HELLO :)
Intro
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Welcome to my makeshift art portfolio!
My name is Daphne but for several years now I have used the online alias "EMajor" or just Em for short. Visual art has been a skill I can't remember not being a part of my everyday life from the time I was a toddler to now. I've never done the calculations but on average I'm probably dedicating 150-200 hours to practicing per year, without ever having a proper paying job actually relating to it.
I started off learning traditional painting, illustration, and comic inking until I turned 10 and discovered ways to practice digital 2D animation. I switched over to primarily making digital illustrations in 2016 and have been perfecting my skills over time since then.
Below I've divided some of my favorite and most relevant works into categories to show different aspects about my art that I like to highlight.
Character Splash Art / Concepts
This is a selection of some of my favorite character "splash" art pieces for original characters made by myself and my close friends. I take pride in my ability to diversify faces and body types, design original fashion, and curate palatable color schemes that showcase a character's personality in just a simple but striking image. I once heard from a movie critic that you should be able to tell what a character is "all about" just by looking at an image of them, and since then I've tried to aim for that idea with everyone I bring to life.
Dynamic Shots / Lighting
These are a few examples of pieces with dynamic angles and atmospheric lighting. One of my next focuses as I progress in my expertise is to practice more foreshortening and unique angles to tell a subtle story--to show how a character's presence and power can be changed by framing them from up above or down below.
Maps / Interactables
I am heavily inspired by Flash games from the peak of Newgrounds' popularity in the mid-2000s to create puzzles and ARGs for my friends to interact with. These are backgrounds and graphics made to resemble settings and consoles you might see in a point-and-click adventure or "escape room" game from that period of time.
Grotesque / Horror
It wasn't just Flash games that inspired part of my style--as a very young child there were some creators of more mature content whose projects were burned into my brain and inspired a morbid curiosity for all things flawed, deformed, surreal, and painfully organic. Artists like David Firth, Jhonen Vasquez, Glenn Rhodes (Splapp-Me-Do), and Stephen Gammell stuck out to me the most and I think my drawings below reflect this.
Discretion Advised: This section of the gallery contains heavily graphic and violent content. Please view at your own risk.
Pixel
Pixel art is my newest venture, as I begin working toward my next goal of programming small-scale games. I am working with multiple art programs and learning little sprite animations for the time being.
Animation
My journey with animation began when I was 10 years old on my Nintendo DSi like a lot of nerdy art kids then. I practiced my skills daily and befriended a community of artists my age, and by age 12 I was more than comfortable animating skits and lip syncing at 8 frames per second. At age 20 I moved up to 12 frames per second. I use Flipnote Studio for fun still, but I've also picked up SketchBookPro as a way to animate from my computer. It's not a super intuitive program to use and has its limitations, so I seldom find myself having the patience to animate with it. I have yet to test out other programs as I've only really used free or very cheap programs I find online.
While I'm not frequently making animated content anymore, my skills still apply to what I make today, as understanding keyframes and dynamic weighted motions are important to balancing and blocking a piece. Animating has also taught me the importance of "marketable" design--keeping something simple, iconic, and easy to replicate as opposed to overly complex and detailed designs.
Below are links to a few animations I have online; one full 3-4 minute animation meme, an animatic for a trailer, and a few 30 second flipnotes from long ago.