My name is Tameka Small and I’m a twenty something Toronto artist currently attending my second year at George Brown College for video game development.
This blog is a means to showcase my art and illustration works through school, as well as through personal studies and art experiments.
I have been using Photoshop for almost 7 years and am comfortable with many paint and illustration programs such as Illustrator, Painter, Sketchbook Pro and Open Canvas. I also have experience with Autodesk 3DS Max and Maya. Web design has been a personal hobby of mine for quite some time, and I am quite comfortable with HTML and CSS.
In terms of art style and subject, character work is my specialty and I can draw in a range of styles from anime to cartoons to realism. I am always open to constructive critique, so feel please free to comment on any of my posts.
Here’s hoping you enjoy your stay at my rather random blog. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.
If you’d like to learn too much about me, then feel free to read on.
A Little History
I’ve been in love with drawing for a very long time. Ever since I watched my first anime at the age of 10, I’ve been doing my best to draw my eyes out. I had pretty much 3 interests at that age: drawing, computers and video games.
On video games and art:
The history of modern video games is pretty much the history of my life. I can’t begin to describe my early childhood, or what it was like having some of my earliest memories being of watching my older brother playing Donkey Kong at the arcade, or going to the house of the awesome kids in the neighbourhood with their Atari system and feeling all kinds of envy. My mother, being the “hip” and “with it” kind, took it upon herself to keep us kids up to speed though. Having our birthdays just a week apart for my older brother and I, we often got combined presents, but rather than being a horrible travesty (what kind of shenanigans can happen when you combine presents for a girl and a boy!?), we got a Nintendo. And a Super Nintendo. And an N64. And a Playstation. Oftentimes I can remember the smell of our living room, and the feel of the controllers when my brother and I played Duck Hunt or Contra, or our favourite, Cabal which we played pretty much religiously. There are times even now, where we still get all nostalgic about our days of shoot ‘em up, alien-destroying, babe-saving, Duke Nukem 64 bliss. When the Playstation came around with it’s mostly single player fare, my brother and I diverged in our gaming tastes. While he stuck with his FPS (I refused to play FPS again without a partner as I had been raised), I moved onto to other genres like point-and-click adventures (oh Kings Quest VII~<3), RPGs and puzzle games.
It was at this time that I tried to make my own video games using RPG Maker 2000 and its ilk. I was convinced at the time that I could do it all, and had even co-opted my sister for help with the story (it was going to be a magical girl game about magical girls… yeah we had our priorities straight!), and while the sprites and other artwork were fun (though difficult… and very ugly), there was no way at the time that I could wrap my brain around coding… or level design, or how you actually make games. Despite spending months on the project, we eventually had to abandon our ambitious little endeavor. I didn’t really think much of it then, and as art had already been a major focus for me, I just continued improving my love for art and my love for computers without really thinking much of making video games again.
I spent years learning about digital art software, starting out with programs like Gimp, Paint Shop Pro and Open Canvas. Getting my own tablet became my ultimate goal, and I got my first tablet when I was just 14 (around the same time I made my first web site). Mind you I don’t really even remember the brand, only that it cost about $30 refurbished and could basically only move my cursor around on screen. Now this may not seem like a lot, but for a kid who was going from trying to colour all of her pictures with just a mouse, it was a godsend! I started an anime club in the last few years of high school, and the same people who knew me throughout middle school as “the girl who draws all the time”, began to know me as that “anime girl who draws all the time” instead. I got my first real tablet at the age of 17, a Wacom Intuos2 that I got on sale because Intuos3 was just coming out, paid for by my meagre savings through my part job at McDonalds. It was from that time that I felt I was doing something I was meant to do for the rest of my life.
Fast forward over ten years later, and art has pretty much become my life. After years of self-study online through forums like Eatpoo and later, communities like Deviantart, and studying art fundamentals at Sheridan college I decided that it was about time to make a career out of the things that I loved, but what career was up in the air for a very long time. Animation, Illustration, Web Design, Sculpture… So many of these paths had things I wanted and things I didn’t, and deciding on one path always seemed like shutting a door in the face of others. In the meantime I become a really good pharmacy technician and enjoyed the high pressure and fast moving environment that kind of job offered, though there was no doubt I would move on to a career more in line with my specific skills. It was at that time, that while I was taking classes in a continuing effort to improve, I accidentally picked up the full time course calender instead of the part-time calender for the next term. I flipped through it anyway, to see what the full-time design classes were like, when to my shock, I saw a listing for Game Development. As in video game development. As in every childhood ambition and dream I ever had, coming crashing back at me as if it had never left. In this sense I had finally found the one area that combined everything I was looking for in a career into one cohesive whole. I applied (though late) immediately.
And here I am, doing my best to further learn and improve in any way to become a successful member of the game creating force at large. If you are still reading this, then kudos to you for sticking through it. I ask that you wish me luck in this challenge. I’m ready for it and looking forward to where this road takes me.
