Featured Artist: Nikury
Q) Where are you from?
I'm originally from Finland, but have been living in the Netherlands for almost two years now.
Q) How would you best describe your art style?
Oh, this is a hard question! I'm into many different art styles and mediums and firmly believe in not restricting myself from one if I feel like trying out a different art style or medium as I believe this is good for my artistic development and also makes me happy. I'm not a big fan of hyper realistic art though so all of my artworks are stylized, cartoony or cute.
Q) Where do you find your inspiration when creating your art?
I find inspiration everywhere! I don't need to look for inspiration, but instead have too many ideas all the time. Most of my inspiration comes from the nature, from the games that I play and from the inspiring fellow artists who I follow in social media.
Q) When did you know you wanted to make a career in the art world?
I've wanted to be an artist for as long as I can remember and loved drawing when I was a kid. Later in life I faced lots of hardships. These hardships and the feeling that my art is not good enough led me into a dark path of not making almost any art for quite a few years. Then something great happened. I got an opportunity to take a long break from work, backed my bags and traveled around Southeast Asia for 8 months. Suddenly, I was filled with joy and happiness and slowly started to also draw again and realized how big source of happiness art is for me. I made a promise to myself to continue doing art, flew back to Finland, quit my job and applied to study game art in university, games being my other passion in life.
I just graduated last Christmas and started my own one man art company this year and even though the journey of getting to the point where I am now has not been easy and there's still hard days, I'm happy because I can now, and hopefully also in the future, do what I love as a living.
Q) How does art impact your day to day life or your impression of the world as a whole?
Like mentioned in the previous question art has a big impact on my happiness. I've also noticed that I'm all the time in the look for nice references when I'm outside. At the moment I'm really into plants and find myself stopping to marvel all the pretty plants that I see along the way when I'm walking outside.
Q) What does a day of creating artwork look like for you and how to you start your creative process?
I usually like to start my day slowly with a big cup of coffee or tea browsing through social media to wake up and get inspired. I'm working on one piece usually more than one day and start the work process looking at my sketches or mood boards that I've gathered in Pinterest and make fresh sketches of the idea that I have in mind. I do both traditional art pieces as well as digital art and I use both mediums simultaneously. I usually do the first sketches traditionally on a piece of paper and then refine the sketch digitally. After that I make the final piece either using traditional mediums like ink or watercolors, or digitally using tools like Photoshop.
Q) When you're not creating, what do you like to do with your time?
When I'm not creating art you can mostly find me behind my computer gaming ..or outside looking at the pretty plants and harassing the cute neighbor cats, haha. :) One of my favorite games is World of Warcraft (WoW). I admire how Blizzard has built the worlds in WoW and how the different continents make you feel when you combine the stunning game art with the beautiful music and excellently built worlds.
Q) What artist (either current or past) do you most admire and why?
There are a lot of beautiful fellow artists that I admire, but if I need to choose only one it's definitely Audra Auclair. I've been following her for a few years now and she always amaze me with how hard working artist she is and how far she has come in art and life. I also love the beautiful and unique women portraits that she has made and her ability to always pick such beautiful color combinations and the pretty, artistic line work that is seen in many of her artworks.
Q) What's the best advice that's been given to you as an artist?
Work hard, do not give up, enjoy the journey and believe in yourself and in your abilities as an artist and you will reach your artistic goals eventually no matter how far you might feel those goals are at this moment.
Follow her on Instagram @ Nikury_Art . You can check out her website here.
