I decided to do up a sort of profile for myself, just so people who are interested can get to know a little about me. I mostly did this, however, as an art meme, or art history. It was very enlightening to look at the path I took to get to where I am now with my art. It's long though, so be prepared for a long read if you'd like to brave it's depths. >3


START
Personal Quote:
"Practice makes perfect, but practice and perfect are never enough to combat laziness.”
Full Name: Felicia Rose Crowe
Pronunciation: fa-lee-sha rows crow
Gender: Female
Age: 18 (19 in 5 days)
Birthday: July 17th, 1989

Basic Info:

Height: 5'2"
Weight: 130 lbs.
Eye Color: Steel/Grey Blue
Hair Color: Light Brown, blonde and red streaks
Orientation: Straight
Ethnicity: Caucasian


Detailed:

Nature:
Trait snapshot;
Clean, self revealing, open, organized, outgoing, social, enjoys leadership and managing others, dominant, makes friends easily, does not like to be alone, assertive, hard working, finisher, generally optimistic, likes to stand out, respects authority, practical, perfectionist, dislikes chaos, busy, controlling, high self control, doesn't like to cry in public, tough, brutally honest, tomboy.

Art Saga: I started drawing was I was five. I still remember going to Peggy Sues and other restaurants when I was a kid and using either napkins or a paper place mat as my canvas. When we went to Montana's my father would draw with me on the table top that was covered in disposable paper and rip out the pictures I liked the best to take home.

I continued drawing right up until grade five, where my teacher, Mr. Lichlyder, encouraged me to continue drawing and taught me some valuable lessons in art and life. This was where I was first exposed to anime due to my best friend's sister. Once I seen her work I devoted myself to the style and furthered my research with it.

I started out watching and reading animes like Ranma 1/2, Inu-Yasha and Digimon, where the art style furthered it's favoritism in my eyes. Traditional means were all I used at this time, but I eventually furthered my pencil sketches by outlining them with a black pen. More research into anime art revealed what kind of inking pens to use and I remember spending all my allowance on black, fine ballpoint, quick dry inking pens.

My dad built me my first computer in 2000, a tiny 20 mb hardrive running on Windows 95. It was my pride and joy and the basic Paint program that windows was equipped with became my new canvas. I still enjoyed Traditional methods most, but using that mouse, I became a little more familiar with technology.

Grade 8 I took my first art course, where Mr. Seright reckoned my art skills to be on the verge of grade 9 level work. In that class I ended up taking a test for every individual grade, getting A's on each project until I was a grade 8 student taking a grade 12 art course. It was a lot of fun, but it had it's challenges. I left his class with straight A's and B's, satisfied with myself for my progress.

This was the time period of my life were switching from traditional to digital means was something difficult. For a long time, all I did was use paintbucket to change the hair color and clothing color of already created anime characters. Poor Akane ended up being blonde more then once, and Ranma suffered the same fate. My traditional style wasn't really developed yet either though, I was tracing poses from Rumiko Takahashi's manga that I had collected in fandom. On occasion I would draw things on my own, but I was never satisfied enough with them to show them off. Compaired to what I was seeing, they seemed disorientated and lacked life. I came in contact with PhotoImpact 8, an image editing software from my friend Stephanie, who had been producing wonderful banners and wallpaper collages for fanfare. She shared it with me and it became my number one platform, despite it's complete lack of layer usage. I liked how things didn't look pixelated, but rather soft and smooth and took to it right away.

I still remember trying to argue with poor Stephanie that PhotoImpact 8 was better then any other image editing software that Microsoft produced at that time.

That old computer is also how I learned about computers in general too. I still remember it crashing when I had been trying to salvage the hard drive from formatting, only to find out from my father later that I had partitioned the tiny thing into 8 different sectors. What a mess that was.

I joined the Deviant Art community March 2, 2004 at 12:44pm.I had been introduced to it from Marissa, a friend, but a much better artist then I allowed myself to take credit for at the time. I uploaded my traditional art on her computer because I lacked internet and a scanner at that time, and then checked on their progress in the library at Norkam. The encouragement and wonderful acceptance that I found there really gave me a boost and I continued drawing in all the spare time that I got. I met amazing and wonderful artists through their front pages and got a few favorites that I kept checking back on. Anime art was accepted there and I took to it with pride.

I kept getting updates to my computer though: bigger hardrives, more RAM, better video cards... right up until my family moved to Campbell River. There, I enrolled in grade 11 in high school and took a classical animation course. Timberline secondary had an advanced computer lab, fit well with all the Adobe programs that I had never before had access too. Classical animation moved into digital art soon enough for me, and Mr. Coad, generous as he was, allowed me to use a copy of his program, Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 for my personal home use.

I used the tablets that he provided to all his digital art students, and eventually was well taken care of. Mr. Coad was even kind enough to lend me one of his smaller tablets to take home while I was in his class, under the condition that I returned it in the same condition I got it in- and I did. Taking all the new software and hardware home was a big step in my digital art... I got to experiment and play with a program until I got familiar and very attached to it. Scanners became useful too, and my art style became more developed.

During all of this, however, I had been taking a classical art course as well. In this art class, I had noticed a lot of students were simply printing pictures and photos off of the internet and redrawing them: claiming that they had either thought of the idea themselves, or had done the original. I did not like what I was seeing and decided to approach my art teacher with it. He rebuked me, saying that the best way to learn was to observe and try it for yourself. I hadn't really accepted what he said, but I didn't approach him with it again.

My art style wasn't to his tastes either. Anime art was something that wasn't looked upon with any sort of favor unless you liked or watched it yourself, but it was all I had developed at this point. I seen colleges and friends learning to draw realism, and in my few attempts, I found that I was not nearly up to par. I keep trying it, but everything ended up looking so lifeless and so dead in comparison to what I was seeing in my minds eye. Drawing realism from my thoughts was harder then what others around me were doing in their attempts to photocopy an image... or, at least that's what I got by telling myself. My proportions weren't nearly as good as they could have been, and I still remember strictly a time when my traditional art teacher pulled me aside, opened up my sketch book and told me: "Next week we're working on realism. I don't want to see any of this."

I passed the first semester, but as the second rolled around, I got my first F. Besides my Math and Japanese courses, I had never felt such a crushing defeat. I had always known I was bad at math, and I had reasoned with myself about how heavy and unready for the Japanese course I was. My art, however, had been something I held with pride. It was as much a part of me as my looks, or my personality. My parents had always given me kind compliments, as had my colleges and friends. All this time I had been parading around thinking that my art was something worth mentioning.

When I had tried to reason with my traditional art teacher as to why I received such a final grade, he simply told me that I had not met the requirements that he had laid out. I left his classroom feeling quite hurt, but I continued in my art attempts with my digital art teacher, Mr. Coad. He encouraged me back up, showing me tips and tricks to using Adobe Photoshop Elements, and offered that I become a teacher's assistant for the next year. I accepted, and spent the next semester teaching what I knew to others and trying to help people reason upon what they were being taught in his class.

Mr. Coad, noticing my art fondly, had also noticed that I had never used any form of Photoshop besides Elements. I had grown so attached and reliant on the program that, when he had suggested I move up to Photoshop CS, I refused. He did not give up, however, and through what I believe to be pure perseverance, he put me on CS and taught he where things were and how things worked. I used it very bitterly for the first few months, but it grew on me soon enough.

One thing led to another and now I'm using Adobe Photoshop CS3, my own tablet and a computer that is lovely and fast. It crashes now and then, don't kid yourself, but my skill level in programming definitely has improved since my little Windows 95, and I can take care of most things myself.

I created FourSeasons, an Inu-Yasha Roleplaying Site on January, Wednesday 16th at 2:18pm. My creativity soared and I took it into my own hands to write the plot and story line with the help of a dear friend, Chantelle, and with our material, opened up the site for the public after a long night of work from an online friend with all the coding. Our public thread was posted Thursday, March 6th at 12:18am, and we waited for our first members. When we got them, we expanded and flourished and I offered to draw the characters that weren't cannon that were popping up on our site. Drawing so many unique and different characters definitely helped my basic CGing style that you'll sometimes see pop up, and it's nice for producing an idea quickly and efficiently.

Whew. That was a lot, but I guess that's how I got to where I am now. ;D