Final Artist's Statement/Final Critique

     This semester has been absolute hell. I have not enjoyed it. I have been drowning since about week 3 and it never stopped. I had to allocate most of my time between 3 demanding projects: My German Capstone, my animation short film project, and my Art Capstone. The panic attack count is around 4 at the moment. However, all is not lost, because I've been researching a lot for my capstone and I found a lot of interesting things and ideas.

    First up, the first character I finished one of my pieces for. Girl's fashion isn't what it used to be, and it's terrifying. If you've ever gone through a girl's clothing section in stores, you'll see many outfits for little girls with incredibly short skirts and tight shorts and shirts. The shirts will most of the time be cropped and revealing, and the dresses in the summer have the hips cut out in the dresses. These outfits are inappropriate. The power of social media and the lack of spaces for children and tweens to hang out have left little girls to look up to grown TikTokers and YouTubers. This causes the problem of these little girls wanting to be like the women they see online, and since most of the women they see online now are adults ages 20 to late 30s they want to act older than their age. They want to wear the things they see adults wearing, and their fashion is reflecting this. I have a 10-year-old cousin, and soon I'll be gaining another little cousin that falls into these issues, and I want it to be safe for little girls to be little again.

    In recent times, I've alos seen the rise in "kawaii fashion" which is a style of fashion used by grown women (mainly in South Korea and Japan) where oversized jackets and sweaters are mixed with frilly skirts. Bright colors and bows as well as children's characters on the clothing create a childlike and "cutsie" vibe, usually to emphasize a girly look. I really like this style, and although I wouldn't wear it myself because I enjoy more sophisticated looks, I think it would be a benefit to children if girls would wear things like this.

    Another fashion category I want to explore is modern regal. I love to learn about royalty, it fascinates me. I'm Slavic, so I've had this fascination with Russian/Slavic royalty. Their regal outfits from back in the day were fascinating. The Russian headdress is so beautiful and I love how the royals just decorated themselves with jewelry. 

    These are the inspirations for the outfits I have planned. It's a true process. I mostly want to focus on the face and bodice of this character for the elaborate jewelry I want to draw her in. This is the pose at the moment.

    Another style is goth. I'm not sure how popular of knowledge this is, but goth has many substyles such as pastel goth, gothic academia, and cyber goth. My favorite is a mix of patel goth and gothic lolita. Lolita is a type of style from Japan in which the girls dressing in this style dress as china dolls basically. They wear a lot of bows and lace and Victorian-like dresses to give the appearance of a doll. Pastel goth is a style in which bright pastel colors are mixed with a goth look and black to create a more cheery gothic look. I wanted to mix the two of these together. Here's what I got so far:

    These are the looks I plan on using for the goth inspiration. I need to look up some makeup looks to because as any goth can tell you, it's not just the outfits that are important, it's the makeup too.

My Artist Statement

    Since I was little I pretty much only watched animated media. I remember the first live-action show I watched was Wizards of Waverly Place and it never wowed me like the animated shows did. As I grew up I noticed western animation was fairly simplistic in its designs with the exceptions of Disney movies. I was 14-years-old when I got into anime. I was introduced by a friend and I loved the amount of detail put into the characters designs, especially their outfits and their eyes. This has become important for me over my years as an artist. I've also always had a interest in fashion as my mother will tell you, and I've always been interested in fashion dolls.

    Animation isn't very respected by most people, especially in the western world. As a result, the details put into the characters in western animated media aren't as prevalent as the details eastern animated media put into theirs. In my series exploring the different fashion styles of five different characters of my own creation,  I hope to showcase that the details of each character's style is just as important as the characters themselves. 

The Artists Who Inspire Me

    Concept

Tim Burton

William Joyce

Garrett Sander

    Physicaity/Process/Appearance 

Kentaro Miura

Hajime Isayama

Yana Toboso

   

    Current Works