We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kristina Orlova a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Kristina, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

Throughout my years as an artist, I have always aspired to further my technical abilities as well as develop a unique style.
One of the key things that helped me in my learning process is studying things that I enjoy or challenges me as an artist. I enjoy experimenting with my work and trying new brushes as well as different rendering techniques.

If I could go back with what I know now, I would have prioritized learning the fundamentals and would have done more studies as well as took my time to develop my work fully. I think patience and persistence are two skills that I find most essential when working on an art piece. I find that having patience and working slowly helps me grasp the fundamentals easier and gives me more time to figure out the common questions I have when working- such as where the lighting is and what it would look like on clothing or armor. On top of that, I think persistence is very important to continue working through a piece even if it isn’t working in the beginning. I notice my biggest breakthroughs were on my most difficult pieces. I also think that it is helpful to take breaks when I am hitting a point where I am not sure how to approach the piece. When I take a break and come back to the piece, it gives me a brand new perspective.

In the beginning stages of my art journey, I had issues with many of the fundamentals and only drew faces at a 3/4’s angle from imagination. I spent years and years drawing these faces, which helped me improve slightly, but when it came to pushing forward with my art- my biggest obstacle was fear. I was afraid of learning new things. Later on I found an interest in live-streaming my art and challenged myself with seeing how fast I could draw. At this time, I had begun experimenting with painting, color, poses and backgrounds but they were not very good due to my lack of experience tackling the fundamentals as well as not using much reference. I think my learning process would have been quicker if I used more reference and did a couple of studies before tackling a big project.

Kristina, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am an Estonian artist in Ireland who enjoys creating dark fantasy characters. I have been an artist for around 10 years.

As a young child, I was always curious and creative. During my school years, I would come home and have free time after doing homework so I would play around on my favorite childhood game, Wonderland Online, and I would take screenshots of my character and go into ms paint and draw on new clothes with the pencil tool. Later on, I began creating my own little comics with the sprite sheets of the game. This activity gave me a strong passion to create characters and stories- so much so, that I had made over a thousand comics at the time. This interest in story building pushed me to also try creating small games in RPG Maker VX ace using art assets drawn with a mouse. I also have dabbled in traditional art when I was younger, but had fallen in love with digital art. One of my earliest memories in becoming an artist was through my online friend who did digital art, she was really good and inspired me to start – I remember thinking “woah I wish I could draw like that”. My parents gifted me a cheap office tablet for Christmas earlier that year and it felt like it couldn’t have come at a better time. I spent around three years drawing on my tablet before I realized that pen pressure existed.

One of my biggest inspirations growing up were games that I used to play, such as : Wonderland Online, Tera Online and Vindictus. I absolutely love the music, the vast beautiful landscapes and the cool variety of clothing and armor designs. I have always had an appreciation for different themes and styles, but the main theme that inspires me the most in my art is dark fantasy. In my work, I enjoy rustic and organic textures. I love working with lots of details and tackling new ideas as well as creating unique outfits and an interesting story. Overall though. throughout the years I have noticed that I enjoy trying different things and bouncing from one way of doing things to another- a lot of my work can be very colorful and different in some ways but I would say the one thing that stays consistent is the dark fantasy theme.

The one thing that I am most proud of would be my dedication towards my goals. When I was 15, I was very fortunate to get a chance to attend a six-week Game design course. This experience gave me a newfound realization that game design was something that I wanted to pursue at the time. I was lucky enough to enroll in the course part-time and learn new things about creating games- one of them being concept art. I was so passionate about game design that I attended this course while still attending my high school. I would go to school for 8 hours during the day and attend my game design course during the evening/night. Later on, I discovered that concept art and character design could be a possible career, which became my primary goal and focus ever since.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is the journey. I enjoy knowing that I can never stop learning and that with each piece of work that gets created will come a little bit of knowledge and experience. I like the process of creating my work and how there are so many ways of approaching a piece. There are many instances where I will start with a sketch for a character and in the middle of the process, I will change direction or create multiple instances of a piece and explore it further.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

After graduating high school and my game design course, I attended a university to further my study in Animation and Game Design. During this time, I went through a pretty harrowing experience. It led me down a dark path in my life that I struggled at moving past. The only thing that helped distract me was working on and improving my art. I started taking art more seriously and made a goal for myself to push myself as much as possible as a way to cope with the negative emotions I was feeling. It was while going through this difficult time that I met two individuals in my life: my husband and my best friend, both who supported me and inspired me a lot to push my art further. With my best friend, I was inspired by the fact that we both had a burning passion in our respective fields and we motivated each other to improve and succeed. I would see all the hard work she would put in her assignments and i would be inspired to push myself even harder. As a result of working constantly, I saw huge improvement- not only that, but I unlocked a new appreciation for art. I learned to push forward and I grew so much more as an artist in the process as well as in character.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kristinaorlovaart/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSrNTqLhGS0mCkwyQ-_lxSQ/videos
• Other: Artstation : https://www.artstation.com/kristinaorlova