Hi Sheezy! Remembered this site has journals and started browsing them on a whim, and saw this meme and thought why not :)

RULES:
Answer each question in as much detail as you like. Skip anything you don't know or would prefer not to answer.

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How many usernames have you had? (You don't have to share them!)

That's a good question! I just ran through in my head as many of them as I could think of and counted 18! But honestly I tend to keep things pretty simple and use either "captainharrie", "harrie", or "diosmaden".

What does your current username mean?

It's just my name! Diosmaden is the name of the setting my stories take place in, which is not a particularly elaborate setting in terms of world building so it's named for the diosma flower which mean "your simple elegance charms me" + den, as in place. Being entirely literal with its etymology it actually means "heavenly scented valley" though, which is a little funny.

What is the first program you used to make digital art?

MS Paint babey!!!!!!! here's one of my favourite drawings from when I was about 11:

Where did you first start posting your art?

In a thread on Animal Crossing Community Dot Com called Who Likes To Draw? when I was 11, which is where I ultimately learnt about deviantART.

What is the first piece of media you drew fanart for?

Who knows! I think it really depends on your definition of fanart. I got started drawing by taking my favourite book covers and trying to copy what I was looking at, so if that counts the series I remember doing this with the most is the Dragon Riders of Pern books—I remember copying Steve Weston's cover for Dragonflight, and David Roe's cover for Dragonsong. But in terms of art made knowingly as a fan that wasn't just copying what I liked... I don't know! Probably The Legend of Zelda. I first played them when I was 5.

Who was your first self-insert/persona/fursona? What did they mean to you?

When I was about 13, 14, I would quite literally draw myself if I was in that universe, isekai'd style, for my favourite media at the time—I wasn't really making a character and I also wasn't really making a story, I was just a quizilla kid LOL

So sona stuff wasn't something I ever really had. A few years ago I made Harebell though, who is my self insert into Diosmaden, and who I refer to as my "demonsona" from time to time, so I'd say they're really my first and only sona.

I'm not particularly into vtubing in the sense that I don't really... know any... so the vtuber world is a complete mystery to me. But I'm:

1. not very comfortable with my face, and also not keen on having that up online anyway
2. a big fan of tinkering with complex things for the sake of creating fun effects
3. someone who streams from time-to-time
   So, Harebell also allows me to play around with vtuber tools like Hönk! Which is sadly no longer being maintained, but the full release of Veadotube will include the lipsync feature that I like from Hönk, and I'm very excited to play around with toiys when that releases! So mostly Harebell just exists to let me play around with things like this.

What phases/styles has your art gone through? (e.g. an anime era, a watercolour phase?)

Oh all sorts. I'm going to talk foreverrrr about this one strap in my lovelies and let's take a walk through my artistic journey <3

for many years my art was... scribbly. I began with paper and pencil and later coloured pencils, and honestly I was pretty good for 11-13 years old!

But I eventually started to also draw on the computer directly with a mouse:

Drawing curved lines with a mouse is difficult, so to compensate I would zoom way in and just scribble the line I wanted to draw.

When I was given a tablet at around 13ish, that habit of scribbling my lines had been really deeply ingrained into me and as a result pretty much all the art I made as an adolescent was simply put, scribbly.

Some time in march 2015, I downloaded ace attorney on my 3ds on a whim because it was on sale or something. At the time I was figuring out a lot of stuff about my identity, I got extremely attached to the characters Franziska von Karma and Maya Fey who nowadays are one of the most popular ships in the fandom but at the time there was very little and nobody could agree on the ship name. But I spent like the next 2 years drawing ship art of them and figuring out that I am a lesbian, so now they're one of the most popular ships I think, and I'm gay.

But more to the point, my art went through a lot of changes in this time. I became frustrated with the messiness of my art and started really focusing on being more intentional with the lines I was drawing. My art started to get a lot cleaner, with a big focus on shapes and fun contrasts between straight vs curved lines and sharp vs soft corners. Eventually I was so focused on shapes that I stopped drawing with lines and started just drawing the shapes! I think there was a lot of charm to the shape-iness of my 2016 art.

And the end of 2016 was a big moment for me, I sort of divide my art journey in my head between "before 2016" and "after 2016"—2016 is when I began to push myself to have more direction and intentionality in my art, and on the 18th of september 2016, I created [Bear Noises], the first OC I had created in years. The following september I would make Tempest, the protagonist of my now webcomic Heart of the Storm, and that means that that first september marks the beginning of my shift from being primarily a fanartist into being primarily and original story artist.

After that, Octo Expansion came out for Splatoon 2 and I got pearlina hysteria (stan off the hook) and I started drawing these low effort pixelated brush lineless splatoon drawings. In becoming more intentional with my art, I'd become kind of a perfectionist, and it was fun to do something completely different and kind of messy. As time went on this style became more refined (I actually eventually started drawing a nuzlocke comic with this style even), but it was good for me to get messy with it again.

In late 2020 - early 2021 I had another little lesbian hysteria phase. By this point I had actually started to shift more towards original art and had begun writing Heart of the Storm, but towards the end of the year I watched Tangled the Series with my friends and came out of it rotating Cass around in my head like the microwave.

I drew a few different pieces, and I'd been drawing with this brush for a few years at this point and recently at that point started to draw bigger bolder lines with it and drew this particular piece, to which one person commented that they thought it was drawn with a brush pen at first. And I don't have any of it on hand unfortunately, but there was a period of time in around 2016 where I would exclusively doodle in my sketchbook using a brush pen.

Which got me thinking! And well, now my art looks like this:

What/who do you think has influenced your art style the most?

I mean a lot of things really, but I think the biggest thing that drives the direction I take my art now is a desire to capture a sense of tangibility. Around 10 years ago I was all about pleasing shapes, now I'm all about something you feel like you could touch, or that you could rotate, that occupies a physical space and also Feels. A sense of weight, a sense of texture, something tangible. Although my art has gotten a lot more realistic with this goal, it's not so much about reaching for realism as it is about capturing how something feels to the point that it's tangible, if that makes sense.

What/who inspired you to be an artist?

I was drawing from a very young age and very encouraged to keep doing it, so mostly it was "I enjoy it and people say I'm good at it". That moment when Nausicaä enters her secret garden is when it kind of clicked in my child head that these were drawings that someone made and you can tell stories with them, though, so I think that's a pretty important moment for me. I'd have been around 8 then I think?

What tools are integral to your current workflow? (e.g. Programs, brushes, references.)

Clip Studio Paint babey!!! I break down the brushes I use and where to get them on my website. I also use 3d models for references a lot, a lot of them I make myself but others I get from the CSP asset store. Cant beat a real photo though, so I'm a big fan of x6ud's human and animal photo reference search with a rotateable model that helps you find the exact angle/pose you're after, and referenceangle's very similar tool for human faces specifically.

What improvements have you made recently?

Last couple years I've gotten a lot better at drawing faces :)

What steps would you like to take in the future?

I'm trying to get better at clothes! I'm like, okay at them, but well as I explained above I'm trying to capture the way things feel in my art and I never feel like I quite capture the weightiness of fabric.

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Thanks for reading this far! If you did, well then tag you're it :)