ScarabDynasty1

   It's Scarab, on Tumblr. 

So I have a kind-of-maybe Follow Up to my "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Fanart" post a while back!

An old deviantart friend got in contact with me with some positive words of agreement, so I wanted to give a shout out to them, their friend, and the great looking Undertale story they have begun creating. I'm really glad that you got something out of my post, Feles, and that things are better for you.  

Onto business: Feles is starting an Undertale Fan Comic co-project with their friend . I intended to recc it once it started proper, but you know what? Life is too short for wait. So, anybody who loves the videogame Undertale and would like to read a comic based on it, you can check it out over of Dea's account right here.  

By Feles Alata and Dea-Chaos

IN OTHER NEWS I have been reading back over the comments people left on the Love Fanart entry. Thanks so much, guys, it's incredible to see everyone engaging with something I wrote in such a way, you all seem to have had similar experiences to me. Here is some of my favourite and interesting feedback from my fellow Deviants, all of whom you should check out because they do some rad stuff, both writing and drawing. (For real, some of these I kind of want adapted to put on a T-Shirt. Especially the first sentence of Star's comment "LOVE FANART: HATE SNOBBERY 2016" - what do you think, Star?)

Anyway, here are some generally good quotes and their sources:

 "Snobbery is a form of torture for everyone involved. It's anti-fun, anti-happy, and anti-creativity. It's why I couldn't read books for 3 years after the end of college. It's why I resisted writing fanfiction for even longer. It's why I've found it difficult to start drawing again. And guess what? Who fucking cares? Who cares if it doesn't earn you money or fame or whatever? Most shit won't. Your life is so stinking short. Why don't you do the stuff that makes you happy?" - StarDragonBlue

 

No matter how many uptight artists out there want only originality in the art world and then some, fanart is...kinda just ingrained within it. Even all the Renaissance artists of old were inspired by the great artists before their time, and that's the key word here - "Inspired." There's nothing wrong with looking at an original work and making a different spin on it.  - Cocho

 

"People don't really know how hard that can be to not get caught up in the fluff and just do it cause you love it." - sithwolf

 

It's important to be doing something because you love doing it, and not worrying about all the rights and wrongs and whatevers because then you just end up hating what you're doing. - Hyperpsychomaniac.

 

I also have a Sumerian electrum hedgehog for you. - Cennoreth02963 (You know me, darling <3)

 (Ouch)

Today I have a very important story to tell you guys about Drawing Fanart and Why We Do It, and this is quite a personal post for me so I apologise in advance if anything biased or overly self-indulgent comes out. I hope, though, that I can help assuage some peoples fears a little bit about the work they do.

Well, why I do it, at any rate. Because something I've realised lately is how individual each person's enjoyment of art is. Possibly get yourselves a cup of tea before you settle, because this is a long one.

I enjoy art. You can probably tell that by now. I always have. I enjoy certain styles more than others, and I have my favourite artists. Growing up I was a fan of anything by Eric Carle (of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" fame). I loved his colours and designs. My dad got pretty sick of reading me the four different books of his I had, and when I was in college, a lot of my work was heavily inspired by that kind of brightly coloured collage-like art. I loved anything by Van Gogh. Monet was enthralling.   

                                                               

                                                  Check out how cute those lil' guys are! You go, Mr Carle! (Above) My older stuff (Below). 

                                                                                 

And then came the fanart era. Where my interest was in drawing, primarily, fanart. I enjoyed drawing characters I loved. I'd draw stills from Sonic X episodes and fan comics based on Ace Lightning. Fanfiction about Digimon and drawings of various hypothetical future Digivolutions. I wanted to continue the experience of shows I loved in my own work.

This is where the problem really started for me. Because as I was engaging in my fanart at home, I was also being taught by various tutors throughout my college days, to think of this as taboo.  

I know most of these teachers had my best interests at heart, and I'm not saying all their advice wasn't beneficial. Obviously, it's imperative that we learn realism and then develop our "own style" gradually. I cannot emphasise enough how important it is to learn such things: anatomy, perspective, action lines, real life environments, figure drawing (it's just naked people, guys, stop making like it's weird), composition, colour theory etc. We need to know the rules before we can break them. That's just common sense, and I have absolutely no  bitterness for the tutors who taught me this.

But at the same time, in my head, was bred a sullen dislike for people who were so "uncreative" as to base all their art on the works of others- for people whose entire galleries consisted of nothing but fanart after fanart (I apologise to those people in retrospect for this gross generalisation and unfairness). That dislike of course, extended to myself and to my own work, which I was gradually growing to hate. 

                           
                       Cerebro-Bullet's Yogscast Art: IDTTID and The Queen, 2015

I became absolutely convinced that my way of drawing was somehow wrong. That my art would never be considered "good" unless I stepped away from other peoples canon and created my own. Unless I created designs which were utterly apart from anyone else's. That's what I had been told -that I had to find my own sources of creativity and my own means. So that's what I tried ruthlessly to do. I was only allowed to draw inspiration from other artistic sources in the most basic sense, and I absolutely 200% was not allowed to do Fanart. At all. I won't lie, this entire process taught me one or two valuable things about art.

But for the most part? It made me utterly miserable.

I wasn't enjoying Art anymore. I wasn't able to come up with new, creative ideas. I wasn't able to invest in my own creativity or my own creations. I would stare at blank pieces of paper for hours trying desperately to come up with something new when all I really wanted to draw was Lady Illusion, from Ace Lightning, or Sonic or Star Trek.

I was upset, I was depressed, I still loved all those old artists that I had adored before, but I felt utterly disconnected from the things that drew me to art in the first place. My work too, suffered for this. I still drew fanart, obviously, I couldn't resist. But after doing so I was always left with a sense of guilt - the feeling that I should have been spending my time on better things.

I don't think I came up with a single idea I can be proud of in the entire

time I was at college. Decent artwork and developing skills? Sure, but for the most part I was just sad.

Sadness is a feeling I am well acquainted to. It's followed me all my life. But I had never been so sad about my art before. It's honestly terrifying, now that I look back.

I started to distance myself from this feeling as I got older, and went to Uni to study animation and design. But even there I was still haunted by these personal warnings I'd placed in my own head: no fanart. Be original. This attitude was not particularly helped by a few of my classmates, whom would dismiss (not unkindly... usually, anyway) even the slightest hint of fannishness or "other artist's style" in the work of their fellow students. I remember a talented artist in the years above me, whose work was almost entirely done in the style of traditional 2D Disney mixed with classic mythology, and how she was always put down because of it. You'd think a class of people studying animation would know better but we didn't. I didn't.

All this continued to reinforce my ideas: copying other artists, even in style, is terrible,  fanartists are uncreative. Fanfiction writers (of which I once numbered among) are the worst of all possible worlds (sorry guys). I could not fully escape my love of fiction, doing my first year writing exam on the study of anime (something we were also advised against), but apart from that, I don't think I created a single thing I was proud of in all that time at Uni. My first year film still fills me with embarrassment. My work was badly designed, uninspired. It's a very good job I'm so capable at writing, since my Thesis really saved my overall class scores. 

     
                   
            Lord of Irony's LOL Fanart, Annie, 2014

I continued to be miserable. I was dealing with Clinical Depression -something I really don't want to go into here- and, like with many people, it was greatly emphasised in a University environment. It made my social and personal life extremely tough, both for me and those few I considered friends. I don't think my attitude towards Art at the time caused my Depression, that has a lot of extraneous factors I'm not in control of, but it sure as hell didn't help me that I had lost a thing that helped me cope with a difficult adolescence. 

You might be wondering how all this actually ties in to my utter refusal to touch Fanart for years. Well, I'm about to tell you.

In the first year of my Masters Degree, while I was having a bit of a self-pitying mope in the study room, I came across something online that showed me just how wrong I had been.

It was called The Wall Will Fall. An Alternative Reality game on a forum and YouTube account, which I engaged with between roughly August and December, 2012. To explain the whole thing here would take more time than I have, so I'll just link you to this, and give you a basic explanation: An Alternate Reality Game, or ARG, is a community-based puzzle-environment that sets the "players" tasks to solve together in order to reach a goal. Usually that goal is the completion of a story which cannot be figured out alone. (For more information on ARG's you can read the late David Szulborski's "This Is Not A Game").

Overall, it was a writing exercise, so you're probably still wondering how it was relevant. Patience, grasshopper. I'm getting there.

The ARG consisted of two primary stages. The first stage, introduced to us via a YouTube channel belonging to a student named Average Joe, was the players using the information they had -in the form of videos, blogs, and comics, to solve puzzles and progress the story. In this process a small community was formed. We uncovered a conspiracy -that the Fourth Wall, boundary between fiction and the world of reality, was physically breaking down, and releasing fictional characters into our world (fun fact: Cinderella is utterly unable to hang onto her shoes, regardless of which dimension she is currently inhabiting). Throughout the course of the ARG we met countless examples of people from fictional universes: Sherlock Holmes, Don Quixote, Morgan le Fey, Long John Silver, Romeo and Juliet... These characters interacted with us through blogs and videos and seemed, for all intents and purposes, like real people (except when Juliet decided to wash her computer in a bowl of water... that was weird). Our task, it seemed, was to return these people to the world from which they belonged, and repair the damage done to the Wall.

And the second stage of this ARG? The means by which we would accomplish that final goal?

Was writing Fanfiction.

To be specific: it was through writing fanfiction inspired by various tropes that we were able to send the characters from fiction back beyond the wall, before the whole thing collapsed, and subsequently destroyed our reality as well as all of theirs. We were in essence, required to write Fanfiction of those characters. The idea was that one work of fiction would be chosen which would have a strong enough narrative to send the characters home, as it were.
    
                                                                                                                     
                                                                                                                        FNAF Fanart by Cocho, 2015 

I remember the reaction this caused early on. I, like a couple of other players, were initially sceptical. I recall one of our number confessing to me much later that had the story not been so engaging so far, the introduction of fanfiction as a requirement, would have made them balk. I couldn't deny, I felt the same, mostly because I was afraid: afraid that writing fanfiction, just like creating fanart, was the same taboo I had been warned off all those years before. Other players had no such problem and were immediately eager to write as many fanfiction as was considered acceptable - and then some.

Hey, it wasn't like we were infringing on anyone's copyright, right? The characters used by the ARG Puppetmasters were chosen carefully, and obviously all were public domain by this point.  And hey, it was the only way to progress the story.

So I sucked it up. I pulled myself out of my funk (which at htis point was at times... bordering on dangerous) for long enough to open a word document, and I wrote.

For the first time in years, creativity felt right again.

We all loved this stage, it's safe to say. Even people who didn't usually write were engaged. It brought us all together in a way no other stage had. We figured out the necessary tropes together, created increasingly elaborate works of fiction. I remember the moral battle we had to give Frankenstein's Monster (known to us by then as an aspiring writer named Adam) the happiest possible fiction we could give him, rather than sending him back into hell. I remember the winning poem for Sweeny Todd, reuniting him with his beloved Lucy. I remember the piece for Don Quixote (whom the entire team loved) driving us to literal tears because it was so beautiful. I remember the outrage and energy over the frankly incredible and brave work of fiction used to send back Moriarty, of Sherlock Holmes Fame.

I remember the final story we all wrote: the ultimate challenge for us, really, because at that point, all that stood between the End of the World and the freakin' Elder God Cthulhu (I kid you not), were a few determined young adult and teenaged writers, and one of our own: a frankly terrified man with a mobile phone and a wifi connection, and all the stories we could tell him to get him out of there alive.

                                                                                   
                                                                                       The Wall Won't Fall, 2012

The winning story for that part was mine. I don't think I would have been able to write it if I didn't love him as much as I do. None of us would have.

Suddenly I was excited by the idea of drawing again. I ended up becoming the default 'art person' of the group. I decided to create fictional character versions of all my fellow Players, the Metaguards, asking them all for whatever they would like to see in a character based on them, and then creating them. They were as excited by this as I was, and I rediscovered the joy of creating for myself, and for other people. Even my University Art improved.

About halfway through was when I started to draw for them, and I remember, most strongly, a compliment one of my fellow players gave me that still matters to this day. 

"You can write, sing, AND draw? o_o Welp, I give up, I'm going home! XD"

Nobody had ever complimented my fanworks until I showed up on the Watch the Footage Forums. Not like that: not just as art for art's sakes. Nobody had ever valued them as I did.

I remembered why I loved this. I remembered the point of it in the first place. We talked about our favourite books and TV shows and cartoons together, we talked about fanfiction we had all written both for TWWF and for other things, and I drew and drew and drew.

I have heard people say that fanart and fanfiction are worshipful acts - tributes to the creators. And while to some small extent this is true, I don't think of tribute as the main point. Fan-creations are the ultimate "what if". They are means of exploring what series offered, but also what the series had never, and would never do: what if there was an openly gay person on the bridge of the Enterprise: what if the Characters of Digimon were dropped in a real videogame: what if the world really was ending? There's a really good post made by Lev Grossman, that you can read here if you want to. But here I am just going to draw on a quote of his that I find most meaningful:

“Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.”

That is what I see in a lot of fanfiction, and if it's true of the fiction, why not the art? That was the thing that I had denied myself and others for almost a DECADE. Of course I want to be an original, published writer someday. Of course I can and will create my own characters and worlds and universes. But trying to completely separate myself from these fanarts was as bad for my creativity as just mindlessly copying in the first place. Anyway, can you look at these, or at any of the artworks linked above, and say that we were "mindless"? About any of it?

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I sure as hell hope not.

Enthused by my realisation, I started exploring the works of YouTubers and webcomic creators- people whose lives intertwined, to an extent, with the works of their fanbase, in the form of characters they created for various games and shows. I started exploring the fine line between creator and creations and realised it was even thinner than I had originally presumed. That if the fourth wall had truly existed, then it wasn't in danger of breaking: it was already broken, by it's very nature - all the time, in a million different ways a day. I started exploring mythology again, remembering what I loved about Fairytales. Why does the age of something change it's value as a critical piece? Why is The Wife of Bluebeard more worthy of literary analysis than Furiosa? Sherlock Holmes more "important" than James Bond?

I spent almost a decade telling myself that these people, that I myself, was somehow less than others. How foolish and selfish had I been? How much had I refused to pay tribute to the creative's who mattered?

It wasn't that my desire for originality or creativity was bad, far from it. Of course that's important. Of course people are turning out stuff nobody has ever seen before, but the important thing is, they're not doing it in a vacuum. The problem is that I was so obsessed with finding my own ideas that I completely forgot how those ideas work in the first place: that they are all part of a never ending tapestry of creative's and creativity.

Of course that's important. Of course people are turning out stuff nobody has ever seen before, but the important thing is, they're not doing it in a vacuum. 

Life's too short to offer the world, and yourselves, anything less.