 Hello Kim my friend. How are you? I'm barely alive. Yet I live again. You've been so busy. I can't believe you've done this month. It's been kind of hectic. But before we go into that, my name is Kim Dias Holm, also called Ungeher Holm. And I make art for free youth. And with me I have my friend, Scott Kristensava, who also makes art. He makes fantastic art. Don't think you think. Donna painted my nails today. And I forgot to paint mine. So it's left over from the Inferno Festival, still shining. What was it, like a silverish? This was gold. And it turned silverish. And yeah, but it's a good nail polish. Expensive nail polish. So yeah, so I didn't know what we were drawing today. And so I went on to your community and I looked to see for the votes. And it was either video game character or Greek gods. So I was like, huh, I'll pick video game character. And I was like, nope, Greek gods won. So I looked up Greek gods. I was looking at like the 12 main ones. And I was like, I think I like Athena the best. And so I was looking up essentially reference for costumes and whatnot. And I came across a statue that was built for the Academy of Science in Athens. And like 18 something. And I loved it. Look at that. Isn't that pretty? So I was like, I'll just paint that statue. That's that's that looks like fun. So like, I want to now go there and paint it in my journal. But this will have to do in the meanwhile. But so would it? Yeah, I figured you're always almost halfway done. And yeah, I mean, you clearly see which God or God is this is. Take a guess. It's obvious. You're going to do the God of War. Aris, Aris, Aris. Yeah, Aris. No, I'm not going to do it. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. He's a bit of a dickhead. I mean, he really is. He's thought a very venerated God in the Greek pantheon. He gets a much bigger role later. But in the Greek stuff, no, no, no, not that much. Oh, okay. Okay, another guess. Anybody else? Let's see what someone else asks. But is God or God is associated with war, though? And is associated with Aris? I don't know my Greek gods that well. I was just looking them all up. You suggested this. It's all your fault. Well, someone else said Athena. Not Athena? No. Mars is the Roman version of Aris, so not Mars. Yeah, he just said Mars is the Roman version of Aris. So they all have Roman versions. Okay. So in early Greek and in late Roman periods, this God or goddess was associated with war. In the middle, not so much. All right. Donna, no. It's one of the most popular ones, probably the most depicted, maybe of them all. I mean, you didn't go straight to Zeus, did you? No, he's such a dickhead. He is truly awful. More often depicted than Zeus, I would say. Apollo? Not Apollo, not Hera. Okay. Probably originating outside of Greece and in the Middle East. The question is which God or goddess from Greek mythology? I'm just teasing everyone. You are. Someone said Aphrodite. Yes, we are drawing Aphrodite. And she gets depicted as the birth of Venus all the time, which is probably the most, probably the single most most popular Greek God image, I would say. But her story is really interesting. And, you know, I could have picked a bunch of others. I could have picked Hera, I could have picked Hecate, I could have picked Hermes or Aedes and Pluto, or so many fun gods. But Aphrodite is really interesting. That is fantastic. And so I was thinking about it. I was like, I would not attempt to try to draw a Greek God out of my head because I don't know what kind of costumes they wear. And I'm like, you can just do that with impunity. And as part of that, a little bit of, I don't care. I don't care if it's accurate or as part of it, the fact that maybe you've done some research on it and it's stored in that big brain of yours. Scott, I'm going to tell you a secret. And don't tell anyone. Don't even tell the audience. Okay, so you did do some research. Okay, good. I don't feel... Yeah. I used reference as often as I can, but I don't really stick as closely to the references you do. But I use it for all the symbols and also to... I spent the day trying to read up on Aphrodite, so that I will not mess up. And hopefully I... Yeah, so I don't know all these things. It's, you know, I'm... I think you heard me for a loop when we were live a couple of lives ago and someone asked you to draw Zeus with a tutu, throwing a lightning bolt at a sadder. I was like, and you just did it. Now, granted, that could have been any old white guy, you know, with a tutu and a lightning bolt. So, but it was just funny. It was just so... I was wondering, do you just store that information? Are you making a best estimate? Well, there are some things I do store. I could, you know, draw Zeus with his most known features because that's not that difficult. He has a beard and one of those Victor crowns or leaf thingamabobs and he has a lightning bolt that he throws. That's not that hard. And there are some gods and goddesses that are more known to me. Aphrodite, I've been interested in for a long time because she seems to be, and this is all, you know, theory, academic theory, not my theory, but she seems to be an evolution or a relation of the Sumerian and Babylonian goddess Ishtar and Inanna. And I absolutely love Ishtar and Inanna. Oh, that's amazing. So do you know the story of the birth of Aphrodite? You know, the birth of Venus painting by Botticelli? Yeah. Venus is stepping out of this clam shell. Yeah. You know why she's stepping out of it? Does it have anything to do with Poseidon? No, no, no, no. And now don't laugh. It has to do with Uranus. Not Uranus, but Uranus. And you said not to laugh too, sorry. So Uranus is one of the first generations of titans or gods. And he is sort of the, and this is just one of many different tales, but it's one that I like. He is a sort of a sky god thingy, and he is married to Gaia, the Earth, and he just won't stop copulating with her. So they never stop doing it, the sky and the Earth. And at some point, their son, Cronus, who will get murdered by Zeus later, sneaks up with a sickle and castrates his father, Uranus, and throws his nobler parts in the sea. And from the sea home where the old cock and balls hit the sea, he springs for Aphrodite. Really? And on this boat of seafoam or a shell or whatever, she lands at the city of Kythara, where her cult starts. So she's not a part of the Pantheon, Greek gods. She's a part of the Pantheon, but she's not a part of the earlier Pantheon, which were inherited from the Mycenaeans and from the Minoans, but she is a part of the Greek Pantheon. And the theory for why she lands in Kythara and why she has her cult there is because the Phoenicians had a trade city there. They had a colony there. And the Phoenicians bring the alphabet to the Greeks. And it's not unreasonable to think that they also brought a goddess. Interesting. It's weird that people can bring a goddess from one place to another. It's just amazing. Well, they brought the stories and they brought the worship, the images and the rituals. And when you start using someone else's written language, you know, there is a non-zero chance that you're taking some other elements as well. And there are so many similarities between the tales of Ishtar and Inanna and Astarita, which is the Phoenician version, and the later Aphrodite. So we sort of assume that they are the same. Yeah. And it's funny because I am half Assyrian and we never, you know, you're half Assyrian probably. Assyrian, yeah, you know, which is Babylonian, you know, Mesopotamian, you know. And but those were the, my ancestors were the indigenous people of that area. And those were their gods, yet none of our modern-day Assyrians, nothing either. They didn't even talk about those gods. Like we do, you know, like we just converted Christianity 2000 years ago or whatever. And that was it. Well, in Syria, it's a majority Muslim country and there are some Christian and other religions as well. But I don't know how it is for Syrians, but for instance, for Persians in Iran and for the Persian regime in Iran, and also for the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, the old, kind of like Norway took the Viking mythology in order to start our nation-building, those old tales of gods and goddesses, of heathen gods and goddesses are a part of their nation-building. So you will see the priest regime in Iran very proudly display the ruins of Persepolis and the heritage from the Achaemenid Empire and stuff like that, including the tales of, for instance, the Book of Kings, which is the Persian historical fictional or mythological poetry that starts in the Soroastrian and ancient mythological age and goes all the way down to the Muslim age. Yeah. Well, it is a part of their, but you know, Syria is different and I don't know how. Well, this is what my family still holds on to. Yeah. This, the winged lion. So they always have these in their house, you know? Yeah. That is a mythological pre-Christian, pre-Muslim symbol, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. So they still have that, which I think is kind of cool. And right now, I am drawing the bearded Aphrodite, which is a version we have forgotten a lot about, but that was really important in, I mean, from pre-Greek times to later Roman times. And it was basically Aphrodite, but with a beard. And she was different from Aphrodite, which was Aphrodite, but lifting up her skirt, which she sometimes had, and showing a boner underneath. That was the nail version. So I thought we wouldn't do that version here because we like to continue streaming. This is a family-friendly... I mean, the naked bearded goddess of love is family-friendly. Yeah. So I wish I could sculpt. I am just absolutely fascinated with sculpture. Yeah. And when I go to museums like the Louvre, the Met or something like that, I just love sketching the sculptures. I just think it's just the way the light changes it. Light doesn't hit a painting and change it. You can't walk around a painting and get a unique perspective on it. And you can with a sculpture. Definitely. So the amount of things that you went out and did this on the last 30 days is mind-boggling. How are you holding up? I'm not holding up. That's the truth. I'm falling apart. It's been almost a week since the Inferno Festival and I'm still not quite alive yet. Yeah. And I'm almost falling asleep all through the day. I'm sorry, but I'm really happy that you went out and you did that. I think those are wonderful experiences. Yeah. So basically what happened was that I went to the Inferno Festival, which is the Extreme Metal Festival, and I was supposed to do a sort of a Lovecraft reading show type thing together with a fabulous artist called Kostin Kirinu from Romania. And I was supposed to do daily Ink Monster live shows, and I was supposed to go and draw the concerts. And I traveled down to Oslo one day before, or two days before, in order to fix any last-minute things that weren't fixed before we started. And I had been sort of hiding off a flu or a cold for a few days, and I saw my friend Zbigniew Bielak, who is a fantastic Polish artist who has worked with bands like Ghost and lots of other things. And so instead of doing my preparations on the Tuesday night, I said, I'll do it tomorrow, and I'll just relax a bit with Bielak and have fun, because we all deserved to just relax. And he was setting up, I had set up my exhibition, and he was setting up his, and we were listening to music and talking, we were doing basically what we do now, except not drawing. And that was wonderful. And then I went to sleep not too late, and I slept well all through the night without kids waking me or anything like that. And then probably the adrenaline of the past few days managed to fall down, and I woke up with a fever. And I hadn't, I wasn't done preparing for anything. So yeah, fun times. So the Lovecraft show was the first thing where I was reading four stories, but I wanted to memorize them so well that I could just look down at the page, and then know which paragraph I was on, and then just recite it without having to read everything. And I was, and especially the end, I wanted to just memorize everything. I worked so hard on that. And full of painkillers and fever still, I went out, and I didn't remember a single word. My mind was just blank all through the show. And it was fantastic. It was so amazing. And Kostin made so magnificent music, and people were spellbound and tranced. And a few of them said that when they walked out in the streets afterwards, the world didn't seem real. Which is, which is exactly what we were aiming for. Couldn't be better. And no one noticed the times when I was reading up from the stories, and I forgot where I was, so I read the same paragraph twice. No one noticed. And then, and during that, I, for the last story, I had costume changes and everything. And for the last story, I had a bowl of green and black theater makeup that I started smearing into my face. And I got a little too excited when doing that. So I managed to smear it into my eyes and my contact lenses. So when I was done with the show, I had green eyes. Oh, gosh. And, yeah, so, and I weren't smart enough to figure out that I could buy new contact lenses before the day after, where just, you know, my eye was completely red, except the color of it was green. So it was a good look. And then, you know, as long as that made you happy, I'm happy. Yeah. And it was, it was so fun and so painful. And yeah, loved it. And the people seem to love it. And oh, good. Then it was just drawing daily ink monsters with a crowd and drawing the concert and trying to survive. And the fever died down on the second day of the festival. So after that, it was just a little bit on and off, but mostly, mostly okay. That's amazing. Well, Donna and Bethany have been moderating and answering all of the questions while we're rambling on. Let me ask Donna, is there any questions we should be answering? Oh, everybody's painting and drawing along with us this Saturday morning. That's great. That is amazing. I love that. One question they had was, how did we find our photo references? Okay. Go. You first. Okay. So for me, I first, I googled what are Greek gods? Then you googled what are statues? Yeah. Then you googled what are photos and what is Google? What would look good? No, I just read through what each one was and I think I just liked Athena the best. Then I googled Athena. I would say a good 60% of the images were AI generated. I just didn't want that. Basically, the way I was seeing it was, I was just a pretty woman with helmet. I was like, eh, that's kind of boring. Then just one of the images was of a statue in Athens from the Academy of Sciences. I was like, I like that. That would be a lot of fun to draw. Basically, that was it. That was my thought process was, what am I going to draw? Look it up. I'm hoping that the future Google searches can scrub AI images. You would have the option to say, I don't want to see AI images. Essentially, that's what I did. Yeah, I mean, mine was a little bit different. First of all, I've read a few books on Greek mythology and stuff, but I never remember anything. So I always have to do my research again and again. But the first thing I did was read through the Wikipedia article, which is always a good place to start with these things. Then I watched a 16-minute video about Aphrodite by Overly Sarcastic Productions, which is very fun. Then I watched another 20-minute long video by Crecgan Ford, which is much more academic. Then I watched a 45-minute long video by the archaeologist Bethany Hughes, all of them about Aphrodite. Then I started googling different images based on what I found interesting there. Bearded Aphrodite, we have this fantastic image of the bearded Aphrodite here. I like that. Then we have Aphrodite with snakes, which I like. That sort of is a link to Inanna and Ishtar, often portrayed holding snakes. Then this one, you see that she has a rack to hold a weapon, and she was holding probably a spear. That is Aphrodite Aurea, which is the Spartan Aphrodite. The Spartans were among the first of the Greek city-states to import the cult of Aphrodite. Their Aphrodite was a warrior Aphrodite. The other city-states thought, no, that's not fitting. Women, warriors! How barbaric! Also, when you google Greek gods, you basically have two things that can make you skip the AI art. That is, if you put in the word statue, or if you put in the word vase, and the statue Athenas or Aphrodites are very different from the vase ones. The vase ones are more clothed, the statue ones are the nudes. Those nudes were controversial in ancient Greece because to portray the female body as something naked and delightful and sexual was a big no-no. It was a male body that should be naked, delightful and sexual. Not females. They were dirty. Females should cover up. Men should change. It's sort of for the same reason as women should cover up in Christian culture. It's that the women were considered the property of the man. So you had to hide the goods of your property. The Greek philosophers wrote about how improper it was for Athena to be both the goddess of love and of lust and of war, and stuff like that. That's what they made her into different goddesses even. So you have a lot of different Athenas. Athenas, Aphrodites, based on the philosophers not thinking that mixing love and lust and war and all those things was proper. But even though she was controversial, she was one of the few gods that were celebrated and worshipped as a part of everyday life all over the Greek world. You wouldn't need to ever worship to Hephaestus if you weren't a smith. No one seems to have worshipped Ares. He was just a stupid angry guy that created wars or that created the wars that Aphrodite didn't create. And Athena was the patron goddess of Athens, therefore the name. You didn't care that much unless you were a strategist or a seeker of knowledge or something, then maybe, but otherwise you didn't have to care. You had to care about views and then people chose to care about Athena, Aphrodite. That's why some of the philosophers created this more divine Athena that was all the noble love stuff, and then they created Athena. I say Athena every time, but I mean Aphrodite. Okay, that just confused me. I'm sorry. They created Aphrodite Pandemos, which means Aphrodite of all the people, Pandemos, and that was the naughty Aphrodite of all the yucky, lusty, all the yucky parts that they didn't like. Yeah, so yeah, that was noble. Bearded Athena, I don't know quite how she was integrated into this all, but there are from the very early Inanna and Ishtar cults, there are traditions of the priests of Inanna and Ishtar being either transsexual or transgender, or at least appearing in the other genders' clothes. Maybe a gender fluid type of thing, too. Yeah, and there are, yeah, there's a lot of these things that also seem to have continued or evolved with Aphrodite. Yeah, now it's your turn to hold a lecture about Athena. That's funny because it was like, I googled it, I googled what? I read a book, I watched videos, and now I'm gonna do a dissertation. Yeah, it's so funny how different we are, you know, and yet so alike. I love that. Yeah, definitely. Shall I do the dissertation on Athena? You can, yeah. I have so many friends who can info-dump on certain things, and I don't know if I know anything to the level to where I could talk about it for more than two minutes. So I'm always impressed. The important part here is that I make shit up. But usually I remember enough small parts that the stuff I make up isn't completely inaccurate. So it sort of works. But the reason why I have to do all this research is I've researched it many times, but I need to re-research it in order to figure out what I've made up and what is actually something I've read somewhere. So that's the reason why I'm able to talk about these things is that I lack the morals of an academic. I get it right once in a while, sometimes. Do you know the birth of Athena? I don't. That's different from the birth of... Wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on, hold on. Was Athena the one that sprouted fully formed with armor from Zeus's head? Yes, she was. I did catch that while I was wikipedia-ing. Yeah, she was. And do you know of her shield? I do not. You have drawn her shield? Donna says there's a question, yeah? Okay, let them say about the shield and then I'll ask. Go ahead. The shield is the head of Medusa, which is a Perseus that gives it to Athena for having helped murder Medusa in her sleep, as one does. That's right, because we have a replica of the Parthenon here in Nashville, believe it or not, with a giant... Of course you have. Of course we do. Of course, in Nashville. As one does. Why wouldn't Nashville have a replica of the Parthenon? I mean... It is, it's huge, it's gorgeous, and there's a 20-foot Athena statue with on her shield is Medusa, so that makes a lot of sense. And you can barely see it in this one, but that's amazing, I didn't know that. I just thought it was decorative. But okay, so what was the question? They want to know, one question was to you, Kim, how did you find your art style? That's always a difficult question to answer because I don't know when I... I don't know what my art style is. Yeah. I draw what I think is fun, and then I get back to these... I've always been notoriously curious about art and art styles, so when I see an artist I like, I used to just basically learn how to draw like them and try to analyze their art and then integrate parts of that into what I do. And through this all, I've always gotten back to these elements that seem to make my art mine, which is the shadow, the ink spots, the broken line work, the messiness, which are all just things that I like that I enjoy. It isn't... I never sat down and developed an art style, but I always had these elements that I... that made me like my art when I succeeded at them. So for instance, there's always a fight in me between wanting to draw more primitive and more simplistic and more messy on one side and wanting to draw more technical on the other side. And the thing I notice is that when I pale on the side of too primitive, I still like my art mostly. When I pale on the side of too realistic or too technical, I think my art is boring. So I have a natural inclination that goes towards the primitive, but isn't quite... It is not quite... I need to go towards the realistic, but not too far because then I don't like my art anymore. And that's sort of how it's been all the while. It is experiment with everything, and when you don't like the results, do something else. When you like the results, try it again. And it's not... If you can replicate it. Yeah. And that being said, I have developed art styles for projects. I've developed cartoony art styles and I've developed a specific comic book art styles and all of those stuff, but the parts that I like, those are the parts that I still do in my art. Yeah. And there's a huge range there from the most primitive to things that are halfway sophisticated. Yeah. I always say that you take the parts, the things that you love about different artists and apply that to what you do. So like when I first started out, I was really into Conan, and I love John Busima's work. And so I learned a little bit about line weight. I learned facial structures based on how to draw comics the Marvel way and copying Conan and whatnot. Then when I got into art school, I learned about J.C. Lyon Decker and he was very angular with his... It was almost caricature-ish with his characters and he would simplify his shapes. I was copying that. And then I got into Drew Streusen's movie poster. He would do those outlines to make their characters pop and he would do some mixed media. And then Bill Suskevich would have these like little scribbles with colored pencils. And so I would do that. And all of those little things became a part of who I am. All these like little signature moves. I got into Art Nouveau and then oh, you can make your hair kind of be like a decorative thing. So that became a part of it. And I think it's just... I look at it the same way as the way that you dress. There's no... Some people will say, I'm gonna dress in the style of a 1920s flapper or something like that or whatever it might be. And that is the style... I picked a period and a style and that is what I'm gonna stick to. And I think there are artists who say, I'm gonna be a post-impressionist painter. And so when you ask them, they're like, I paint in post-impressionism. And they have a particular style that they've just decided I'm not gonna add anything to it. I'm going to copy someone else's style exactly and do that. But I think for the most part, most artists are... I like a little bit of this and I like a little bit of that. I like bell-bottom jeans from the 70s. I think that is so cool. I like that. I like a vest. That's more of a 1930s kind of thing. I like that. And I think the same thing happens with your art too is you just pick little bits of stuff from other artists and that becomes your own personal style. Definitely. And if you analyze what I do, you can see I stole this from John Bushema. I stole this from Frank Miller. I stole this from Sam Keith. This from Bill Sienkiewicz. I don't know if yours or my pronunciation is right, but probably none of them. I took this from Jay Lee. I took this from Robert Crumb. I took this from Möbius. I took this from Simon Bisley. Oh, I took that from Simon Bisley. I took this from Goseki Kozima. This from Heroku Samura. I took this from Yurji Shinkawa. I've stolen this from Don Martin and Sergio Aragonis and all of those things. And it is just... And I've failed at stealing it. So now only I see it. We fall short always. But it still, just even if it's 10%, it still influences us and it still becomes a part of our style. I specifically see when I do a Bushema face profile. And I always love when I just manage to do this evil sorcerer face profile that he was magnificent at doing. And I recognize it immediately as, okay, this is me doing Bushema. And other people, maybe not. Yeah. I don't mind that we fall short because I don't want to... I have a couple friends who just picked an artist that they wanted to emulate in college and they got really good at it. And that's their whole identity. And it's like they're known as, oh, this person does this person's style. Because that person isn't making art anymore. They've kind of taken up the mantle. And I think that's great for them. But I just, I feel like they'll never have their own thing. Because they never, I guess, ventured to add any other person's style to it. Afraid of maybe tainting it. That's often a good starting point. I mean, both Frank Miller and Bill Senkiewicz started looking too much like Neil Adams, especially Senkiewicz. And now you don't see that. Because they added their own little bits to it. Yeah. Over the years, they started looking less and less and becoming their own extremely different artists. If you compare Miller's art today to Senkiewicz art today, you wouldn't say that, yeah, they both started copying Neil Adams. Or the same person at all. You can't really see that unless you know it. Because it's so hidden under the Frank Millerisms and the Bill Senkiewiczisms that, you know, it's just integrated into who they are. I think that's beautiful. And if you want to do someone else's style, then you do you. If you're happy doing it, then... Yeah, it makes you happy. The people I'm talking about are now professionals, whose sole identity is they do an older retired professional's work. Yeah, but again, if that gives you pleasure, it doesn't have to be original. And it doesn't even have to be original to have a point of view. I mean, I think we've gotten a little bit lost in this idea of originality because of how copyright works and because of how we have to be original. Otherwise, we might be breaking the law, breaking the law. But for a lot of artists, creatives, it is doing the meditative thing of channeling the art that influenced you and doing your best version of that is more than enough. And yeah, I mean, it is seeing, this is going to be controversial, but sometimes seeing a great cover band can be better than the original. And I love seeing all the original bands, way past their prime. I would love to see Judas Priest play concerts when they're all rolled out on stage in wheelchairs and the highest tone that Halperd hits is, I would love that. But it is about the love of art. It is about the love of performing or drawing and you will always have artists like me who can't really, I can't, I don't have the patience to copy someone else's style accurately. And I have the drive to always do my own stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I found that I wish that I could get away from realism more. I've tried caricature, I've tried being a little more impressionistic. And I never like it as much when I have a photo. And I'm copying a photo. Even the painting that I just finished, The Guild, I did 37 characters and I had 37 photo references. And the characters were, for the most part, not human. And there was a lot of imagination that went into it. But I still just feel like my art is better when I am not relying on my imagination too much. And I've always disliked that about my work. But that's where my strengths are. And I think at 55, I've just resigned myself to say, I don't have the willpower to say, I want to start all over and learn to, I'm so impressed with comic book illustrators or cartoonists, especially like a, even like a Bill Watterson, you know, like a Calvin and Hobbes type of, you know, where they can just generate so much emotion or, have you ever seen, I know you have Prince Valiant? Oh yeah. You know, and you think this person did that every day for years and months. They did horses and they did knights and princesses and castles. And I'm sure they had references, but just to be able to do that just destroys me, that they could do that out of, you know, their head for the most part, you know. And usually you see which artists don't use references. For instance, look at Jack Kirby drawing tanks or planes or helicopters. It is completely all awful and I love it so much. He was a cartoonist, I think. Not a reference in sight. Yeah. John Busema was an illustrator. Jack Kirby was a cartoonist, you know. And I always gravitated more towards the John Busema's than I did to Jack Kirby's. And do you know an artist named Frank Cho? Yeah, yeah. Frank Cho is magnificent. Yeah, yeah. So Frank's a friend of mine. And he, you know, years ago came out and he would bring his portfolio with him whenever he was when he would travel because he's always on a deadline. So he was working on a Hulk and Wolverine comic and he, you know, sat down at my table. We would hang out and talk and he would sit there and just draw these immaculate Wolverine and Hulk and what, you know, just out of his head. No reference whatsoever. And actually, here's one of his Hulk covers I got of his. I don't know if you can see it. Yeah, it's got the enchantress and he just would just in his lines were so clean and his characters and everything were just so good, you know. And I would just watch him just out of his head do that and it just absolutely deflated me. It just made me not want to make art, you know. No, whenever I try drawing beautiful women, I channel a little bit of Bishima, a little bit of Adam Hughes, a little bit of Möbius and a little bit of Frank Cho. So this, this is my wonky Cho, very wonky Cho. I think it's beautiful. Well, I can see the exact part that is a wonky Cho. Yeah, he's, you know, he's one of those anomalies, you know. And he, what he, the thing is he was not, he went to nursing school. He did not train to be an artist. Just quit and said, I want to be an artist. Didn't he used to have a studio with Mark Hempel as well? I don't know. I don't know who Mark Hempel is. Oh, he's fantastic. He drew a great funny comic called Gregory, which was about a little kid in a straight jacket in a padded room. And it was so fun. And he also did the final art, or not the very final, but the the climax art of the art of the Sandman, the kindly ones. Oh, okay. Okay. A very idiosyncratic style, very, very cartoony, but so awesome. Yeah. Very sort of like, like you could see that he was trained artists, but doing cartoony, not, not natural cartoon, still awesome. And Frank's cartoon stuff, I don't know if you ever saw Liberty Meadows? Yeah, that's, you know, that was huge in Norway. And that's, it was its own monthly magazine here. So Oh, okay. Okay. For a little while. And then it dropped off. And yeah, his stuff is wonderful, too. He did, but that's 90% of the work I'm familiar with is Liberty Meadows. Really? Okay, okay. Yeah. So I know I've read a few of the superhero and action things he's done, and it's lovely. But for me, he is Liberty Meadows. Yeah, he did a bunch of Jungle Girl, I think what it was to do. And, but yeah, he did, we hired him to do a movie poster, because, you know, we got a couple movie posters done for Animal Crackers. And I asked him to do it in his cartoony style, but I wanted it in the vein of Winsor and McKay's Little Nemo in Slumberland. So it's framed in a, in more of his Frank Cho current style, where it's got like monkeys and like a circus kind of thing. But the interior comic pages are Chesterfield, Danny DeVito's characters and Owen, John Krozinski's character, talking and he's giving them a bunch of different cookies and showing them how the cookies work. And it's really funny. I was like, I want to do a movie poster that's a comic strip. And it came out really great. But we never really got to use it for anything because of the pandemic and it never got to go into the theater and everything. But he's just, he's so versatile. He can go back and forth between a realistic style. He's been doing a bunch of stuff Sherlock Holmes. He got into like a Sherlock Holmes society. And he's been using very, you know, because he does, have you ever seen a stuff where he does like a Franklin Booth cross hatching kind of style? Very Bernie Wright. No, I don't think so. Yeah. So Franklin Booth was a, an artist in the 1920s, sometime around the Gibson, Charles Stena Gibson, Gibson Girls type of thing. And brilliant, brilliant black and white illustrations. That's where Bernie Wright's in copy to do his stuff when he was doing something like he was copying Franklin Booth for the Frankenstein comics. And, and so Frank Cho has been doing kind of a Franklin Booth kind of thing. He's been really on a kick like going out and buying some originals and whatnot. And he's been doing some stuff in a Sherlock Holmes kind of thing. And it's just beautiful, very late 18th century, early 19th, you know, or 1800s, early 1900s kind of look really nice. Well, I know one thing you can use your Frank Cho movie poster for. You can send it to me so I can look at it and get those handboy jitters like, I'm seeing Frank Cho. I'll get a picture at least and send it to you. You know, I feel bad because there's things sitting in a closet somewhere right now, you know, and that's the worst. All right, I'm going to mute for a second because I'm going to blow dry. Let's see. Yeah. So is there any questions? Let me see if I can see some questions in the chat here. I don't see anything. There's a lot of comments. Hopefully people are, oh, yeah, I can talk about the thumbnail because I created the thumbnail last night and I wanted to do something that held the possibility for both being about Greek gods and about being about video games. And then I suddenly remembered the Amiga game gods, which wasn't a great Amiga game, but it had magnificent graphics. I would say to that when you would get, were the graphics on the cover good or are you saying the actual game graphics were good? Both great game graphics and I think it had, it might have had Simon Bisley cover or something like that. So when you see that, did you see the thumbnail for our live today? I did not. I just clicked the link that you sent me. Yeah. It's just the two of us, the usual images and the startup screen from the Amiga game gods. In between us, it says with big, blocky Amiga letters, gods. That's great. Yeah. So that is, yeah, I think that works very well. Now I'm going to get us banned by drawing the naughty bits because you have to, it is, it's, you can't do a Aphrodite without the naughty bits. Well, it's funny because one of my biggest shorts that I've done was when I, we were, you know, doing the 60 days of studying the masters and I did Michelangelo's David and it's mostly just a bunch of 12 year olds going, hee hee. Hee hee. Yes. Oh, good. Oh, yeah. I've never done this video, but I've been thinking about it for years from the first time I got a TikTok ban for nudity with artistic nudity. And I was thinking about doing an apology video, completely straight things, apology video about sorry for having nudity in my art and I realize it offends the sensibility of people and then just doing each cut of the video with one of the like dozens of nude sculptures around Virgen in the background casually without saying anything. So maybe one day. I genuinely thought you were going to say it, you know, like as you keep talking different parts of your clothing were missing. Yeah, that's another video I want to make, but then I will get banned. And it was bad enough to get the clips out of the blood painting video without getting banned. But we managed that. So hopefully we'll survive this one as well. The uncensored version of the blood painting will be or of the blood painting ceremony will be hopefully at Witch Club Satan's page because their YouTube is a lot smaller. So it's not that much of a problem if they get banned. It should be okay. It is all, it should be within the guidelines. But it is so weird to, you can't really know what's within the guidelines and what's not and what will happen if you break them and what will not happen. It is, that is one of... YouTube has been really cool though. YouTube is much more cool about that than TikTok. Oh yeah, but there still is a lot of uncertainty in how they word what is allowed to be shown and what will happen if you break those rules. So it's sort of, you're in this, I maybe, maybe not thing and that's a scary place to be. That's true, that's true. I posted a short, I haven't done a short in a while, you know, moving over to long form and I thought well I'll post a short because I just had a thought that wasn't longer than a minute. It was just one of just a kind of thing talking about how when we look at our art all we see is the scars. We see all the mistakes that didn't go right. And I posted it on TikTok last night and it's sitting at zero views and it's under review and I like to think of is the word scars was questionable or something and so I'm just letting it sit because I don't need the views from that. I just thought it was interesting but I'm going to let it sit and see if they review it and see what they say but TikTok is always so unpredictable. I haven't had those problems with YouTube, would thank God. Yeah, I saw that video that was magnificent and the metaphor of scars is so so beautiful that worked so well. Thank you. I just, you know, it was one of those things where I just I finished the painting and young people are saying oh I really love it I really love it and all I'm looking at is all the things I got wrong and I thought I've got to talk about this because this feeling was so raw at the moment that you never know if other artists feel the same way but I found that if I talk about what I'm feeling I get that feedback from other people going yeah I feel the same way and that always makes it a little bit easier so it's a little selfish sometimes you know because it's all selfish isn't it I mean it's true it is art is it's egotistical in so many ways yeah which is why artists aren't always the easiest people to get along with I think I'm pretty much done I am with this one yeah I'm almost done I was really my favorite part of doing sculptures is always adding the shadows you know I just it's so fun so I was kind of looking forward to this part oh yeah but it looks really nice and you you worked quick this time I didn't feel that way and yours is gorgeous thank you so now what are those are not cherubs what are they those are what were they one of them is the og cherub that is Eros okay who has a bow and arrow and who shoots people with his arrows of erotic lamb okay also called what's he called in Cupid is called in yeah yeah and the others I think are Pobos and Daimus who are sort of like tear and fright something like that and Eros, Pobos and Daimus are all the children of of Aphrodite and Aries so so war and love its children and they become Eros which is erotic love or lust and they become fear and something like fear and fright I don't know how you translate it from because I don't know Greek Greek is all Greek to me Greek is all Norwegian to me so yeah yeah so easy to understand yeah well I can noodle with this a little bit more later but um this was good this was good I hope you get some rest this month because you did a lot last month yeah hopefully not I want to keep the plugging there are there's so much to do I mean uh how has it been going trying to go over to the long format for you I I think everybody who has seen it really likes it and and I think it's allowed me a chance to kind of slow down and just kind of talk about the process a little more my it's funny someone said you always did long shorts meaning I always did 59 seconds out of the minute and now you're doing short longs which is I'm probably doing five to seven minute long form you know I I can't talk for 20 minutes I can't just have something important to say so I um but I I'm enjoying it but it is it's been three months and um I haven't seen any real noticeable you know I have two million subscribers and my long form are getting 20 000 views so yeah one percent of my fans are seeing it and um so I I'm I'm trying my best but right now it's just it's been really really rough you know with with YouTube um but you know we're I think you you sort of have to see your long format as a different audience as a different channel yeah I think yeah and probably I I'm I'm it's funny because the the thumbnails are the most important part people will click on it because of the thumbnail and so I'm trying to come up with interesting thumbnails and um I will see we'll see what happens but for the most part I'm enjoying making them that's the most important and uh uh yeah I I absolutely hate the thumbnails not not yours but but yeah but but uh I try to get the idea for a thumbnail is just it is so dreadful yeah I don't know why because it should sort of um it should be something where I can use my skills from other things but no no it is uh I I don't know how to think I don't know how to speak thumbnail it's marketing is what it is yeah I hate marketing yeah me too and it is 100 percent um you know like if you look at like a mr beast thing you know he's always got his mouth open and he's shocked and you have to say I can't believe that this didn't you know it's it's it's clickbait and I don't like clickbait I know but but but there are other ways to do it as well but I I can't get my head around those either yeah doesn't help but but I want to do more I haven't gotten as far as you uh with uh with the lungs but I do have your um folders of scripts that are half finished and they're called uh lungs and then they're called lung shorts and they call short lungs and uh short plus plus but those are oh gosh no I I it's funny because sometimes especially what I'm you know talking to you I think what are we doing you know we're artists why are we worrying about algorithms and and marketing and thumbnails and whatnot you know like what kind of life is this and and um and then other times I go it's it's it's an opportunity that artists 10 years ago 20 years ago didn't have and but but it's also it's sort of perfect uh for me because uh I don't like the marketing part I um I'm not really good at the socializing part and you know going out to to openings and art gatherings and I'm not those are not my arenas but um what's great about uh and this is you know maybe a problem for everyone else but for me what's great about social media is that it um uh takes marketing and you know that ability to get your art out there and it gamifies it so I can sort of play around with it and say oh does this work this work you know I I find it I find it fun to you know test the limits of uh uh test the edges of the algorithms and to say see you know can I get a video where I do do this thing that I absolutely shouldn't do and get it to do well and uh yeah often I can sometimes not I mean yeah last summer I figured out that um um if you only post um art videos with the um music of uh ukulele player fantastic yeah israel comma viola all summer then it will take months for your views to get back up but it was good I liked it yeah I remember you did that that was hilarious um almost asleep almost okay okay we'll call this oh we can if there are any questions we can try to answer oh yeah yeah them read a question do you want to see Donna do you have any questions that anybody's been asking or yeah they I think they they kind of uh so little little wheel x says what are your favorite weird art pieces by other artists oh I I mean um there's a huge one uh literally huge one um which is the german artist unsung keifer and he does all these did all these fantastic paintings where he sort of abstract landscape escape paintings where he also uses you know sand and um pieces of straw and stuff that that and he had all the museums that exhibit his art have to sign uh contracts saying that they wouldn't restore his art so the sand and the bird feathers and the straw falls off and that's part of the art um they are beautiful but he also did a fantastic book uh of uh of prints uh a huge book of prints and and you can see them now are you talking about like print s or the music musician prince not the musician prince all right it would have been it would have been even better if it was prince but um a huge book of uh I think it was prints or something like that and we can still see them because they were photographed before the book was closed but we can't see them anymore because the book is made of heavy sheets of lead so it's too uh heavy to physically open and it's just got all those artworks in there and also the lead is uh soft so it's starting to sort of bulge and grip almost so it's changing and it's on this uh I think it's on a lead uh bookshelf as well so that is also dripping and morphing and yeah and it's just a beautiful thing and you know that hidden inside it is all these other beautiful things that no one will ever see in real life again wow wow that's amazing I don't have anything I I don't really have any artists that are weird and wacky and wonderful like that that I can think of but uh someone says oh my gosh the art is inside an art piece of time yes let's see what are your views on when and how to abstract visuals in order to facilitate the story of a piece for example making things purposely less realistic or using detail strategically to draw focus I did that a little bit with the guild where I and I talked about it where I said um there's three things I was using to make the characters come and get in front of the background which was line weight so the thicker lines were relegated for the characters and the thinner lines were for the background that gives it a feeling of atmosphere and distance uh saturation of your colors you can have uh you can use saturation the thing that's something that's more saturated is going to be more eye catching than something that's less saturated and contrast the blackest blacks and the whitest whites are relegated to the things that you want your eye to go to so if you were to close your eyes and open it and look at a piece your eyes are going to go to where the most contrast is and um so that's what I do Kim yeah yeah it's basically uh this is all my art all my art is uh these abstract fields uh that are you know if you just take this this isn't the stomach this is just weird yeah yeah when you see it in context you see that it's a stomach and I thought I'd just try to explain how I do it and what I do in a drawing so if I close my eyes and I draw something like this I don't know what it looks like it's perfect this will be beautiful because it's impossible to see what this is but if you let's say you place an eye here like this and here and you place some teeth here then everything else starts to make sense yeah and it's still abstract but you force by placing these small areas of of um basically small yes of certainly of these are small cartoony areas that are really clear yeah and that that that really show you instantly what it is and then your mind figures out the rest and you know 90 percent of my art is justice it is all the stuff I do with uh negative space and it is just the trick of doing the you let the mind be clear yeah yeah yeah it's tiny points of cartoony clarity spread around a field of abstract and that's enough for the viewer to the beholder to get something out yeah yeah oh thank you gale gale was saying our nails look nice and saying hi spanish says says the word kim might be looking for is figurative and no no the word i'm uh isn't just figurative because you could do the same thing with figurative but but it is specifically um the cartoony or even iconic where instead of let's see if I could draw the light of the eye like this and I could draw the light of uh above the eye and below the eye and I could draw this impressionistically and try to get it right but what I find is that yeah I do that as well but I also put in these small areas of the the icon or the cartoon of an eye or the cartoon of a tooth or an arm or a hand or something like that and and as long as those cartoons are fundamentally functioning as a cartoon should which is to instantly give you what you can identify that then everything else falls into place if you try to do the same but with a more figurative or realistic approach uh then the art tends towards a little bit more lifeless and a little bit more static I think but you know it you can do both and the truth is I do both but I know if I draw an eye that is just the impression of a real eye then I almost always go in and give it those couple of lines that make it three percent easier to read and those are the the cartoony lines those are the lines that make an expression easy to read yeah they're almost like iconic markers for people to say this is this this represents this this represents that this isn't just an eye this is an angry eye a happy eye a and those if you try to do that realistically you have to be extremely precise and being extremely precise tends to eliminate the energy and the movement of a piece uh but if you do it take the cartoony way instead so if you you uh I mean this is an angry eye everyone sees that that angry eye yeah and if you take those elements and you just trick them in around the edges of a more realistic portrayal then you get you don't yeah how should I say that you get to keep some of the energy some of the vitality without losing the sense of reality again yeah and I think I'll take you off the hot seat so you don't have to keep talking but um Allie Ray asked uh what does noodling mean to you I've been wondering that because I want to start using the word more often and for me noodling is when you finish the piece but you're just like oh I just want to fix this a little bit or I just want to add a little more detail here or I just want to add a little bit more so noodling is what I do when I'm kind of done with the piece but I just want to I don't want it to be done and I just keep you know kind of adding a little bit more what if I add a little bit more here what if I now that's different than doodling which is this is my little sketch wallet and so like I will I will doodle um this was a thing of syrup yesterday this was a car you know I'll do a picture whatever I'm I just this is literally in my wallet and I'll just doodle the things I see but noodling is for me when you're working on a piece and it's pretty much done but you don't want it to be over so you keep adding a little bit more to it yeah I think that sounds reasonable like a good distinction that you've just made up but but noodling to me does sound like when you're adding a doodling is drawing without a purpose in some sense yeah and noodling is adding detail without the purpose yeah smart and as the poet said don't doodle your doodle I don't know any rhymes that rhyme with doodle yeah um I'm sorry yeah we're at the point where Kim is singing now so I think that's a nap uh Kim needs a nap all right um and this has been yeah so we should probably let people go but as always I love hanging out with you my friend and um I'm sorry we're at the opposite end of the world from each other yeah we we have to fix that someday yeah definitely and hopefully soon and just remember to do all the plugging if you're not following Scott Christian Savva then do follow Savva art on all the platforms his stuff is magnificent and he has uh a lot of great art advice and just a delightful attitude towards art and life that that is really infectious it sort of makes people better around him and you have a you have a patron do you no no no you don't but you can become youtube members yeah or or buy the posters when I come out with new posters oh yeah buy the posters uh buy all the posters my my son has all of your posters on his wall now we're gonna send him big we'll send him the guild um excellent I'm sure he doesn't have um the the dragon in the centaur one either right he doesn't have a dragon in the center I don't think he has the 90s alphabet oh there we go okay so good we'll have a nice shipment soon yeah and uh and you know so uh buy scott's posters they are wonderful the print quality is great uh the paper peels exactly like the posters of old yeah uh from you know when the magazine posters were thin but not too thin yeah it's like it feels the right amount of thin yeah the right amount of thin not not thick so it feels exclusive and so you're afraid of rolling them but thin without being too thin so it's an exact right poster thing and if you like my art then I do have a patron and I do uh have a youtube membership and I do have a web store at den ungehardhorn.com where you get 20% off uh all I have to write this uh you know it'd be nice if you just yeah have like a little card that you hold up or put it down you know you're you're an artist you could like draw something really nice I I I could draw something really nice so I think if you go to den ungehardhorn.com which is spelled exactly how it sounds and you use the code thank you can you put a link yeah to counter I hope this is right I need to check if this is right god damn it I I'm the worst at plugging myself literally um the thing I have to do is I have to check my email my email box and find the promotion email sent from me to myself thank you 2024 that is the and that is to celebrate that I've been 10 years on patreon 10 years all right don't just yeah posted a link to this site if you guys want to check it out yeah and and uh we got original art and uh prints and uh merch and also all my art is available for free use so you can download it you can print it you can um send it to your mother-in-law as a late birthday gift because you forgot her birthday last week or you can even sell it as long as you put my name on it and that is supporting me as well Kim I used our first school project that is awesome thank you send it to me if you can and we'll be back in next 30 days yeah in 30 days we'll be back and it's been so much fun same here bye bye everyone bye everybody let's see if I managed to stop this thing how do you stop it wow I don't know how to stop it the x in the top left yes