Sarah Meier

Robby Derrick S. Cham. 

Rob Cham. 

I don’t think I can really name just one person. I am not familiar enough with the world to know who could personify my artistic style. 

Source of inspiration would be a bunch of people. I think the Internet would be the main thing I get a lot of my inspiration from, as well as how I got to learn how to do what I do. I got to sort of figure out my style from being just exposed to all these great artists I’d find everyday from all around the world. I’d see something I like and try to ape it, make it my own and apply it to my own work albeit with a different sensibility. I always check blogs and other feeds to find new artists. The whole connectivity of the world just allows that access and each day I find a new artist to love. It’s important to expose yourself to all sorts of things, and just work from there. I think. 

A lot of artists I get inspiration from happen to also be comics artists. Asides from my own personal pieces, I’d make comics in my spare time. My comics are somewhat absurd, autobiographical in some strips, and sometimes just dumb. I got to sort of be exposed to making my own not from reading Spider-man or Superman, but through the alternative world of web comics. I would find comics like Achewood, Horribleville, Pictures for Sad Children, Dresden Codak, A Lesson is Learned, and the Perry Bible Fellowship. (Google those. They are wonderful ways to waste your time on the internet.) 

A thing I love about web comics is how young and fledgling artists can now get their work out to be seen all over whereas before all we could be exposed to was print and limited stock. With the whole web comic rise, I’ve been able to read different stories I could never imagine be seen in local newspapers here. The skewed humor and different art styles displayed on these sites are a huge influence on my own work besides the comics as seen with my characters and humor and word balloons I’d sneak in to larger pieces. 

I want to give people something to notice and smile about in the work I do, hidden Easter eggs here and there, and I try and make things people would be interested in looking at. I want people to look at my work longer than they should just noticing a lot of the smaller details I’d hide. I reference a lot of things I watch or read since I just like having those sorts of moments where people would see this character or line and know that we have this common interest. It’s a conversation starter. Another thing is I just want to have fun with it. “If I don’t like it, no one else will.” is how I see it. 

 If I treat something I love as just work, it gets a bit grating and I wouldn’t bother with it. I just try and figure out how to keep myself interested in it as well. I never make excuses not to work like needing to get high or what other people would use as excuses for why they couldn’t create stuff. I either feel it or don’t. If I don’t, I fix that feeling by just looking for inspiration or motivation through reading, browsing image sites, or just resting before tackling anything. I just avoid that whole tortured artist needing pain and misery, or that whole inebriated, intoxicated feeling, to do art. It’s forming a dependency on these things for creativity that just sort of feels wrong to me. Cut away the ties and rely on your own. Believe in yourself a bit. Everyone else probably won’t, or will, but they aren’t going to do what you want for you. I just sputtered a bunch of nonsense. I’m sorry. 

I want to make an animated series. I’d get a bunch of creative people and just work on something we love, tell stories about our characters, about ourselves, about everything through that medium and get to show it to the rest of the world. I always loved animation and just feel like if I had to accomplish one thing before I die is that I make a cartoon. It’s nothing big I suppose like curing diseases or say a large art installation utilizing the whole of Metro manila as the canvas, but I had all this obsession with art because of cartoons. It’s what started my whole journey into trying to learn to draw so I could just sort of tell stories to other people and kids who would maybe want to try getting into it as well instead of settling with being an accountant. No idea what the show would be about, what I do know is I want to make it that everyone can tell their own story in that world, and that any one of my friends could come in and pitch a story for us to make. That whole collective collaboration thing is what draws me towards animation as well. I think when people collaborate, you’d have people putting more into it, and animation and film are art forms that require that there be collaboration between people for it to be any good. Comics, sure, but animation is on a bigger scale.

Creativity is: problem solving.

The Filipino artist can: just be called an artist and avoid the politics.

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And here is what the kid can contribute!