
I am a neurodivergent artist and I recently spent 2 years working in a studio as an artist in residence. I've been committed to practicing as an artist before but after the experience I feel confident enough to put myself out more. Eventually I want to be able to create and sell prints, stationery, comics, zines, and maybe end up making games and music. Hopefully I'll have my own stall some day! (´Д`)
My name comes from when I was worldbuilding at one point some years ago, from one of the countries that was named Moumouring. Rummy comes from
this character, I just always liked her name.
Apart from drawing and doing artsy stuff I love animals, nature and cute things. Some of my favourite animals include thylacines, meerkats and beavers. I love how safe, cozy and isolating beavers' lodges look. Sometimes I get emotional (in a good way) from seeing pigeons because my grandfather kept racing pigeons and they always remind me of him. I love dogs and ever since I got my whippet I've been obsessed with all sighthounds. I almost always have VTubers on in the background when I'm in my workspace at home but I can only listen to group collabs. I feel awkward when it's just one by themselves, not that there's anything wrong with that though. My favourite Sanrio character is Marroncream.
I like to surround myself more than anything with works from 90's anime and manga artists. There are a huge amount of artists from that era that have greatly influenced me but if I had to choose a few they would probably be Noritaka Suzuki, Takehito Ito, Tsukasa Kotobuki, Kenki Fukuoka and Hiroyuki Eto.
Oekaki works from the 00's are so good and I try and find them when I can. Aside from nostalgia there's something about their compositions that feels so unique that I enjoy. It feels more immediate and communicative, probably because of the context they were drawn in. I get a similar feeling to a lot of artwork on Drawr as well, a lot of them look great.
When I was 17 when I came across two things roughly the same time that I feel really defined where I wanted to go as an artist. They still kind of do today. One was discovering
Fort Thunder from Lightning Bolt and the other was this one artist, but I would prefer to ask them permission first before I mention them on this site. Fort Thunder
looked amazing, it was just unbridled creativity all over the place and I wished so bad I could live somewhere like that. I probably wouldn't do that today if I was given the chance though since I'm good with the space I'm in now, but the fort helped me be so much more open minded and appreciative about art. It led me to tons of interests when looking for artwork (one big thing for me in the past was so-called
"raw art"). About a year later I almost got to see Lightning Bolt play but their session was made 18+ at the last minute and I hadn't gotten my ID yet, it was really heartbreaking. I have two of Brian Chippendale's comics though,
the one that he made back when he lived in Fort Thunder is something I really cherish. It's so sludgy and dense and the ink printed on it smells really industrial and unique. It kind of reads like morning page exercises, minus the words.
With the other artist, they're still active and they're getting recongition but I feel they deserve way more. I owe so much to their art and I'm forever grateful for them. They're probably easy to recongize in my work if you've seen them before. They helped me be honest to myself and feel comfortable with cute things and furry stuff back when furries were way way more stigmatized.
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. Fernando finished his career with an extraordinary 80% win rate and as a result there's been an huge market for him as a stud where his genetic value has been overexaggerated for his career compared to whatever random factors were involved (dogs ultimately have no concept of a race, so no one's ever going to know exactly how he got his 80%). His is yet another example of the
horrendous problem of overbreeding in the 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'm 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.
I really enjoy playing city builders and anything with base building. Honestly whenever I can I want to just zone out by myself building cozy places. I was really into Valheim at one point, the base building in it's my favourite out of any game but I got bored from how little variety there was in building materials. Like, so much has been developed in that game and you're still stuck with one kind of wood wall to build with, it's so bad. I have some great memories with some of the bases that I've made and I want to draw them some time. I can't comprehend competitive games. If I ever play a MOBA or hero shooter or fighting game I always feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. Maybe it's because they all have a faster pacing and I have to pay attention to so many open ended things happening around me, I guess. Even listening to people have discussions about the specifics of it in those games a lot of it just goes over my head. I'm really bad at combo inputs as well (I probably shouldn't be saying that though since I never really committed to it).
The past few years I've gotten into solo tabletop and worldbuilding. Ironsworn is really simple and fun, I like using a mix of that and Mythic GME.
I love exploring for music and I go through a
lot of mid 80's-90's jpop, jfusion and game music. It's impossible for me to listen to anything else at this point. Many of the vocal tracks for Tokimeki Memorial 1 & 2 have fueled the work I put into making this website. I used to go through a lot of early 90's rave stuff but I'm exhausted from it now. 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. A lot of the songs people pick out for city pop and the "80's" vibe sound like they're still stuck in the 70's anyway. 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.
Even though I brought up Lighting Bolt before I haven't really listened to them in years. It served it's purpose for me at the time (alongside Deerhoof and Haunted Graffiti) and I haven't felt the need for it now.
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). I never really had a full commitment on either book, I would just be on and off with them over the years but they still ended up being such a big help for me.
I swear by Nicolaides, even though what his book expects from you schedule-wise I feel is outdated (it's almost 90 years old and neurodivergence was only just being worked out back then, if anyone reads it I recommend just approaching it like you would The Artist's Way). So much of what he wrote about drawing holds up still, nothing can substitute following your senses, listening to yourself and developing experience. There's so much emphasis in the drawing world on methods and theories and whatever nice little phrase is used to break down a work but when you spend enough time simply engaging with things all of that gets handled just fine subconsciously. Interestingly the way he describes a "daily composition" is similar to The Artist's Way's morning pages. I can't imagine any other book being of any actual help for drawing to the point where seeing anyone mention Loomis makes me cringe.
We even owe so much to the LGBT community as well for it even making it out to publication since Nicolaides unfortunately passed away in the middle of writing the book. The artist who helped bring it forward has some
great examples herself that demonstrate what it's like to study with it that really should have been included in the book. The Artist's Way put me in a better mindset to things, though I haven't read it in a while. I haven't done morning pages in a while either but when I was in my residence I was journalling as much as I was drawing, which kind of turned into that in a way. It was half writing what I worked on and how I felt, and half just trailing off into stuff like you would in a morning page.
More recently Madeleine Dore's writings have been a big influence on how I work. Her book "I didn't do the thing today", her podcasts and some of her newsletters have been really insightful things that I've kept close to me the whole time I was in my residence.
One of my main programs that I use for digital works at the moment is Krita. On a previous version of this page I was assuming I'd just be using one program and not looking back to anything else. I used to use AzPainter when I only had a laptop because it was light,easy and felt like an oekaki program, but I've realised how much easier I can sketch on there compared to other programs, so I'm using a mix of that and Krita. I used to use Clip Studio Paint but I find it underpowered and I dislike how they turned their back on everyone using them in the first place by implementing paid subscription.
There's one opinion I hold really dearly about making art and it's that I avoid using the word "style" to describe art. It feels like such a brief surface description, there are so many kinds of elements and ideas that go into the creation of an artwork and "style" isn't enough to accommodate all of them. When people say they want to "find their style" as an artist it sounds more to me they are looking for a brand image. Everyone would be better off if they didn't think about style and focus on what matters which is literally anything else.
I am strongly against censorship and conceding to purity culture in art. Freedom of expression as it's stated in the UDHR should be respected and more people should be aware that it should never be treated as something that can be conveniently disposed of under the excuse of morality or to solve social problems. If exclusionary grifters actually cared about making people feel safer they would be making human rights a priority.
I don't really have an interest in taking 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.
If you read all of this, thank you, I appreciate your effort! If you're looking to support me as an artist in any way I appreciate that so much as well!