Ask the Artist: slinkymilinky

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Ask the Artist: slinkymilinky
Interviewer:
Interviewee:	slinkymilinky
Date(s):	November 25, 2011
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Fan Art, Supernatural
External Links:	interview is here, Archived version
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slinkymilinky was interviewed in 2011 for Supernatural Roundtable.

Some Excerpts

What’s your opinion on manips and paintovers? I have no problem with either. Good maniping takes a ridiculous amount of skill – I personally really struggle with it - You’re starting off with several complete images that are sometimes low quality or the light sources/colours vary from image to image, or the sharpness, or a hundred other factors. I find breaking those complete images down into the elements I need and then stitching them back together again really difficult.

I think the effect of a good paintover/manip mix can have a really nice nostalgic quality to it. A lot of the fanart for older fandoms like the X-Files was done in that way. Maybe because graphics tablets were harder to come by and that 'smudge and smooth' technique can be done with a mouse.

So yeah, generally I don’t mind how an image has been made (tracing, manip, paintovers, griding, pixel by pixel…); I’m more interested in the end result.

Do you feel doing fanart or fanfic detracts from your 'dignity' as a creative? Not at all. At the moment fandom is the only thing stopping my skills going totally stagnant. And plus it’s a great sandbox to explore new things. I’d never made a vid before, or even looked at editing software before I joined fandom. I’d never made a movie poster, or a book cover, or tried to say something about myself in a 100 x 100px jpeg, or written something for fun. I’d never collaborated with someone. Fandom's awesome; everybody is creating things that they want to create, so overall I find it a great learning environment. I’m not shy about my involvement in fandom either – most of my RL friends have some knowledge of my fandom activities.