Blog | Pirakami Arts

- Mar 18, 2019
- 2 min read

Chapter 5: Collaborate and Listen

A doodle of a character of mine, Nebula! Different from the usual Py image!

Hey hey hey!! I'm back in action once again! While I've been absent for a bit, my work has not slowed down!

Following my last blog post, I installed my KINSHIP series at the ODU Higher Education Center, and as the second semester started up, I began working on two collaborative pieces! Hence the beginning of a new category haha.

ANYWAYS! The two collaborations I have been working on have been as a designer for a production that seniors from the theater strand of the VPAA are performing: EmberBlaze. The other project has been a collaboration with Raenan and Yamilla. (You can find their respective websites here and here!!) The project is a seven piece series called Archangels that portrays people in our lives who have been a major positive impact in our lives as archangels.

I'll start off with Archangels!! We started working on our seven piece series for senior production at the beginning of the quarter, and I kicked off our project by working on the sketches for the seven figures. Each figure aligns with an angel as followed (as stated in our group's notes):

Michael: Pete Coore (Rae's Dad) - Protection, courage, strength, and success

Sunday and the Sun

Gabriel: Miranda Simmons (My Mom!) - Communication, intuition, and clarity

Monday and the Moon

Chamuel: Katalina Sussman (Mila’s Mom) - Love of self and others, forgiveness, and compassion

Tuesday and Earth

Raphael: Crystal Brewer (Friend of Mila's family) - Truth and healing (physical, mental, and spiritual)

Wednesday and Mercury

Jophiel: Erin Richburg (Our art teacher!) - Guidance and Inspiration

Thursday and Mars

Uriel: Rhyan Cooke (Rae's friend) - Wisdom, peace, and problem solving

Friday and Venus

Zadkiel: Damian DeSantis (My Best Friend) - Freedom, change, understanding, and comfort

Saturday and Jupiter

Now, for what I've worked on for the most amount of time.

For the majority of February, I spent my time managing the collaboration group between the visual arts seniors and the theater seniors' productions EmberBlaze and Trash World, shows that they're going to be touring to show in elementary schools throughout the city. I was the sole designer for the backdrops of EmberBlaze, a story of two siblings who get teleported into their video game, and I coordinated students to work on them. There was also a day that elementary school children came in and helped to paint a big chunk of blue and green on one of the backdrops! (Which I organized for my backdrops).

I also helped in designing the costumes for EmberBlaze; however, I spent 95% of my time with theater on the backdrops.

[EDIT] ! Artist Highlight !

Japhers

Instagram

Twitter

Tumblr

This is an artist who I've followed across a few different platforms after the semi-death of tumblr! Through it all, I have made an active effort to find their art because of just how inspirational their style and character design is.

I absolutely adore the style of their work, as their brush strokes and digital painting style makes me feel like an artist from the renaissance came to the 21st century and got inspired by webcomics and JRPGs. They always have an elegance and detail to their work that can allow a wide variety of people to enjoy their art! Their accounts are CERTAINLY worth taking the time to look through if you're interested in fantasy work and/or character design!

- Jan 23, 2019
- 4 min read

Chapter 4: Finalizing KINSHIP

Hello again guys! Recently I have finished all of my artwork for my series KINSHIP! I'm very excited to be able to say this, but it's not the end yet! Before I get to that, however, I'll go ahead and show you the results-

(For those who are new, each piece represents a different family structure! Check out my second blog post for the list!)

Now, I am very satisfied with the pace at which I've been working on this project. I've definitely managed to meet the deadline, and due to this it has even given me more time to expand upon it with the remaining time in the semester! By working on this piece, I became more adept with Photoshop (especially with creating patterns), just another thing that makes me happy about working on these pieces.

But like I mentioned before, this is not quite the end yet! Due to having this time left after finishing the bulk of the project, I have decided to make this a full on children's book! I will be formatting these to pages and turning it into a book that showcases family structures besides just the nuclear family structure. I am very excited to do this, especially because my point was to shine a light on this subject, and having it in a book and presented like this really hits the nail right on the head in my opinion.

It won't necessarily have a narrative to it; however, I do think that it will still be valuable and a piece that I appreciate for a long time after this. To accomplish this I need to write up the actual WORDS in the book and format everything in InDesign. I'm entirely confident that I can finish this all by the end of the semester so that I can send them off to be printed and bound in a book. I will also probably be creating a front cover for this as well, possibly incorporating animals from each page! All in all, I'm just happy to finally be satisfied with and have a plan on how I'm going to present this.

My initial vision of this project hasn't really altered too much honestly! The biggest different would definitely be the fact that I'm making this into a literal book with, like, words in it. Much different than just plastering them up on a wall next to each other in a line. I think that any differences in my original vision have only been improvements upon the piece, but I'm not too upset that my execution wasn't too much different than my plan though. Working on this has really helped me practice creating a solid plan for what I'm working on, and executing it to its fullest potential.

After our first round of critiques, feedback on my piece has been fairly repetitive and scarce. I do appreciate what I have been told, and it really helped to ask for a wide variety of opinions to decide on how I was going to format this for presentation! But, I believe the primary reason that I haven't received a whole lot of diverse information has been because I essentially had everything planned out from the beginning and stuck to it fairly thoroughly! Thorough planning isn't a bad thing by any means, but I'll just have to hope that a lack of variety in feedback means that I've been doing well!

While this piece may not present hyper realistic detail or anything, I still highly value this piece. It was the first time I created a series of this size successfully and cohesively, and I think that the theme + execution of this piece are both touching and impactful. I find that I was able to incorporate my style and themes that I particularly enjoy exploring into this project successfully, and it's inspired me to work on more types of projects from here on out!

My goal was to create a piece that manifested positivity and a spotlight towards many different family structures. Work like this is something I see as a necessity in today's society as we become more diverse as a people and ideals change. What will change that is goodness, knowledge, and acceptance of different kinds of people, including what their families may look like. So I think I'd say I've done a pretty darn good job of achieving that goal with this series. :D

! Artist Highlight !

Nickolai Walko

This time presenting a local artist,Nickolai Walko! I recently discovered his works through MOCAs instagram page and I instantly fell in love with his anatomy pieces.

Walko's works that are anatomy based reductive art done with masking tape and X-Acto knives are especially enamoring to me. I absolutely adore composition, concepts, and figures in these works. His work will be on display at the MOCA Boardwalk Art Show Midwinter Preview today at Smartmouth Brewing Co. at the Oceanfront tonight at 6PM, free of charge!

- Dec 20, 2018
- 4 min read

Chapter 3: The Bees Knees

Howdy!! Happy holidays everyone!

I hope you're not looking for a super huge update!! Since my last post, since I planned so much beforehand, I've only cleaned up each of the pieces by adding clean sections of color and lines. I decided to do a mix of lineless and line...ful? Anyways, I think this mix has ultimately contributed to the style of my piece :D

So far, I'm doing great in terms of progress! I'm just about where I feel like I should be. Now I just need to add shading and add a backdrop to each of the pieces (my favorite part uwu). I altered the colors for the elephants, so now they're right! I think I'm going to make them a little bigger to fill up more space and take away a tad bit of negative space because I don't really like it. But otherwise, I feel like my message is coming across well! I'm really glad I chose a simple topic, and a positive one at that, because I need at least a few months of not being super depressed in high school!!

Update pictures of my animal families!

These are my pieces at the moment! (the foxes + bear isn't finished, but that's okay) I'm really satisfied with my progression of these! I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to manage to make clean and smooth lineless works by hand without a stabilizer, but hey I'm awesome I guess and managed to do it :D ! I also was able to make all of the animals readable, and the water overlay on the river animal group is way more successful now that it's cleaner. I still need to figure out exactly HOW I want to implement my shading, but I have enough time that I'm confident I can experiment and see what I like best. All that's left besides the final touches would be to potentially adjust colors, but other than that, I'm content with what I've made so far! (I might adjust the penguins' head... THEY JUST LOOK WEIRD THOUGH, ALRIGHT)

I've also decided to name the series KINSHIP. I've had the folder with them all in it named that for a while, but I figured I should share it !

During the critique, I got plenty of positive feedback!! (Mostly about how I should sell this stuff LOL... I might though... watch out for a webstore-)

While my piece is coming along swimmingly, as I finish I come closer to my biggest issue at the moment: presentation. Now, I initially was planning on having a wall composition where I presented them flat and next to each other, refer to my First Blog Post for my composition sketches. I'm still going to keep them at 10 x 10, because I like my pieces big to draw attention; however, I've gotten quite a few different suggestions for how I should present it.

My biggest issue with the original plan is that I was ALSO going to add multicolor frames to each of them (the secondary color + background pattern color would've been the color for each piece), but uh They're Expensive-

and also I wouldn't be able to do that for the senior art show anyways.

Another dilemma I'm having with this is that I, quite frankly, want to stand out. I have such a simple concept that simply having it up on the wall wouldn't feel like I'm making enough of an effect to be able to stand out among you guys!

So, I've gotten a few different ideas, none of which I'm really sold on entirely, but I don't hate either. A few of my alternative options so far are:

-Picture book

-Picture book, but mounted to the wall

- Blanket/quilt

My favorite idea is having a large picture book mounted on the wall so that people can turn the pages and view each of the illustrations. I think this would make it fun to interact with, and evoke a childlike enjoyment of turning pages in a big book. Some criticism I've received for this is that it wouldn't be strong enough since it wouldn't be telling a story, and while I understand that... I don't think it bothers me that much honestly? I was also thinking of adding velcro to the pages or maybe magnets to keep them upright so they won't fold over ''owo

Anyways! Aside from that, I am very happy with the progress I've made so far!! I'm so excited to see my piece finalized and hanging up in the gallery :D Even if I don't win anything for it, I think that it's still a cute and heartwarming series, and I can probably profit off of it, so like, who cares-

Just kidding! (mostly!) But, now it's time to share an artist!!

!Artist Highlight!

Toni Infante

A freelance illustrator who does STUNNING fantasy and fan art. I absolutely adore their use of color, dynamic poses, interesting lighting, and energetic compositions in their work!

There's obvious anime and videogame inspiration in their pieces, even the non-fan art ones. But they utilize these elements in an interesting manner, mainly through their character design and ridiculous + dramatic compositions and character designs. I LOVE the blend of hard and soft elements in their art that gives it an animated feeling, yet can add more seriousness to their pieces (especially the tiger one).

If you're looking for some ridiculous fan art from anime, comics, and video games, or just enjoy fantasy illustrations, you should definitely check them out!