Gideon has affected my work as much as Adam Wan and perhaps more. These are some shaded attempts at a few of his characters off one picture you'll recognize if you know his art. His shading is I'm sure the airbrush tool and a tablet, which I didn't quite follow with my pencil and paper interpretation here. I overdid the foreshortening on the fingers of the hunched over boy, but beyond that, I like what I see. I am growing both frustrated and intrigued with what I see when it comes to facial expression--by imitating another's art, it is virtually impossible to capture the expression that I want. Though it seems to me as an observer that the artists that draw these images capture precisely and accurately what they want the character to see, I have to wonder if they have similar troubles at times.

The sketch in the upper right of this scan, I did in about four minutes counting the shading. This troubles me as much as it pleases me, because I'm not sure where to go from here, precisely. Finding my own style is difficult because I feel a specific mood for a given picture that I want to go for, and its expression is largely irrelevant. I've determined that an artists' 'style' is merely the set of tools that make pictures of the mood they like most rapidly, which makes sense if you think about it. Gideon's works, like these, convey an assortment of images that represent individual, stylized moments one might find in one's memory and suggest a story. Adam's present a sensation cleanly and simply, in an almost cartoonish way, though I hate that word. Arphalia is another whose pen-and-ink work suggests his style so simply that it almost seems to limit his expression.

I frequently wonder if anybody reads these rantings at all, and if anybody has suggestions, they're welcome. I do progressively set my sights higher as I look at art more critically, and I can only describe Zen's more recent artwork as perfection. 'Experiment #2573' is beyond words. I cannot comprehend what it must be like to be able to create such a work as that. I see small things 'wrong' with work like Gideon's and even Adam Wan's, such as the position of lips or the flatness of his disturbingly large sheaths, but the longer I scrutinize Zen's pieces, the less I can say about them other than that they are perfect. Lighting, depth of field, perspective, and even the character's expression seem to have flown forth from the hand of a god creating a living, breathing being, rather than a mortal's expressions on paper.

This piece had some debris on the scanner when I scanned it, so the smudge tool helped me in getting rid of the marks but keeping the consistency of the paper.

~Treth