Now that my health is back up enough to make more art, I finally got around to opening up a Patreon for my work: I’m still working on content to fill it with, namely the script to my webcomic I’m developing, but currently it has a portfolio of my art, and more importantly a readable copy of the novella I wrote and want to publish someday.

I look forward to seeing some of you there!

https://www.patreon.com/r3znor_x

I finally was able to set up a Bluesky account today, from here I will be using it instead of Twitter:

https://bsky.app/profile/r3znorx.bsky.social

This past week I had a near-death experience with an ulcer that I never knew I had, I had to get a transfusion to counteract just how much blood I lost and as of today I’m back from the hospital: I’m unable to eat certain types of food or take in caffeine for at least a very long time from now, meaning I won’t have nearly enough energy to make any substantial art for just as long, if I do attempt to it will no longer be within a few days, so for the time being my productivity will be at a snail’s pace to what it had been before, I have a lot to do to recover and cope with the experience…

I’ve had an idea I’ve floated around for a while now about donating a portion of the money I make off of my work to a mental health charity, since the topic of mental health has a through-line in all of my art, and today I think I’ve finally decided that it’ll be the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, as it’s something I struggle with and would be the most direct way to communicate my work’s message.

I’ve begun to notice a trend with my work that is leaving me dissatisfied with its direction it’s taking: I’ve been moving into the direction of a simpler, cuter and overall easier art style that goes against what I originally set out to work towards but has developed specifically because it’s what gets the most attention out of my work across my social medias, which I’ve been justifying to myself as a necessary evil in order to accomplish my goal of developing a large enough following for when I finally start publishing the chapters of my webcomic.

I feel something I need to do in the near future is take a step back and reevaluate the choices I’ve been making with my art, to start from scratch and get back on track to working towards a grittier, dirtier art style that actively reflects what I want the most out of my art; the only issue is that I can’t at the moment, I’m preparing to move on Monday and after such I need to prioritize my queue which has gotten fuller than I’m used to, all I can make at the moment is art that’s smaller-scale, simpler and takes less time and focus to finish, and unfortunately that homogenous style I’ve found myself being boxed into fits perfectly into that criteria.

I want to break out of it as soon as humanly possible, but as time passes it seems like that opportunity is drifting further and further out of reach, at least for the time being…

With my most recent work as of writing this, the Madness Combat fanart, I’ve been thinking of ways to fully implement the new effect I had created with it into my future work: I could see about directly tinkering with the effect itself with different colors and levels of transparency from here to make it suited to each and every work’s tone, especially the grunge art style that I still wish to develop.

Possibly the biggest implementation will be the effect being added into the backgrounds and horror elements of the webcomic I’m wanting to publish to make both stand apart from the characters and give the visual aesthetic of the comic a grimier, less safe feeling to it than I was initially going to go for.

This also applies to the mural project once I start coloring that, where the only thing in the mural that doesn’t have any of the effect on it will be Derrik to make them stand out from the rest of the mural’s characters and the background.

I’m really excited to further practice this novel style aesthetic, I’m really hoping for it to greatly improve the quality of my art overall, potentially faster than at any other previous time.

One thing I’ve made a habit of in order to motivate my work further is to actively engage with the positive support my work receives: Not only do I encourage and reply to the responses I get, I’ve made a notes list of all of the individual aspects of my art that people have pointed out as positive features and each supportive comment I receive, no matter where I receive it or who it’s from, I save in a photo album to revisit later.

If you enjoy my work, by all means tell me, it means everything to me to hear what you like about it, more so than any money I could make off of it!

I’ve always wanted to be able to share a vertical slice of my workflow as an artist but I’ve never really had a good enough place to do so:

My art usually takes between one and five days to complete depending on the complexity, and those days usually follow a very specific routine both for efficiency and focus: I drink a can of Monster Ultra after 9:00 to not conflict with my medication in the morning, and I usually take a half an hour to an hour to get started on a project; by noon I drink a Diet Pepsi to tide myself over the rest of the day and I end up finishing around 5:00 or 6:00.

If I don’t have any projects I’m already committed to such as a commission or a work-in-progress, and if I haven’t already decided on anything, I thumb through my notes of things I wrote down prior to draw and pull from there to draw something new and keep my art from becoming repetitive in content.

After I’ve got my project lined up, I decide on what I will listen to in the background of my work to keep my mind occupied: usually I either put on an album or two I know well (Nine Inch Nails and My Chemical Romance are my default choices) or I find a video series on YouTube that’s long and doesn’t need much visual engagement.

I draw everything from an iPad 10 with an Apple Pencil, a drawing glove and a paper-textured screen protector, the latter two create a greater friction for my hand to help with the smoothness of my line art.

The wrist that I draw with was actually broken when I was a kid and never healed correctly, it bends at a roughly thirty degree angle and shakes even without caffeine, my hand-eye coordination has always been massively affected by such. I have to draw everything with maximum stabilization to have the clean, smooth line work my art is known for.

I hope this brings insight on my process, I’m not sure if it’s really too boring or too complicated, but it’s everything that goes into each of my pieces that I make, even the sketches. I admit it’s a lot for a vertical slice, but I hope it was at least an interesting read!

I guess to start off I can share a bit of where I come from with my art and where it will be going: my art style is something that I’ve been continually tinkering with since the start, inspired by the types of art I had seen when I first got internet access in 2009: low-pixel-density, glossy works by hobbyists characterized by their truly digital aesthetics; the oil paint texturing of the colors that I use is both a nod to my love of impressionist and expressionist art and to give the works a digitally compressed feel while still being clean.

My main influence in terms of the aesthetic itself is the work of a Japanese garage kit modelist named Ryoichi Itou, specifically his art from almost two decades ago at this point, of which I homaged in the fanart I did of his original character Aria. For the emotion I invoke I draw from the portraits of Oskar Kokoschka, how he painted clearly stylized depictions of himself and others that still felt more human than the more traditional paintings at his time, my avatar image was directly influenced by his 1913 self-portrait, for instance, my favorite work of his.

Where I’m hoping to take my art from here involves a lot of experimentation I’ve only recently developed the skill to practice: I’m wanting to draw grungy, exaggerated works reminiscent of a White Zombie album mixed with Ren & Stimpy, the practicing of both being the more stylized sketches in my portfolio, with the half-body sketch piece being my first full attempt. I still want to keep my current style around for more general art as I recognize its utility in its broader appeal, but the more I progress as an artist the more I want to move towards wilder and wilder work.

I have a couple of pet projects I’m working on in the background that are going to be aided by this experimentation, those being a psychological horror webcomic I’m trying to develop based on my experiences with schizophrenia and a full redraw of the mural art for My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade equally depicting such themes (WIP attached below), both to be made to help spread awareness for the condition not just for myself but for others that also suffer it. I genuinely don’t know if either project will be successful in the end but they’re nonetheless projects I feel deserve to be made, and it makes me happy to pluck away at them behind my other work.

I’m really looking forward to continuing to improve my craft, I’ve already progressed so much in only two-and-a-half years and I can imagine even by the end of this year my work will be almost completely unrecognizable from what it is now, and that progress is what drives me to make my art in the first place. I’m just glad for people to be able to watch me as I do so and hear their support for such, it means everything to me that they do.

Hello, I’m Derrik, an up-and-coming artist looking to branch out my avenues for posting my work, especially to move away from sites like Twitter. I’ve been actively drawing digitally for two and a half years and I approach my style as a love letter to art blogs of the late 00′s. I enjoy diving into darker themes in my art from time to time, so if such isn’t your thing I understand.

I enjoy making art for the fun of creating as well as that I know it makes others happy that I do. I like to experiment with each piece I make, and such has made me known for my rapid improvement as an artist. My main goal with my art is to inspire others how my favorite artists inspired me and express my emotions in a constructive fashion. I want my work to speak for itself and reach out to others how mere words cannot.

I hope that this site will be a great avenue to reach more people with my art and potentially engage more with my audience. Thank you for reading, and I hope you stick around for more.