~F.A.Q~

Email me any questions you have. I don't mind and I don't bite.

Influences:
Added December 01, 2008: People have often asked me what my story and characters are based on. I really need to make pages and pages for citing sources though. Everything I find interesting, about this real world, gets applied, in some way, to my imaginary world. Like any world- It IS ever evolving. New discoveries happen all the time. I blocked out the basics of my story back around 1991, but I fit in what I like where ever I can. Like, in college I took a cultural beliefs class and the aboriginal stuff I learned about REALLY fleshed out Korin's people and lands.

Q: What is the story based off?

A: Hummm... Good question. Well, in general, I kind of just made up a basic boy character and girl character so I could have people I would be interested in drawing. (Before I was 13, that was when I started drawing them, I really only drew animals) and then I gave them a loose basic story; which I've elaborated on greatly over the years. If I was to say it was based on anything it would be what I was interested in at the time: Mythology, knights, Arthurian and Norse Legends, various tidbits from culture and artifacts I found interesting, slap on a 90's RPG feel mostly because of Secret of Mana, and some children's books- like the ones by Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles (The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, The High King- Read them ;) Most of the sub-characters, like the pirate boy, just come from me mis-drawing one of the main two characters, or because of something like... a costume I drew for one of them would inspire me to make a character around the feel of it.

More specifically; it's really pretty juvenile and uncreative. "Princess and orphan on a high adventure kind of story." But, hey, I was like, 13 ;) My excuse for it now is that it's been with me too long to change X)

The Writing/Symbols:
Added December 01, 2008: Sometimes you'll see some gibberish, odd alphabet-like symbols, written on my OneLand art.

Q: I was going to ask you - do the... symbols written there mean something, like some sort of alphabet you created to your world, or do you just sketch them randomly so they look cool?

A: You got it ;D It's just english with different characters/symbols/letters (what do I call them?) I was really (still am) shy- It didn't stop people from randomly grabbing my sketchbooks to flip through them though :{ I didn't want them reading my character's silly dialog or the diary-like thoughts I'd jot down, so I just scribbled a few symbols up and matched them with letters. It took me a while to be able to write in it as fast as I can in real english; but now sometimes I write in it by mistake X) I still can't read it as fast though. Words I don't use a lot often stump me and I'll have to translate the symbols back to english to finally figure out what they say (my bad spelling and handwriting don't help!) There are also a few extras; like there's symbols for 'the' and 'and'- as well as some double or commonly used letter combinations, like for 'oo'

There was one point where I wanted to make my own language, but I soon figured that's way over my head. The only thing I'm worse at than language is math. I'm a little dyslexic ;p Genetic's failed me there

A Note about The Legend of Zelda:
Added December 01, 2008: Because I do a lot of Legend of Zelda art, and there's a blonde boy and a blonde girl as my main characters, people sometimes assume that my stuff is based on that series, and the characters from it: Link and Zelda. But, nope! That's probably had the least influence out of all my influences. I need to post a time line of Link and Zelda's looks compared with Urack and Keireia's looks but, for now, take my word: the only real influence LoZ has really had on my story is that my main guy, Urack, has some of the "pure of heart" personality I pictured Link to have back when I played the original game. Look at the art from the first 4 Zelda games, and then at a sheet at my characters from 1996.