We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Alexandria Dority. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Alexandria below.

Alexandria , appreciate you joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

From a young age, I have always been interested in drawing. It started off simple, drawing crude imitations of characters I liked from media I was consuming at the time—like the PowerPuff Girls— before it slowly became an active hobby I regularly participated in. I will always consider myself a self-taught artist first and foremost; as I did not have art teachers to guide me on areas to improve. When I first started getting access to the internet, I was seeing a lot of skilled artists post to their social media pages (mostly sites such as Deviantart or virtual pet sites like Mweor) with their most recent art pieces. A lot of the work I saw was significantly more impressive than what I was able to create, a bit intimidating even from sheer skills alone.

However, I did not let that stand in my way as I used it as motivation to learn what I could by either trying to mimic a person’s art style or watching art time-lapse videos to try to gain an understanding of how it was made to begin with. I watched a lot of “how-to” videos on YouTube, such as MarkCrilley, to learn visual shortcuts to map out a drawing and understand how to construct it properly. I probably contributed to a lot of views on his wolf tutorial with how many times I watched it.

As the years went on, I learned a lot when it comes to making art! If I had to start completely from scratch again I think I would tell my younger self to study the basics, such as understanding anatomy and value. It can be a tedious skill to learn but there is only so much you can do with “adding a bunch of colors to make it look pretty” before you realize it doesn’t measure up to professional level art. Once you learn these skills, you’ll start to improve in other areas at a faster rate and produce artwork that not only is clear to read, but looks more professional as well. Joining art focused communities also helped me improve and speed up my learning process a bit. It allowed me to ask fellow artists for feedback or critique on areas that I could improve in.

If you’re not able to afford art school like I did, I definitely suggest reaching out to artists online or using the internet as resource to learn. More often than not, the information you are seeking is free or is reasonably priced.

Alexandria , 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 a recent college graduate looking to get into the animation industry! I’ve always loved animation from a young age, just seeing a series of drawings being able to feel so tangibly alive felt so magical to me.

I currently take art commissions through my social media, artistree.io/midnightsbloom, and provide mostly illustration services such as portraits, character designs, sketches, concept art, and full background focused pieces. I even take some animation focused work from time to time but it will reasonably take longer to produce.

A lot of the time the most requested commissions are character design, where I problem solve with a client to figure out the vision of what they have for a character and I provide the visuals to bring that character to life. A lot of the time, I will provide suggestions to see if that is the direction the client wants to go in with the character, especially regarding the clothing or color palette. Overall, my clients are always happy with the results as I make sure to provide progress every step of the way to ensure the client will be happy with the final results.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

I think not supporting Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) for starters. The way AI works is that it has to pull from existing media data in order to generate media. The majority of data that AI uses does not get permission, copyright, or pay a licensing fee to the original creators to use their work to train their AI datasets in the first place. With the way AI works now, there is nothing stopping it from seeing a picture of one of your family members and using it to create some amalgamation that puts them in a compromising position; all without your permission.

With how quickly AI is evolving, big companies are looking to incorporate AI into their business so they can fire a massive number of people to save money, all the while using the work from the people that they had fired to train their AI and keep their pockets lined big time.

I understand the appeal of AI to the average person: giving someone the sense that they “created” something that looks good with little to no effort when they believed their entire lives that could never create something in the first place. The reality is, anyone can create. How good it will be depends on the amount of time and effort you dedicate towards improving.

On another note, AI is really bad for the environment and uses up a ton of energy and resources. Probably shouldn’t rely on it too much either.

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

I think the most rewarding thing about being an artist is being able to bring something to life with your own hands despite the blood, sweat, and tears it took to make and getting to feel that sense of pride and accomplishment afterwards. A great thing about art is that it is something you get to keep learning and growing from; there’s no “end” that makes someone reach their full potential with making art; the only limit is how much you’re willing to learn from. The more you keep going with your artistic journey, you get to look back see how much you have improved.

And there’s so many different mediums to choose to learn from too! Be it traditional art with watercolors or acrylic paints, sculpting, using digital art software, learning to animate, a different technique etc. you can keep learning throughout your entire career when it comes to art and I think in a way, that’s a bit of a gift.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Avdority.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/midnightsbloom/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/avdority
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKB6KiInloaVBaNVGU_ln1w

Image Credits

Arcane poster was created in collaboration with Alexander Kaufmann.