Hi! I’m Flynn, I’m all the way from the Seattle area in Washington state. Right now I just do art as a hobby. As a CS major it’s unlikely I’ll be able to do art as a part of my job, but I hope to continue making art for a long time. I particularly like drawing scenes from TV shows and movies that I really enjoy. I’ve been doing traditional art for a while now, I have sketchbooks dating back to when I was around 10-ish. I mostly drew from reference, things like Pokemon cards and whatever comics I was reading at the time. It’s a little embarrassing that my linework was so much cleaner back then compared to now 😅 I’d mostly do stuff in pencil, sometimes redoing the lineart in pen once I was done. Now, I mostly do digital art though I will occasionally do pieces in pen. Just starting with a rough sketch in pencil and jumping straight to shading in pen. For digital art, I usually use either Krita, Blender, or ToonSquid on the iPad for 2D animation. I do some 3D animations as well, I use Blender for that though I’ve also used Maya for another class before. I didn’t really like it as much as Blender but I’m chalking that up to me not being used to the interface and not being able to find some features that I usually use in Blender. I like to use Blender for 3D sculpts and procedural models. I tried using Nomad Sculpt for 3D sculpting because I wanted to be able to sculpt on my iPad but I couldn’t set references the way I wanted to and the UI really likes yellow as an accent colour and I just can’t see yellow things very well. For digital drawing and painting, I use either Krita with my old Wacom drawing tablet, or Procreate on my iPad.

I really want to get better at making 3D models and making textures. I usually make procedural textures in Blender, and then bake them if I need texture images so I don’t have a ton of experience in making them the normal way.

I’ve been using Unity to make games for a long time now, maybe 8 or 10 years now. Whenever I started learning C#. I’ve recently started making projects in Godot instead, I really like it. It’s missing a few features that Unity has that I sorely miss (live scene editing when playing the game in-editor is the main feature Godot lacks, along with some language features for their own programming language GDScript), but I’ve been enjoying it a lot more than Unity.

Probably the biggest game I’ve made so far is called Once Upon A ___. We were a team of two and I did all the programming side of things. It’s a narrative-focued puzzle-platformer. You can play it on Itch or on the IMGD game cabinet in Fuller.

I enjoy playing the piano, though I’ve unfortunately hadn’t had much time to do that recently. I mostly like playing songs from video games or TV shows I like. I also enjoy playing the guitar, I started learning on my own last summer because I wanted to learn how to play Safe And Sound by Taylor Swift, and I kind of just kept learning new pieces after that.

There’s so much media that I’m inspired by. The Spider-Verse movies of course, as well as Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, The LEGO Movie, Arcane, the Nimona movie, TRON: Legacy, and The Owl House.

There’s a huge emphasis on different universes in the Spider-Verse having their own style. With Miles’s world being a more classic comic book style, Gwen’s universe being a really beautiful watercolour style, and each of the spider-people having their own unique art style that hearkens back to their respective source materials.

And Arcane has an incredible attention to detail, with so much subtext being conveyed through the use of colour. The lighting in the show is incredible too. There’s so much strongly direction lighting. The characters have rimlighting in like half the scenes, the dramatic moments of the show almost always occurring in darker environments with just a single colour of ambient light. There’s so much nuance to the animation in Arcane too. So many character traits telegraphed through body language alone. It’s definitely my favourite show by far 😅

As for video games, there’s also so many to choose from. GRIS and Neva, Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Journey, Hades, Get to the Orange Door, ULTRAKILL (though that’s a little more derivative than most other games), Celeste, Spiritfarer, Neon White, Hi-Fi Rush, Katana ZERO, Portal 2, Night in the Woods, The Messenger, and Hollow Knight all have very unique art styles that I really enjoy.

Hi-Fi Rush is incredibly well stylised. Every frame looks like it’s out of a comic book panel and it’s great. Every single animation lines up with the beat of the soundtrack. The developers had to make a custom animation system that would slow down or speed up portions of the animations so that the impacts were always on-beat no matter when the animation was started. For example, sliding doors would open slightly slower or faster to line up with the beat.

Ori and the Blind Forest has such fluid animations and is really impressive. The sequel though switches to fully 3D animation and it looks even better in my opinion. Both games have a striking art direction that makes both games stand out among its peers.

And Hades is just super pretty. The use of pure black shadows with only a few colours per material in the character portraits combined with use of strong shape language results in a super pretty style that I really enjoy. Not to mention that it’s fully voice acted with so many different lines for every single character.

There are also a lot of web comics that I love the art style of. Nevermore, Of Swamp & Sea, and Nonesuch are 3 that I really like and have definitely tried to incorporate their art styles into some of my own works too.

Here’re a few things I’ve done!

And of course, Once Upon A ___ as well.