I had the good fortune to meet artist Alan Brown (aka Medusawolf) during my second year of art school, and he's been a good buddy of mine and a serious source of inspiration ever since. Alan imbues his skillfully rendered illustrations of other worlds and other-worldy characters with a sense of magic, mystery and discovery that makes each new work he shares an exciting new experience. You can see his work on his blog, or his Etsy page, where you'll find paintings and prints, each accompanied by a clever caption suggestive of a larger narrative.
In addition to the abundance of drawings, paintings, etchings, and prints he turns out on a regular basis, I am never surprised to hear on any given day that he's busy carving action figures from wood, building a work table from scratch, making his own t-shirts, or fashioning masks and costumes resembling the creatures in his illustrations. Alan has a killer sense of humor, a cinematic imagination, and a seemingly endless desire to learn, try, and create new things. For all these reasons and more, Alan is one of my most favorite artists and grown up kids. He's currently finishing up a comic titled Ovoyyamar*, and I'm psyched to post a few excerpts from that here, along with his answers to a handful of questions that might be of interest to creative kids and grown up kids alike. Click the "read more" link below to see the full post. (*Parents: please note, some of the topics in this post and illustrations on the Ovoyyamar blog page may be slightly spooky to younger kiddos).
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| An excerpt from Alan's comic Ovoyyamar |
M/B: I've seen you note in several places that you "grew up near the woods and discovered the world was a weird mystery." Can you speak a little more to that, and/or any experiences you had as a kid that persist as influential forces in your work today?
In the forests on the other side of the neighborhood things were a little spookier. There were stories of ghosts in the woods, local legends such as "Screaming Polly", a headless ghost who sought out any head she could find to replace her own. We found an old abandoned car in the woods once, the windows of which were all covered from the inside with black plastic bags. As kids that kind of thing is pretty unnerving and fascinating especially since it was surrounded by trees in such a way that you couldn't tell how it could've been driven to where it had then sat. But naturally, as kids, we threw rocks at the windows and then left it there. We went back to try and find it a couple of years later and it was gone.
Once when I was around 10 years old, my brother and I were throwing a football around near the edge of the woods around dusk. It was getting sort of foggy out, and my brother, knowing it would scare me, threw the ball into the woods to fetch. He then ran home and left me there. I nervously went into the woods and soon found the ball, when i looked up, about 10 feet away I saw a deer standing and staring at me, but it did not appear to have eyes because the sockets were hollow. That scared me tremendously and I ran home nearly in tears. So all of these things, fears and memories and simply playing in the woods and exploring, the feeling of being surrounded by nature, stuck with me through the years. All of it just seemed so strange and magical in a kind of dark way.
The other huge influence on me, especially my artwork are all of the hours I spent playing with toys and action figures. I'd play with my G. I. Joes under a large tree in my yard. There would be trenches dug and forts and fences made out of sticks and twigs and little mud lakes and whatever else I could do to create a little adventure. Those times more than anything else have had the strongest lasting effects on my imagination. Playing as a kid in my view is sort of like having your imagination go to the gym.
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| An excerpt from Alan's comic Ovoyyamar |
M/B: As an adult, I've found myself reading a number of beautiful / imaginative / strange / exciting kids' story books that I wish I'd been aware of when I was younger. If you could time travel to the past to give book (or art, or music) recommendations to yourself and/or your friends as kids, what would they be?
Another book series I think I would show little Alan would be the DK Eyewitness Books series. They have just dozens and dozens of books covering a very wide range of topics from science, world religions, technology, art, various periods and specific things about history, you name it and they probably have a book that covers a topic in some way. I was pretty big into encyclopedias and compendiums of the supernatural or scientific subjects like rocks and minerals or birds. I was never a very strong reader growing up so I tended to seek out books with a lot of pictures combined with concise bits of information. One of my favorite kids books is one from 1959 called "The Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends" illustrated by Alice and Martin Provenson. Full of the classic Greek myths and stories like Beowolf, dragons and knights and creatures! The artwork is amazing and inspiring and a lot of fun, I'd take that back through time.
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| An excerpt from Alan's comic Ovoyyamar |
M/B: What specific advice would you give to kids (or adults) interested in making art or just looking to bring more creativity into their lives?
AB: Draw as often as you can (as long as it's fun for
you!). Sometimes I feel like I want to draw or paint really bad but I
just don't have any good ideas. If you are looking for inspiration for
what to draw just think about the things that you like, the things that
you think about all the time. I think about monsters and creatures all
the time and that's what is the most fun for me to draw. I like birds
and animals a lot so whenever I can't think of a creature to draw, I'll
draw a bird or a bat. It helps a lot to have a good reference book to
help you draw things the way you intend them to look. I used to flip
through comic books and try to emulate the way other artists would draw
until I figured out how to make things look the way I wanted them to.
If you have friends that like to draw or paint it can be a lot of fun
to hang out and draw while you watch a movie or in the park or at the
library. It's been a great source of inspiration and motivation for me
to live near some friends who are artists and we hang out and draw all
the time. There's a lot of encouragement to go around.
Look around in your community to see what kinds of
art programs there are. Some art colleges, museums, libraries or other
creative arts centers hold workshops and open studios for beginning
drawing and figure drawing classes, (and other creative workshops) which
can be immensely valuable for anyone looking to get better at drawing.
You can check out the art magazine section of a local bookstore or a
library, find the magazines you're drawn to and look for "call for
entries" contests that you can enter. Sometimes those contests have
kids categories too!
Try out as many different kinds of ways to make art
and be creative as you can. You never know what you may love and be
really good at. Try sculpting things with clay, building or carving
something out of wood, you can sew, make books or even learn to bake or
cook. I love doing all of these things (except for sewing, I just
never got the hang of that one) and they're are all rewarding creatively
in their own way.
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| An excerpt from Alan's comic Ovoyyamar |
M/B: Can you tell us a little bit about Ovoyyamar, the process of creating it, and what the story entails?
AB: My understanding of Ovoyyamar, basically, is
that it is dealing with themes like loneliness, death, loss, survival,
religion, and along the way I get to do a cool blood and guts fantasy
epic replete with weird creatures, cool masks, neat landscapes and
anything else I can pack into it. Writing was a lot of fun because I
didn't start out to make it about anything specific but the process
calls for you to draw on your own experiences and the story naturally
becomes interjected with a bit of that as well as interests and hobbies.
Visually, I think about it often in terms of illustrating a live action
movie filmed using Muppets kind of like "The Dark Crystal."
I've
been trying to make this comic for about five or six years now. It's
been a little frustrating because I just wanted to do it so bad but have
come to realize that creating something like a comic book is just
something that is going to take a long time. For me anyway. But
ultimately it's a complete blast, just lots of fun! I guess it all
started when I was at art school (DCAD) and I made these two paper maché
masks intended to be used in a photography class. I became really
attached to the masks and soon began to imagine them as full on
creatures getting into adventures, and naturally as an artist I wanted
to
see these adventures before my eyes. I designed the characters after I
graduated and started doing some paintings and drawings of them and
collecting artwork, most notably Ralph Mquarrie's, who did a lot of
production design, characters landscapes and such, for the original Star
Wars trilogy, and anything else that just felt like inspiration for the
world I wanted to make for these characters, and I put it all in a
folder. I also kept and still use a notebook that I would fill with
ideas and sketches for other characters and storyboards for random
points in the story as they came to me.
You have to build a story and that can take a great deal of time before it feels natural, not forced. In a way, as you get to understand the characters better they really do start to dictate the action of the story as you progress and it becomes easier and easier to write. My comic has no dialogue mostly for the reason that it doesn't seem to come naturally to me and I don't want anything about the story to feel forced and false, and also because as a comic book I am really interested to try and tell the story purely with images. I think that is something really unique to comics and if you can pull that off, you may be doing something right. Mostly it's a personal challenge. I really love the way movie soundtracks can help tell a story, so I decided to put together a soundtrack of classical music for what I had storyboarded and then fill in the gaps with what felt like appropriate music in terms of the rising, climactic, and ending action. Once I did that everything really fell into place and I rewrote the whole thing in about two hours. So now I had my story and from then on I've been kind of chewing right through the drawing side of it.
