Slashcast Insider Interview with Sherant

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Slashcast Insider Interview with Sherant
Interviewer:	emmagrant01
Interviewee:	Sherant
Date(s):	June 17, 2006
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Harry Potter
External Links:	online here as a transcript, Archived version
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Slashcast Insider Interview with Sherant is a podcast created by and posted to Slashcast as "Episode 5." Slashcast includes an transcript.

The interviewer is emmagrant01.

Sherant is a Harry Potter fan and a fan artist.

The Interview Series

See Slashcast Insider Interview Series.

Excerpts

Emma: So how did you find the Harry Potter fandom?

Sherant: In a kind of roundabout way. I had heard about the books when they first came out, but I never read them until I think the third or fourth book came out, but I had been a fan of Japanese anime and manga, and a video game that I liked a lot was The Legend of Zelda. And I was just kind of searching Zelda sites and I found a lot of Japanese artists that did fanart of Zelda. "Wow, this is really great. It doesn't look like the games, it's something original. It's their own creation of these characters." And then once I had read the Harry Potter books and really grew to like them, I wondered, "Well, gee, I wonder if any of the Japanese artists that I like for Zelda are doing Harry Potter." And, lo and behold, they were. And they had some really amazing things. And, actually, it wasn't so much canon work that they were doing. It was a lot of slash and I guess AU kind of things and my introduction to the fandom side of Harry Potter was through Japanese artists, which was already having slash in it. I didn't start doing canon fanart, it was- I came in through slash. And then once I had found a lot of the Japanese artists I liked, I just kept doing searches for Harry Potter fanart, and I believe the two artists that I remember seeing originally that stuck in my head were fiendling and glockgal. I saw their art and I said, "Wow, people are doing fanart, but it's, like, really cool and it's art and it's different." So I said, "I've got to do this too."

Emma: Where do you get your ideas for art?

Sherant: Oh, everywhere. I mean, it sounds kind of cliché to say that, but I'm really the kind of person who takes in everything around them and I spend a lot of time really thinking about things. Most people who would see me would say I'm just kind of spacing out and not doing anything, but I'm actually- I spend a lot of time thinking about everything: composition or what light might be like, or how a fabric might be impacted by something. Everything I see, light and people, clothing - all sits in my mind and I just get ideas; they just come to me. There's no magic place that it comes from. They all just sort of form and eventually one will say, "Okay, you have to draw me otherwise I'm not going away."

Emma: Oh yes. So, is drawing sexually explicit scenes- is that different for you than drawing more generic or more gen kinds of scenes?

Sherant: Uh, usually? I have to make sure my husband isn't looking over my shoulder when I do those. 'Cause that can be kind of- it's not that I'm not comfortable with it, it's just kind of- he'll make a crack about it or something and so I have to get in my own headspace and think about what I'm working on. But I don't really approach it any differently except that I have more considerations as far as anatomy and skin tones, but as far as the content, it just comes from the imagination so I guess you could say that I have a smutty imagination. But don't we all, somewhere? It's not really all that different for me to approach. It's just what the idea is and where it comes from, really. The execution is really all the same. I mean, of course, I have had people call me on my anatomy sometimes, especially with the slash pieces. Saying like, "You know, that really doesn't line up quite right..." and I'm like, "Well, I haven't really had that kind of experience to know exactly how the, you know, the mechanics of that positioning." That's where imagination and subtle lighting comes in, to hide some of those. I mean, like, a drape of cloth or something to hide all those imperfections.

Emma: ... How has your work in fandom affected your style?

Sherant: It's been kind of a double-edged sword, fandom. Because it's made me work harder and be prolific, creating a lot of pieces and different things I probably wouldn't've have done, especially CG experimentation, like different types of software. But it's also limited me in that I'm doing fanart. You know, I'm not doing something original, which is, as an artist, something I'd really like to do. I'd love to do lots of things in all sorts of media, even sculpture and all sorts of things. So fanart has been great because I've been pushed to do lots of drawing of lots of subjects, but it's kind of limiting because it's not my own creation, really. I mean, that it's someone else's characters, but- it's been limiting because it is someone else's original creation and I want to do more original things too. Even though fanart is so fun, I would like to do more original work.