Criquetin
You've seen her work among the winners in the Archive-Wide Contest; you've
seen her pictures popping up in everybody's Favorites list. But for some
reason, Criquetin has never been Artist of the Month before. Surely it can't
be because her art is lacking in any way; just a quick glance to the left
and right will assure you otherwise. Maybe it's just that with only 67
pictures uploaded so far, she's just one of the Archive's undiscovered
treasures.
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In the Artist's Own Words:
| “ | Ahaha! Citizens of TLKFAA, you are too nice. And
fools, utter utter fools for voting for me. thank you
so much. :D
So I only have one thing to say: ROCK THE STYLE YOU WERE BORN WITH. Don't worry about matching somebody else's vision line-for-line. Don't worry about getting the correct colors on Simba or drawing Nala's crazy eyebrows perfect. Just DRAW. TLK is so much more besides model sheets, Mufasa is so much more than a huge chin and a fat nose. Do your own thing and it'll be beautiful. I can't stress this enough. When you cut lose of how you think something should look, and you stop worrying so much about emulation and focus more on your specific vision, your pictures really take on unique beauty that nobody else can produce. (...that's one reason to draw in your own style. The other reason is it's so accursedly hard to draw like the disney animators. I have been trying since the movie came out, and it's a total lost cause for me. D:) Once again, thank you! ...I must admit, when I got this e-mail, I was probably shocked out of a good three years of my life. You are all mad. And I love it. |
” |
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Whether she's pushing at the boundaries of artistic traditions (as with the Chinese-style Mufasa at left) or rendering Pride Lands landscapes with a sense of color and linework that make them seem to embody complex emotions without even a character present to portray them, Criquetin has a mastery of the genre that few can match. As she suggests, it's one thing to internalize a model sheet and reproduce a character as envisioned by a professional character designer working diligently away in a cubicle in Burbank for a semimonthly paycheck; but it's quite another to toss the model sheet aside and create a rendition of the same character using your own style and sensibility, your own imagination of the character's personality and psychology, and your own expressive media of choice—and yet manage to convey to the viewer that it's the same character we know and love, just seen through a lens with a few more facets than we're used to.
My personal favorite piece of Criquetin's is the one at the top right, whose description can be found ninth from the bottom on her Gallery page. Her unique synthesis of smoothly digital colored washes and wet inks combine with her natural sense of the ominous and the macabre to lend a darkness and a weight to the scene that is simply missing from so many pieces whose "edginess" is a lot more overt. It's restrained and mysterious, and in that it's somehow all the more unsettling.
But it's the warm humor so often present in Criquetin's work that really keeps her fans coming back for more—that and the whole scope of her artistic vision, spanning the Lion King universe as defined from within and from viewpoints beyond its boundaries. Each piece she uploads is worth poring over, absorbing its subtleties; and the more of those we can all look forward to, the better.