The most wonderful time of the year

A retrospect on my art through Half-Life: Alyx fan art

WIP

I will never shut the fuck up about this game. HLA’s third anniversary is approaching towards the end of this month, the 23rd to be exact, and I have been keeping up a tradition of making an illustration for each year. November 2019, when the first trailer dropped was a warm and fuzzy time for me. I remember rewatching the trailer over and over on the subway, picking apart anything I can get out of this trailer. I jumped back into tumblr for the first time in years to get that tight-knit fandom community I remembered having in the Portal 2 days of 2011.

HL:A reignited me of my love for games and game art, during a time i was doing a pretty much full time freelance gig that consumed all my freetime and I didnt really draw for myself while looking back on it. I’ve spoken about this many times before, but HL was greatly formative to my style and growth as an artist and holds a special place in my heart.

I’m about to show you some cringy shit I drew in 2020 but the first step at being kinda good at something is being kinda shit at it!

Jan 2020, my first piece of HLA fan art shortly before game release:

CHRIST, thats bad, alright. I was very much into a specific style of graphic design and I tried to incorperate it here by making a kind of retro style box art cover. I am not a graphic designer, I just push text around. True story: could you believe someone on Etsy stole this shit and tried to sell prints of it? Wild.

March 2021:

I call this, Fran was really into Alberto Mielgo art. I had no idea what to do for the bg. I like painting but it really took me a while to figure out what I like when it comes to painting.. trying, experiementing.. still doing so. I’m probably thinking about it too much. Shut up and paint! I don’t hate this one as much as 2020’s, theres still some nice things I like about it.

March 2022:

It really took me til this point in time to just start feeling like I was finally growing into myself art wise. I started to discover what I like to draw and how to draw it, which happens to be monochromatic drawings with a dose of analog-like textures. i started to figure out how to use reference in a creative way, and make interesting compositions after deeply inspecting the works of, but not limited to, Sergio Toppi, Gennady Novozhilov, and of course, Ashley Wood. It’s not perfect, but I’m pretty proud of it.

March 2023:

Present day, I feel myself growing into my “style”. I can only get better from here, and that excites me. The love of Ashley Wood’s work still burns brightly inside me, but I am very much working to not look like his work and look towards other artists to learn from, or rather the artists that inspired him, and oh boy, theres a lot of overlap with mine! It’s tough, its eye-candy for me, I look at Ash’s work almost everyday and own several of his books and keep up with his several upcoming projects. I have a very strong affinity for his work…

I think having a strong visual resemblance to an artist is a major turn off, a reason why I have to keep myself inline with my own work, because I am just a sponge for information. I don’t want to look at work and see the sole study/inspiration a split second before I’ve even taken in the whole picture. Unless you are fully aware of that, acknowledge it, and that is goal, then go off! I’m purely speaking about my own philsophies and how I approach art making but I am not perfect. I forgot who said it but, and I’m paraphrasing here,

“It comes to time where you have to put the books away and just draw.”

I’ve got close to falling into that same-y pit but now I think now I can safely say, I’m going in a good direction. One could probaly tell I am inspired by him, but my work does not look like Ashley Wood upon first inspection. Instead, I am now trying to find that essense, that punchy, cool, essense i see and gravitate towards in his work. In Choo’s beautiful artbook, TENDER, they opens up about their inspirations, one of whom being Mike Mignola of HELLBOY notoriety. Choo is greatly inspired by Mike Mignola but you can still tell, that is the work of Choo.

Part of me really wanted to delete most of what I just here under the idea of just letting my work speak for itself and not claim how much i think my work looks like someone elses, in fear that the similarities will be even more apparent! Well, i am here to be vulnerable and open about these things and maybe help someone out.

For March’s piece, I will show when it’s done, hopefully by the end of the month :) Til then, thank you for reading!

Half-Life + art.. forever!

-Francesca