CSP Featured Artist: Grave Weaver

Contact Graphixly @ 2021-08-09

How did you become an artist?

When I was a kid, the Anime Naruto and Tokyo Mew Mew came on TV, and one thing led to another and I ended up getting my first sketchbook. I thought that every episode was drawn by a single guy, and I wanted to be good enough to draw my own anime as well one day. Jokes on me for having two brain cells, but I think my misconception worked in my favor, since drawing a WEBTOON also requires an ungodly amount of drawing on a weekly basis. There was also this girl in my class who drew dolphins and everyone was always super impressed by her, and I wanted to get the same reactions, but everyone thought my anime characters were lame. My goal was to get good enough so people would not think I was lame, and in fact, the coolest kid in the class [note: the better I got, the lamer people thought I was, so this was an impossible endeavor.] I also started going on Neopets and playing World of Warcraft, and honestly it was just a huge confusing soup of inspirations that led me to drawing every single second of the day, neglecting my classes and just trying to produce artwork. Luckily for me it turned out fine! Kids, stay in school.

Where do you get inspiration?

Oh, this is a hard one. I mostly get inspiration from a huge, huge pool of artists and creators on pixiv and twitter. I can't think of any one artist or creator that stands out above the rest as of late.

But, if we go back a bit, I can pinpoint some storytellers and artists that have shaped who I am today. I'd probably say the single biggest influence on both my design sense and storytelling style is Soul Eater. If you've ever seen it, it's quite edgy and makes a lot of use of shape language, which I carry over to all of my work.

BLEACH was probably my single biggest inspiration when I was younger, and you can probably see some similarities in the expressions of the characters in the manga and in my own work. I thought BLEACH did an excellent job making it's cast of characters and creating a defined "style."

And in terms of storytelling and paneling, my absolute biggest inspiration is ONE, creator of Mob Psycho 100 and One Punch Man. ONE has a simple art style and he uses it to great effect in his comics- Masterfully, even. The way he panels and creates such a defined aesthetic without overly-detailing everything is something that I try to apply a lot in the world of WEBTOON, where speed is king.

What’s your hardware setup?

I have a 22 inch screen tablet and two additional monitors with 16gigs of RAM and a whole bunch of other stuff I don't understand in my computer. The most important part to me is the screens- One to work on, one to watch a video, and one to scroll endlessly on twitter with!

What do you like best about Clip Studio Paint?

Oh my god.... I don't even know where to start LOL Clip Studio Paint is like the god program brought down from the heavens to do literally everything I've ever dreamed of. I'd say my absolute favorite feature is how amazing it's fill tool is, it fills in lines SUPER cleanly without having to color in any gaps, and that saves me so much time when working on my WEBTOON. I'd say the second best thing is being able to open 3D models inside the program, and the third best thing is the stroke stabilizer because my hand tends to get shaky after the 12th hour of work.

How long does it take you to make a single illustration?

Oops. This question is funny because to make a full effort "illustration" it takes me about a week of straight work. I spend a ton of time mapping out perspective grids, drawing musculature, readjusting parts and redoing coloring, etc. But to draw a panel in my webtoon, from a blank canvas to completely done, takes about 20 minutes.