CSP Featured Artist: Linda Sejic
Contact Graphixly @
How did you become an artist?
I loved to draw since I was very young, like mentioned in the next question I was inspired a lot by animation and games and wanted to replicate that feeling though my art. For the longest time I thought I wanted to be an animator or an illustrator because I wanted to see my creations either be impressive or see them move, but I never noticed I was enjoying creating stories through panels the most.
In high school I met my husband Stjepan Sejic who introduced me to a comic medium, a prospect I never considered because everything I’ve ever heard about comics at the time was that it was supposed to be exclusively superheroes, which was a genre that did not appeal to me at all. There were no sequential art education opportunities in Croatia, only the basic art education which we attended at the time so both Stjepan and I were learning things together on the fly. Manga just arrived around that time too and it appealed to me with the variety of genres it offered.
After college, in the early years I was doing a variety of illustration jobs mostly for card games and some comic covers. I did a few coloring gigs and did art on my first comic through a small studio, which sadly never got published. Jobs at the time were sparse and very few in between.
In 2012 after a tragic event in my family I decided I will drown my sorrow by creating a webcomic. I needed something to keep my mind occupied and it did the trick. My husband supported me by creating an image that was the source of my inspiration. This is how Blood Stain was born. I never realized how much I loved creating comics until I started working on my own story. Solely creating art never fully satisfied me, it was the storytelling aspect that always intrigued and inspired me and kept me going. ”Just one more panel, ok maybe one more, hmm this part can be expanded for a better flow.”
Creating Blood Stain opened a lot of doors for me too, I was getting a lot of job offers for comic interiors; my webcomic was a perfect portfolio for the jobs I wanted. In 2016, 3 volumes of Blood Stain got published and it sadly didn’t do very well on the market. It definitely taught me a lot of valuable things about marketing side of the things and just as I got busy with creating next volume, new ideas arose and my second comic called Punderworld was born. It ended up overwhelmingly successful on WEBTOON Canvas. Something I never expected would happen and still can’t fully grasp.
Plan for the next few years is to finalize both comics which is something I very much look forward to. Onward to the future! :D
Where do you get inspiration?
Mostly from games, movies and animation. Old school movie lightning inspired a lot how I create mood in my stories, Ghibli and Disney animations inspired my style of art and amount of details I put, and games inspired the feeling of adventure and exploration I wanted to achieve when creating my stories by showing a lot of different angles.
Beetlejuice animated series and Asterix inspired a lot of humor I add in my comics.
What’s your hardware setup?
A Desktop PC with a 13” Wacom Cintiq.
What do you like best about Clip Studio Paint?
One thing? There are too many things I love about clip studio, but to cut it short my favorite thing is how it streamlines and shortens a lot of grindy parts of art. Like the color flatting process, the inclusion of the sub view panel as a replacement for swatches in which you can load your character reference and directly color pick from it, the beautiful crisp lineart, the easy usage of vectors and curves and vector eraser, symmetrical and perspective tools… there are just too many to name.
How long does it take you to make a single illustration?
Depends on the complexity of the image, but it usually takes me between 1-2 days.
Would you consider Clip Studio Paint an industry tool?
Yes absolutely. It has everything any art creator could need and much much more.
Would you like to promote some recent project?
Both Punderworld and Blood Stain are available for purchase as graphic novels, if any of you prefer to read your comics in a nice dead tree copy form. ;)
Punderworld is coming out at the end of this month on August 31st, you can preorder it to ensure your copy through any bookshop or online store that carries books, comics or graphic novels, or through your local comic book store if that is more convenient by using this code Diamond Code JUN210157
Where can we follow your work?
You can follow my works on WEBTOON, or for those who want to read things up front or simply support my comic creation you can do so by joining my Patreon.
WEBTOON:
https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/punderworld/list?title_no=312584
https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/blood-stain/list?title_no=166806
Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/sigeel
I also have twitter and instagram for silly snippets, sketches and character design as well as info about updates.
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/linda_sejic
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/LindaSejic