Arterview: Kadew

Ooh, a toughie.

I'm Kadew, a rather lurksome artist who mostly hangs around the more casual side of Smogon. Create-A-Pokémon, Orange Islands, that sort of deal. I am a student at university who hopes to major in animation, though computer sciences are trying to pull my attention away too.

And why should you care about me? Well, typically on IRC, if you come up with some kind of stupid joke or idea, I'll draw it right on the spot, and people seem to like that?

Yeah, people like stupid stuff, and I like drawing stupid stuff, so that's my niche I guess. I also happen to be a LDS.

While I'm not a particularly competitive player, the competitive stuff interests me quite a bit. When I first discovered Smogon, it was because I enjoyed reading the analyses for fun. Then I discovered the forums, and I liked how, in comparison to other fan-sites, there was an expectation of intelligent in-depth discussion of things. Honestly, the only reason I'm not over in the competitive side of things is that I'm an enormous coward who fears making a fool of herself by either battling poorly or saying noobish things on the forums, so I draw off to the side while still in orbit around the competitive community.

Going way back to childhood kindergarten years, I loved fantasy and, in particular, fantastic creatures. Dragons, monsters, scribbling a blob and turning it into whatever creature you could. So Pokémon, and its large selection of monsters, was a perfect fit for that interest. So throughout childhood I had a passing interest in Pokémon, watched the anime here and there for its first few seasons, but I never actually owned the first or second generation of games.

I maybe played them once or twice on my cousin's Game Boy, but I didn't own a game myself. My parents knew that I liked Pokémon, though, and for my birthday in like third or fourth grade I got my first Pokémon game, Pokémon Sapphire. And by then I had basically come into ownership of what was actually technically my sister's GBA. So yeah, my great secret is that I'm a Hoenn baby, or whatever you call it.

Since then, I've played the games avidly and owned games of every generation. My second and third Pokémon games were Crystal version and then Yellow, so I kind of went backwards in that regard. As a result of my later entry into the fandom, I don't have a ton of nostalgia for the first generations. Most of my favorites are from the 3rd and 4th gen, but I still pretty much love all Pokémon. Except Mr Mime. That guy's a creep. ;-;

I had all these monsters, creatures, ideas, and fantasies in my head, and you won't see them out in the world, so you have to make them for yourself. We're visual creatures, we like to see what we like, and what I liked wasn't there to see in the real world. Me and a friend were like the dorks in elementary school, where we would sort of roleplay that we owned a pair of dragons during recess, and then we would come inside and draw our dragons out.

Without drawing, how do we say what the imaginary looks like? That's really why I like to draw: being able to show others what is otherwise imaginary, and getting better at art allows you to express those ideas to others more clearly. Stories, designs, all that.

Firstly, I'm rather crap at animating so far, so this may not be my eventual route, but it is certainly my dream job. From my previous answers, it's clear that when I draw, I like to draw for an audience. And with animation, you are spinning stories for others, making up a fantastic world and populating it with a story where the drawings come alive.

Ever since I was a kid up until present day, I love watching animated features like Disney, Pixar, Studio Ghibli, and Don Bluth films, and I think it would be so amazing to be a part of that. One day (this is totally a pipe dream), I want to take my kids to the theater and force them to sit through the credits, so that I can point out my name as it scrolls by and be like "look kids, there I am! I helped make this!" And they would be all embarrassed and crap.

It'll be great.

Haha, probably. As a kid, I went through the stage that probably most fans go through: trying to make your own fake Pokémon. I think one of my elementary school ones was like a double-ended bulldog, so there were two heads and no rear (as an aside, I had a fear of dogs at that age). I gave up on that pretty quickly though. The designs were garbage, and I preferred "legitimate" Pokémon or something dumb.

But when I discovered Smogon in (I believe) 2008, there was this one forum I saw called "Create A Pokémon," and it wasn't like the other silly fan things I had seen. They were doing it with all this thinking and analysis in every portion, and the designs in the threads were pretty sweet. So I hung around and watched the process, thought of who I would vote for in the art threads and rooted for them, but (and this is a big but) I am a coward. A huge, enormous coward, and I watched and lurked for a good four years.

FOUR YEARS before I even had the courage to sign up for Smogon and post in the threads to throw my own designs in the ring. Honestly, the reason I participated in Aurumoth as my first CAP was because of my 3D graphics class (part of the animation premajor), where the assignment was to model a bug of some sort since insects are pretty conducive to simple modelling (not having hair and junk). So when the CAP at that time was a BUG-type of all things, it was a two-birds-with-one-stone kind of design.

The 3D model turned out great and I loved it. But because I had to spend so much energy getting that done for the class, the actual final submission was crap, and thus I stumbled into my first art poll hating my sub. For the record, I renounce all connections between me and that drawing, and consider that 3D model to be my submission to CAP. >_>

Don't be discouraged by seeing that other people's art is better, and don't stop drawing because of it. There will always be people better than you at art. I know I look around at other people and think "Geez, my drawings are crapgarbage; why do I even bother," and it's really easy to fall into the pit of despair, but don't. At least, if you do despair, don't stop drawing. Because the reason they are so good, and how you will get good, is by drawing, and drawing, and drawing some more.

If you are taking the path of the artist, it is because you ENJOY drawing, so don't stop doing what you enjoy. Or worse yet, forget that you enjoy it. All of this is spoken from experience. T_T

Forgetting that I enjoyed drawing was a dark time. ;-;

Heh, the username Kadew dates back to when I played World of Warcraft a lot (also dark times). I got into the game because of my sister's husband, so the three of us played it and my sister suggested, when I made my character, to name it "Kader," a nickname she called me. Well, when I made a bunch of alts to test out all the different races and classes, they were all variations of Kader, just changing the last letter and going down the alphabet. Kader, Kades, Kadet, Kadeu, Kadev.

Eventually, Kadew (a tauren shaman), became the character I played the most as my "main." Raided, end-game, integrated into a fairly decent-sized guild, so Kadew became my general internet alias. By the time I finally registered to Smogon, I went by Kadew elsewhere on the internet, and so I was Kadew here as well.

Oof, the toughest of them all.

I have two favorites, and I don't think I shall ever decide on one solidly: Azelf and Breloom. Breloom because it is adorable, with its fat little legs and its tiny little arms and the almondy head with beady little eyes. I enjoy drawing it, and it is dang useful either in battle or as a catcher with Spore and False Swipe. But Azelf has a story behind it.

I was awful, AWFUL at Pokémon back in third generation. So it was in the fourth gen, Diamond version, that I began really getting into the games and getting good (4th would be my patron generation, I'd say). So I went about catching the legends in the game, and with most legendaries, their capture is difficult because of their low catch rate. It takes forever, and if you don't have a False Swiper (I didn't at the time), there is a chance you'll accidentally kill them.

Azelf was not like most legendaries. He was a difficult capture because he would SWEEP. YOUR. TEAM. You would lose, not by running out of PokéBalls, but by running out of life. It was brutal for my less-than-capable team at the time with Nasty Plot + Speed + Uproar to prevent sleep. And because Azelf's defenses weren't great, you had to use a weak Pokémon to whittle it down, making it that much more the challenge. Azelf is my favorite because it EARNED my respect through that hard trial of capturing it. It's the Pokémon of willpower and it tested my willpower; perhaps even showed me that Pokémon is more fun when there is challenge. Which would lead to my interest in competitive battling? I don't know. I just know that Brelly and Azelf are my favorites, and on different days, one or the other might pull ahead. But at the end of the day, they both are. <3

It's been fun.