1. TRADITIONAL ART PWNS DIGITAL ART

But Digital Art looks better. *cries* I have never done digital art in my life, I don't have a Wacom tablet (though I would like one), and though I have a good version of Photoshop I use it more for cropping happy snaps and my traditional artwork than I do for anything else. I love Digital Art, I think it looks gorgeous, and I think in some cases certain types of digital art and certain textures can be executed far faster in a digital space than they can in a traditional. Oh I cry. But here's the thing, I don't want digital art on my walls, I want the blood, sweat and tears of Traditional Art. I am a traditional artist, and I love and respect those who are still masters in varying mediums in the arena. Digital art is like trashy pornography, it feels good to look at it, so you look at a lot of it. Traditional art is like sex, it just feels damned good.

2. STYLE vs. REALISM BITCHES

I like stylised linework and texture. I also really enjoy minimalism. The thing is, I think a great deal can be said and expressed in a few well placed lines and curves and colours, than in a super realistic piece that just basically looks like a photograph. I don't draw in a realistic manner, even though I can (though granted, it's a skill I can always improve upon), I don't want to draw in a realistic manner. My art is an expression of myself as a person, my spirit - not an expression of my ability to regurgitate the world around me picture perfect. So sometimes my anatomy will be off because I didn't use a reference and didn't care to, particularly with animals - this will be because I wanted to capture the essence of the animal itself, and not because I wanted to get that right claw 'just right.'

3. PIA'S SELF-TAUGHT SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS

I have not been formally trained as an artist and here's the kicker; I don't want to be. I am quite proud of my ability to pick up skills through a combination of observation, communication and interaction in an informal setting. This means that I will talk with artists about their art, and I will happily receive critiques and I will even look through art books and see how they do certain things, but at the end of the day I don't have a formal art degree and I don't really want one. I did get into the finest Visual Arts degree in Western Australia, I left after one month. So I guess I got a month of formal training... erm. I want my style to evolve freely, in an informal setting, a la life. This means that I may never be able to charge as much as a 'professional' (read: degree receiving) artist. I don't care.

4. HOW TO GET POPULAR IN HIGHSCHOOL

ALL my popularity in highschool - and by year 12 I had a fair bit of it - came entirely (and I mean ENTIRELY) from my aptitude in art. I spent 8 class hours a week doing art, and my lunchtimes in the art room, and eventually this evolved into a lot of people who didn't even do art coming into the artrooms to watch me work. It was a bit weird, especially when I wasn't really doing anything special. It sort of translated to: Nothing gets me down about my art. You can tell me that it's shit, and I don't care. I have had enough praise from enough corners that I actually can be strong in my own work now regardless of whether its selling or not. It also means that I don't feel insecure when I see the hundreds of other artists on DA who are better than me.

If you are great at art, it doesn't matter how many disorders you have, how crazy you are, how shit you are at Biology (*sigh*) or how many classes you cut - YOU WILL BE POPULAR. At least... in a public highschool in Western Australia you will be. ;)

5. PICASSO AND HIS CRAZYFACES

I like a lot of abstract art, in fact I love it. I don't want realistic pictures of animals when I move, but in fact canvases with lots of expressive gradients of colour on them preferrably in angles and squares. Yup. I am a big fan of Cubism, and will sometimes sketch in a Cubist style just 'because.' Abstract art influences what I do a great deal, primarily my sense of border and form. I am very happy to break up borders within a picture - particularly my pastel works - and I am also very happy to privilege stylised form over realistic form in order to express something like for example, abstract ideas.

6. IF YOU TALK TO GOD, YOU'RE SPIRITUAL. IF HE TALKS BACK, YOU'RE INSANE

I talk to animal spirits, I talk to gods, they talk back to me. I am PAGAN with a capital P (AGAN) and my artwork would be nothing without my faith in my spirituality and the gods and ancestors and animal spirits that I commune with. Yes I am a thumping loon who feels energy in the land and has had some Reiki attunements done. I am nothing without this craziness - and I will fully admit that it is a form of craziness. But it is beautiful, primitive, wild, joyous, dangerous and it encourages me to excel, it inspires me, and without it I would be dead. That's right. Dead.

7. IF YOU REPEAT IT 14434335438906 TIMES, IT WILL COME

I use a lot of repetition in my artwork. A LOT of repetition. This means pointillism, repeated spirals, cross-hatching, drawing little things over and over again in fineliner until I have to stop because my hand is cramping. I actually am always significantly surprised to realise that almost no one else works in the style I work in, and very few people do texture the way I do it. Either it means I'm very crap and should conform quickly (QUICKLY!) or it means that I just found something that works for me. But I've lost count of how many hours I've sunk into a totem picture. The A3 pictures of guides that I've done - for people like Riven Scythe - can take well over 10 hours of solid application before I even get to colouring. It drives me nuts, but the finished product is well worth it. It also means that my drafts tend to look shit when compared with the final, because all the texture and detail comes from the repetition placed later.

8. SOMEWHERE WE'LL FIND IT, THE RAINBOW CONNECTION

My sense of colour is whack. You can see signs of how crazy my sense of colour is in the Wandsuna series. There are conventions with art - I'm aware of things like complementary colours and sometimes you can even see that I have some awareness of conventional colour in some of my totem pictures. But my Wandsuna pictures... oh my god, the different stories of colour I use blow me away. And colours that don't even want to work together often get lumped side by side and are made to deal with it. The irony is that my favourite pictures tend to be those done in fixed palettes of only one or two colours. WTF?!?!

9. CHANCES ARE, I IDOLISE YOU

O RLY? YA RLY! NO WAI! The thing is, I watch quite a few people, and I love all of them, or I love all of their art I should say. Nothing inspires me quite as much as trekking through my Favourites gallery and seeing what has inspired them. It might be something dark, whimsical, minimalistic, or extremely realistic... but in that Favourites gallery is a whole lot of love. I also have quite a few artists on my LiveJournal list, and seeing their art is just... oh man it's wonderful to wake up to and fall asleep to.

10. I STILL CALL AUSTRALIA HOME

Oh my patriotism. Well I hate John Howard. But I LOVE Australian animals, and the land, and the legends, and of course the plants and the wildflowers. And my DA gallery is probably one of the few places on DeviantArt where you can find a Bandicoot, Bilby, Platypus, Tasmanian Tiger, Blue Fairy Wren, Black Swan and Quoll totem (among others, like the Antechinus) all at the same time.

:)