The Artist Review!

[Kaoru]

No, it's not here yet - but I now have a spot in my schedule cleared, I have permission from Strega, and I've started studying up on his whole dern gallery. Expect this thread to be edited into the review itself on the coming Tuesday, Pacific Standard Time - until then, I recommend to everyone that they go over Strega's gallery again, it tends to flunctuate rapidly from "Funny" and "Outrageous" to "Reprehensible", by my own ethical scale, but even the oldest pieces show a pretty impressive skill in art - and Strega's latest piece proves that he doesn't need high-quality paper to make high-quality pictures.

See you all Tuesday!

[Kaoru]

Well, it's here. Day has dawned - and I believe I have a bit of writing to do. Well, here goes...

For a long time, I obsessed over how to handle this - Strega has hundreds upon hundreds of pictures, and while I've at least glanced at all of them once or twice, and, for most of them, studied them intently or viewed them many more times as well, I still feel rather inadequate to the task of criticizing a fine artist - being as I cannot even begin to imagine being as good as he is.
Even so, I'm going to give it a shot. The main focus of Strega's art is, of course, vore - I'm sure you all knew that. Over the course of seven (or more) years, Strega has covered a wide range of subjects, species, and situations, oftentimes infusing his own brand of unique humor into his works.

The oldest pictures in Strega's gallery attest to the fact that by the time he started posting pictures, he had a firm grasp of anatomy and atmosphere - not to mention an already-keen mind. From that first sequential arctic picture onwards, Strega has never hesitated or worried about depicting 'edgy' topics - occasionally, he even drew just to get a reaction out of others.

His attention to detail and his wide cast of characters are varied enough so that, for just about any voraphile, there's something Strega has drawn that will elicit emotion. As I browsed Strega's galleries, I became aware of the complex worlds underlying all of his pictures - but I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here to advise.

Strega's current level of skill, which is what I am addressing today, is not a plateau from which there is no ascending. Despite the exacting and rigorously perfectionist curves and lines on Strega's sketches, inkwork, and finished drawings, there's room for improvement - there always is. I'm sure I'll be hit with a deluge of hatemail if I don't start making some sense here, so I'll get to the point.

Anything that needs to be 'fixed' at this point is incredibly, incredibly minor stuff - the kind of stuff judges at art competitions love to pick on when there's nothing else left. That doesn't mean, however, that Strega's art couldn't be better. The best advice I can give is - continue to refine your style, as you have been, and watch out for the occasionally-awkward poses you sometimes lapse into. Keep trying new things - but, and this is a major point that I've been wanting to address ever since I heard certain comments here...

Don't be afraid to try the same things over if you feel you could do them better. I hear a lot of people complaining about how there's 'nothing new under the sun' with vore, and I have to scoff - especially since this insults the creative, imaginative artists that reside here at the Portal. Strega, in your work, you've got a tendency to re-use certain movements, certain poses, or certain themes - there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Heck, I personally think it's great

Today, right now, you've got a style of creating fur and expressions - and dialogue - that I have only rarely seen equalled by any others. Some of your pictures are laugh-out-loud funny - others are so violent that I've been shocked into silence - but all of them share a single thing - they are executed with a style that allows me (and, likely, others) to look at your art and appreciate how amazing it is, no matter the subjects depicted.

You, yourself, Strega, have occasionally made me question my beliefs about what a human being is capable of expressing - and about what sort of interests and emotions can coexist in the same person. You are a spectacular artist - and, in addition, a spectacular writer, as well.

I do have one rather odd comment that is totally point-of-view - while it's obvious you spend time and labor and strive to make your art good, it feels...strangely...as if your art is not 'a labor of love', so to speak. What I mean is...while there's obviously powerful emotion and great expertise behind your pieces, it feels (And I'm sure this sounds odd) to me that some of your pictures are just not valued in the same way others are.

You work just as hard on them, of course, I'm sure, but they just don't have something that others do. I'm not going to name any names here - and indeed, like I said, this is just a weird feeling I've got, nothing more .

Anyhow, to close out - your coloration is simply superb, and you have a knack for keeping your characters looking the same throughout your pictures - in a good way, in the way that one could see several pictures involving characters similar to yours and immediately know - not only which one was done by you, but which character it was.

...Of course, considering the unique cast you've got, that's not too surprising. I believe I've said all I intended to - and hey, if someone gets something good out of all this rambling, so much the better. Anyone still reading, thanks for tolerating me for so long - I'm cutting it short here because anything further I say will just sound like worshipful gushing or like picking on individual pictures.

[Strega]

You're too generous, really. I hate to even look at my older stuff these days; the anatomy was generally awful back then, though there was the occasional piece that I still like to look at. Getting anatomy right takes a lot of practice, at least for me, and even these days there it much room for improvement. There is always someone better, or in this case, always someone MUCH, MUCH better -- FallynAngel, Jakuhaietzeru, Jidane, FatJaguar, Karbo, Cownugget, and so on. A whole LOT of vore artists are better than I am artistically, and the unfortunate fact is that many of them are much far more talented than I am. I might catch up with some of them one of these days, but each of the superior artists seems to have at least one skill that I can't approach.

I really do love drawing, but I am a lazy artist. I don't like working on multi-panel comics much, because they are a lot of work. I am also a perfectionist, which is an agonizing habit to have as an artist since no artist is ever satisfied with his own work. That's another reason I rarely do comics; it's hard to get the characters to look the same from panel to panel. I don't know how professional comic book artists do it.

There are some of my pics that just start out a bit awkward and never get fixed. It's a case of making a mistake in the sketch stage, usually; the pose might be off, the anatomy might be wonky, the expression might suck. In some cases I can fix it after the fact, since the magic of Photoshop allows me to obliterate lines much more effectively than White-Out ever could. Nevertheless, sometimes there's a glitch in a drawing, and I get stuck with it. I could point out a hundred examples. 83

Thanks for the review, Kaoru. I'd like to say what I am working on now, but I am sort of waiting for the other person in an art trade to ask for something. As it is I might have to dig into my barrel of 'things I should draw'. 83

-- Strega