2023 Grad Show

Ian Jay Gingco

VCD – Character Design & Illustration

My artistic practice is motivated by creating pieces of work that people can hold and engage with. With my years of working with offset and digital printers, as well as having table top games being a prominent hobby of mine, my interest in creating game pieces with custom artwork to add flavour and personality to this form of entertainment. The different illustrations and story beats that an illustrated game piece can portray to show amazing scenes in different worlds that people engage with when playing with table top games. These scenes are a magical portal to escape with the people you play these games with, and being able to bring these to life that you can touch and play with brings me much joy. Bringing a touch of personality to the games that you play is a great way to break the ice with meeting new people when playing these games at a local game store, and being able to create these gaming pieces for others to create these social bonds and to have something they can covet is what I strive for with every piece I put out there.

Original Character - Kandi When I started my journey at AUArts, I had developed this character. She eneded being the muse for a lot of my skills as a practice stubject for everything. Perspective, lighting, anatomy, you name it.

Original Character- Liquorice After developing Kandi and going through my artistic journey, I eventually started to expand the roster of characters. The challenge was to think of some sort of sweet and make a character out it. Thus Liquorice was born.

Original Character - Gingersnap "Gigi" One of the more recent additions to my "Candy Shop" troope of characters is Gingersnap, or Gigi. Born into a wealthy family, Gigi can be sweet, yet sharp person to deal with. She is an antagonist towards Kandi in this world.

Nico Niiyama - Kiznaiver Fan art of Nico Niiyama from the series "Kiznaiver"

Jellymon - Digimon Ghost Game Fan Art of Jellymon from series "Digimon Ghost Game."

Akai Haato "Haachama" - Hololive Fan art of VTuber Personality Akai Haato from Hololive

Personal Works: my Anime Style

Outside of classes, lectures, and drawing excersizes, I use what I have learned to create pieces in my own style and flavour. Anime and J-Pop culture is a huge inspiration on my work, and I believe the art world needs to take the style a lot more seriously. A lot of the techniques and skills required to render photo realistic images still apply to the highly stylized and poppy work that is in anime. I grow and embrace this style proudly and I encourage anyone who enjoys this kind of work to continue to celebrate it and create it.

Marine Iguana

Marine Iguana - Base

Marine Iguana - Muscle

Marine Iguana - Bone

Marine Iguana - Fit 1

Marine Iguana - Fit 2

Marine Iguana Anthropomorphic

This is was a study to create a fantasy creature mixing an animal and a human being, and deconstruct it from base to muscle to bone and have it be believable.

Goblin The goblin design was influenced by the trope of atheltic jocks, as well as tough kids from stories such as "The Outsiders." Giving the goblins letterman jackets to make them stand out compared to other students in this school dynamic calls back on established high fantasy tropes that goblins are creatres known to stick together and cause trouble for others.

Soldier The soldier falls into the category of student whom is a stickler for the rules. In Japanese high schools, there is a designated group of students who enforce school policies onto the other roudy students. At least, that is what Japanese anime has taught me to believe. This particular soldier character usually is found getting into trouble situations with the schools goblin gang, and is the target of their usual shenannigans.

Faerie The original idea for this character was to go with a school idol of sorts. Someone that all the students just love, and is a model student in every way. However, after revisting shows like "Mean Girls" I figured it would be a little more fun to make this faerie a "queen bee" character. She is the top of the school popularity heirarchy, and thus has the power to tell her "friends" to do things for her. Mischevious faeries are much more fun to play with than those dainty ones.

Zombie The classic zombie. I wanted to be a bit more conceptual here, as zombies are a saturated idea nowadays. The concept here was a student who was very plugged-in to the universe of the internet and wasn't very consistent with their own upkeep. Despite being an undead being, she could easily make herself look presentable to the rest of her student body, but instead she neglects simple upkeep to keep up with the trends online.

Token Fantasy High

This is a series of creature tokens imagined for the popular collectible card game Magic: the Gathering. I created these popular creature tokens used in the game to both bring my own flair to the game, but as well as to explore a different world not usually explored in high fantasy: modern day high school.