Fan Art (...and how I got it)

Introduction

As a small-time, tin-pot, have-a-go comic artist, there's nothing better than getting a bit of recognition for the time and effort I've spent producing stuff. We give it away for free, so getting the odd word of encouragement really goes a long way.

I'm very lucky, I've had a few artists recreate my Area 5.1 aliens as fan art.

My first fan art created by Pip

Another fan art from Amalock1

A recent feature in McGrenivan's Comic

It's fantastic to get featured like this, and it seems that my opening comic really appealed to people.

How to get Fan Art

Well, exactly how you go about getting fan art is unclear. I can't tell you what to do, but I can go through some of the things that possibly resulted in these artists taking the time to honour me this way.

These are:-

1. Have characters that are unique and easily recognisable, no matter what drawing style is used.
2. Be supportive to other artists, especially those who are following their own path.

Be Unique

I do a couple of cartoons, Area 5.1 and Funstreak, and you'll notice that all my fanart come from Area 5.1, and that it's easy to recognise my characters. I use relatively simple shapes and colours that stand out. That green is very unnatural and all pieces of work use that exact same colour along with the red hands and feet.

In short, my Little Green Men were designed to be simple.

My first Character Sketch

Be Supportive

Secondly, you need to get into the community spirit and support new artists. Most don't really know what they're getting into and find that the busy world of a cartoon site means their work quickly moves off the main page and gets lost in the huge amounts of work from established toons. Trying to get noticed is difficult, especially if you don't fit in with the typical popular content. It's so easy to associate lack of comments with the idea that your work isn't very good.

Looking at the artist comment that McGrenivan submitted with his Comicbook Ad parody the sentence that jumped out at me was,..

"Special thank you to a few guys who have inspired me to continue this otherwise fruitless venture"

Now to me, that seems crazy coming from such a talented and humorous cartoonist. If you've not seen his work then please check it out,.. and more importantly add a few comments here and there. That's really all I did,.. I'm just passing on what Paztoid did for me when I first started out, and I remember how it kept me going when I doubted myself.

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