort of thing that’s easily summed up. I’ve always enjoyed creating things; I can’t think of a time when I didn’t. I don’t think there is anything special or unique about it, though, nor is it fueled by anything specific, it’s just what I do and who I am.

CM: Were you formally trained in art or self taught? Do you think it has helped you or hindered you?
JD: Both, to an extent. I tried self-teaching myself for a while, but I didn’t start making any real improvement until I began attending art school. I’ve found that I personally have a hard time getting my head around some artistic concepts and I’ve needed teachers to help me understand. I have a BA in Fine Arts from a really lousy school, and to make up for it I’m attending classes at a good art school on a very part-time basis while I work as a full-time freelancer. This has been working out well for me; I’m building up experience doing art orders for various clients, and when I find areas that I’m really struggling in, I attend a class here and there to help me polish it up. I know I’d be improving faster if I attended art school full-time, but I just can’t afford it, so I do what I can with what I have.
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There is something to be said about being in a creative environment surrounded by like-minded peers that is as instrumental to learning as formal training.

Carmine Magazine: What drives you to create? Also, what inspires you and your work?
Amanda Wong: The funny thing is that although other people consider me to be a creative person, for whatever reason, I never think of myself as one. I think a creative person is someone who is always generating ideas that are new or at least entertaining. Fortunately, the field that I am in - animation - is very commercially-oriented. *g* I am inspired by many things - Disney’s Nine Old Men, Hayao Miyazaki, Tim Burton, the people in my class, music that I like…

CM: Were you formally trained in art or self taught? Do you think it has helped you or hindered you?
AW: I am currently enrolled in a Commercial Animation program at Capilano College in Vancouver but I’ve been mostly self taught. Prior to taking this program, I actually completed a Business degree which has nothing to do with art at all. I felt that my abilities were hitting a ceiling from learning on my own and this - as well as a myriad of other reasons - was what drove me to go back to school. I think going to school for art has certainly helped me, although not always in ways that I expected: there is something to be said about being in a creative environment surrounded by like-minded peers that is as instrumental to learning as formal training.
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