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Interview with
Igino Giordano
Featured Artist for February 2001
Would you introduce yourself and give a little personal background?
My name is Igino Giordano and I like to talk to the moon and eat daisies. I'm quite a common guy, so I don't know much else to say.
How long have you been an artist? How long have you been creating fantasy art?
I wouldn't call myself an artist; I started to doodle fantasy related stuff about six years ago. Very childish at this time. Seriously painting started in 1998 when I did my first approaches to oil paint and later watercolors.
Have you had any formal training in the fine arts?
Formal training - like someone else told me how do do these things? No. But I often take part in art classes, which means I try to improve my skills by drawing nudes.
What are your biggest artistic influences and inspirations?
My inspirations are coming from my everyday life, my environment - first and last. But there are thousand other things like music, fellow artists, nature, renaissance and baroque artists, comics, current fantasy and science fiction illustrators and so on.
Can you describe your creative process - how you come up with ideas for a new drawing and how you take those ideas and create a finished piece of art.
I take a blank sheet of paper, throw it to the floor and make it filthy dirty to get an interesting background texture. ... No seriously, I start with sketches, like every one else does. Just to note the idea. These roughs are mostly tumbnail sized doddles, decipherable by me alone. I pic out the composition which suits me most and start with more detailed sketches. Right at the moment I got the expression I intented, I start to color the whole thing. From this point on, it really depends on which medium I have choosen. And this depends on the subject again ...
Do you have a favorite fantasy artist or an artist you admire?
One? I have tons of favourite artists! And I love all of them. I love them for their personal strengths, their skills, for the uniqueness in their work or just for the emotion they seem to put into each and every piece of art.
What advice would you give to young artists who are just starting out?
Well, if you, the young artist, want to live on creating fantasy, science fiction art or whatever, I would advice you to ... hmm... um, well, if you really want this, then you have already done the first step to get there. Everyone can draw, every one is able to paint. This is what I have learned from life. It just takes time to become good in it, but I guess there's no difference trying to learn anything else.
If you could be a character from a fantasy novel, movie or game, who would you be?
Thank you, I have enough with my own character, another one and I'm becoming a multiple personality.
Finally, what cartoons did you watch as a kid?
I loved "Sabre Rider And The Star Sheriffs", "Captain Future", "Nils Holgerson" and "Biene Maya".
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