artalis' Influence Map

That meme looked like a lot of fun. If you want to do it yourself, go here for the blank. I didn't quite keep to the size guidelines, but hell, who cares?

It wasn't actually that easy to actively name the influences on my art and this is certainly only a small sliver of the whole picture. I decided to focus on the artistic influences I got before dA and on the things that inspire me to "do art" in general. Since I joined this community I've improved loads and loads and I can't possibly include all the awesome artists around this place that contributed to my development and keep inspiring me on a regular basis. Thanks, y'all!


Okay, here we go. I drained it of colour, as the most prominent influence on my current works is black-and-white art/photography and working with only greyscale.
Otherwise, in more or less chronological order:

Classic cartoons/Disney. Which child of the 80s has NOT been influenced by them? I loved cartoons and watched all kinds of them. Here you got three of my all-time favourites: The Gargoyles, Gummi Bears and Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. Those were the days when cartoons were still some kind of art - you could practically feel the dedication the painters put into it. I can't say, they made me want to draw - I did that since I could hold a wax pencil - but they certainly helped.

Street painters. Growing up in a tourist city I was already gaping at those old men doing portraits when I was just a little girl. I was very curious and could have spent hours and hours watching and learning. I wanted so much to draw just like them. And now look at me - I still love to do portraits.

Dresden. That sight will always and forever symbolize home to me. I was born in this city of art and architecture and spent my childhood and youth there. I could visit galleries with my gran, marvel at the baroque buildings and gardens, attend plays and concerts at the theatre and hunt statues with the camera. Many people say I have an "eye" for things - I guess it's just the sheer amount of pretty sights I grew up with.

The epoch with unrivaled influence on my work is romanticism. Take a good deal of gothic imagery, throw in a little surrealism and apply to fantasy themes. I included four artists. Their works match my favoured style, though there's only one whose lifedates match the romanticism epoch:
Casper David Friedrich. My all-time number one romantic painter, ever since I was a tortured teenager . I love the morbidity of his works and their melancholy feel.
John Howe. My LotR illustration hero. He fuelled my fantasy love as well as the ability to get pictures in my head while reading.
Luis Royo. Another one of those romanticised realistic painters, this time with appreciation of female beauty. I just love his gothy imaging and the atmosphere of his paintings.
Hans-Werner Sahm. Escher meets Landscape. This man does amazing surreal things to landscape painting and he has a great sense of lighting. The picture shown is part of the very first of his paintings I ever saw - in larger-than-human size (at least to my awed brain) in an art store. Now I got a smaller version of it on my wall.

The left eye. This is a rather weird story of intuitive drawing. Ask me to draw you anything: nine out of ten times I'll do a left eye in a profile to the left. It's my default and favourite sketch theme and the start of any portrait. Maybe it's the ascending curve of such an eye and eyebrow that makes it so natural and fun to draw for a right-handed person like me, who knows. Bonus fact: my left eye's the dominant one.

I get most of my ideas from art of all kinds of mediums: I stop at the passage of a book, a verse of a poem, a line in a song, a melody, a sight in nature or on the street, a face in a magazine, a scene in a movie or tv show - that's when a picture pops up in my head or catches my eye. I could've named loads and loads of inspirational sources following that track, but that would have blown this little template. So I settled for Supernatural / Jared&Jensen to represent my core inspiration. Because they're my current and probably most long-lasting fascination and they never fail to get my mood back up.

My harp representing music. Music is a very essential part of my art. The music I do and still more the music I consume. It inspires me, cheers me up, soothes me or intensifies melancholy, joy, sadness, rage, everything - simply every one of my emotions and thus my creativity is tightly connected to music.

Metallica on piano. Nothing beats that as background music for drawing! I'm best when I can get lost in soundscapes while drawing. I love metal and I love the sound of the piano - so this combination just blows my mind every single time. Most of all I worship Scott D. Davis and lately the very talented Vika Yermolyeva as representatives for piano metal! (Plus, I can get sheets from them! )


And now - you do it!