rummy.moumouring

he/him, INFP, cancer sign

I am a neurodivergent artist and I recently spent 2 years working in a studio as an artist in residence. Since then I feel confident enough to put myself out more. I've been drawing since forever and eventually I want to be able to create and sell prints, stationery, comics, zines, and maybe end up making games and music.

I am passionate about animals, nature and cute things. If there was anything I'd prefer to have a conversation with someone about it would probably be stuff like that. I like to surround myself with works by 90's manga & anime artists. There are a huge amount of artists from that era that have greatly influenced me that are hard to find online, but some of the more easily accessable ones include Noritaka Suzuki (specifically his work for Samurai Pizza Cats and Idol Project), Takehito Ito, Tsukasa Kotobuki and Hiroyuki Eto.

One of my favourite arists is Winslow Homer. I always like the way he chose to express his models
in a scene. This along with the way he could find a really moody and cozy atmosphere, he brought out
a level of intimacy that was far more stronger than any of his realist contemporaries. The swishes of
the lines in his fishing works are a really fun addition when he adds them. I also enjoy historical illustrations such as the works by Angus McBride, cross-section illustrations and the technical works of Antonio Lupatelli in his Woodland Folk books. My favourite Sanrio character is Marroncream.

My name comes from when I was worldbuilding at one point some years ago, from one of the countries that I named Moumouring. Rummy comes from this character, I just always liked her name.

I have 3 dogs: a whippet, a miniature poodle and a greyhound. My greyhound was adopted as a retired racing dog who is a daughter of Fernando Bale, though unfortunately one of many. Her father finished his career with an incredible 80% win rate and as a result there's been an enormous market for him as a stud, overexaggerating his genetic value compared to whatever random factors would make a successful racer (dogs ultimately have no concept of a race so every idea is redundant, resulting in my dog's father's career being circumstantial). His is yet another example of the horrendous problem of overbreeding in the overall irredeemable greyhound racing industry and allegedly, this is intentional in order to entrench the industry with nuance trolling to stop it from being shut down. Every day I wish for that disgusting excuse of a profession to fall apart and that I could give all dogs a good life. At least I can be able to with the ones I have. I'm really grateful for them, they've helped me through so much in the past few years.

My favourite games are city/base builders where I can make a bunch of cozy places and just zone out by myself. I loved base building in Valheim and I could do that forever but there's so little variety in building materials. I have some really great memories with some of the bases that I've made and I want to draw them some time. I can't really comprehend any competitive games like fighting games or MOBAs. Maybe it's because of the pacing, the open-ended-ness and there's a lot be aware of and decide on in such instantaneous moments. When people have discussions about the specifics of that in those games a lot of it goes over my head. Also I'm horrible at combo inputs.

I enjoy having vtubers as background noise when I'm working. I prefer when there's more than one in the stream where there's more talking and it's less directed at me. When everyone was playing Lethal Company it was the best thing ever for stuff like that.

I go through a lot of mid 80's-mid 90's jpop and jfusion. I never really felt comfortable with the term city pop because I was listening to it before people started calling it that. I just associate it with the reaction from Mariya Takeuchi showing up on Youtube everywhere and the vaporwave/future funk scene coming in. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it was just the environment and aesthetic that other people felt when they discovered the music is different to my experiences when I first listened to it for myself. I love when people bring FM synths into their pianos and add a bunch of reverb, it's my most favourite sound in the whole world. I tried to elaborate more on the music I listen to but it got overwhelming really fast, so that'll probably be for another page, I don't know.

The two biggest influences in my artmaking process in the past years were books from Kimon Nicolaides (The Natural Way to Draw) and Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way). There's a lot I want to write with my thoughts on Nicolaides's book (given trying to navigate something that was published in the 40's when neurodivergence only just starting to be looked into and the book was unfinished) but I'll save that for a page on it's own. I read through both of them, I wasn't able to complete everything but I did as much as I could and even then it was such a big insight. More recently Madeleine Dore's book "I Didn't Do The Thing Today" and a lot of her writing and podcasts in general have been a really great help for me as well throughout my residence.

What made me really want to commit to being an artist was finding out about Fort Thunder when I was 17. Everything happening there felt so exciting and unlike anything I ever seen before. Everything there looked so fun, so alive and raw. I have a comic from one of the artists who worked on it while he was living there. It's this small densely packed thing that's sludgy, wild, the ink smells so distinct and industrial and there's this personality weaved amongst it that I haven't really felt anywhere else. The comic kind of feels like a bunch of morning pages.

My most significant influence from a visual point comes from an artist who is still active online but I would prefer to ask for their permission first some day before I specifically mention them on this site. They might be easy to recongize through my work if you've seen them and I owe so much to their art over many, many years. They probably get recongition themselves already which I'm glad about but I think they deserve 10 times more of that recongition and support. Their work played a big part in helping me to be more accepting about and embrace the things I take interest in at a crucial point in my life. I really want to write some time about how I came across their art as I feel it would make a nice story in context to this more concentrated, algorithm-pushing era of the internet.

Another big influence in my work are the oekaki communities of the 00's. There's a sense of immediacy from a grounded, more locally communicative background to them that I feel comes out in a lot of their compositions. I love the kinds of presentation that they have which I don't think is really felt in larger, portfolio-oriented works found online today. If anyone feels like making things like that, AzPainter2 is a great program I recommend instead of having to rely on the cumbersome web based program they used back in the day.

I really like the concept of kitbashing. As I'm learning 3D a bit more I want to incorporate it more into my artwork, maybe at some point just 3D Print things to work with myself. Nilo Rodis-Jamero's series of drawings he did for an auction I feel is a great example of it, I'm just assuming he was involving kitbashing in these drawings based off his experience though. There's tons of experimentation with parts, everything's open-ended and he was happy to go back over some things multiple times to see what more he could do. That kind of approach to working in general was something I wanted to bring into my studio when I was in my residence. The term greeble is the ugliest sounding word and I hate when that word is used for kitbashing.

Some more influences are the attitudes in so-called "raw art",
in paticular Jean Dubuffet's work in the 1940's from when he travelled to North Africa and stayed in El Golea for 5 months (examples here, here, here and here). I don't want to write too much as I feel the original classification of "raw art" is irrelevant now, but I find these works really refreshing and exciting in the ways personal experience is handled and how that can come out through navigating drawing.

I am strongly against censorship and conceding to purity culture in art. Freedom of expression is a human right that has been constantly disrespected by ruling classes, most prominently behind the influence of hysteria. No matter what excuse has been put forward to trivialize, the reduction of our rights to something that can be seen as easily disposable with no consequence (vague labels like "problematic", "immoral" or "degenerate" serve this) as a solution to our problems in place of properly researched, evidence-based actions should always be called out on as loudly as possible. Censorship and repression does nothing except benefit the exploitative engines of capitalism and to help the heads of it avoid accountability while making the lives of everyone else more limited and precarious.

I do not take commissions as I can't handle doing them. I have taken them before but every time they've ended up mentally exhausting me, they've all taken longer than I expect after the initial excitement passes. I have a lot of respect for people who are able to sustain that kind of work in their career.

My favourite hot take I have is that I absolutely hate the use of the word "style" for describing someone's art. There are an endless amount of thoughts, circumstances, decisions and more that affect what goes into an artwork and "style" is too superficial to be able to accommodate much of anything to describe it. When people say they want to "find their style" it sounds more like they're looking for a brand image. I think that no one should ever have to consider style in their art, literally any other facet that goes into an artwork is more important than style.

My main program for drawing at the moment is Krita. I was previously using Clip Studio Paint, but I eventually found it to be underpowered. Also, I despise Clip Studio's company for turning their back on everyone by bringing in paid subscriptions. I use AzPainter2 for more quick and easy lo-fi stuff and just Aseprite for pixel art which I guess is pretty standard nowadays.

I think that's as much as I want to have on here at the moment. Thank you for visiting this page, I hope you'll enjoy my work and if you're considering supporting me in any way I really appreciate it!