EXO Fandom - Part 2 - FanArt
This post follows part 1 - available here.
After working on stories and loving the imaginative fiction created by the fandom, I came across stories that highlighted visual work by fanartists to help provide visual reference. Initially I found most artwork to be digital, but it was happening upon a pencil artist that struck a chord and made me think, “I could probably do that.”
At the time, I was close to graduating with my Bachelors Degree in Studio Arts with an emphasis in painting and mural. I was known for hating portrait work and chose to mostly work in abstracts and landscapes, or still life. The pressure to make a person look recognizable was daunting. I had just finished my senior project early and had very little to do in studio reserved time, but had an ample supply of medium and papers. So, without much thought, I started to draw EXO.
My early work is pretty rough, but as I mentioned, I did not like drawing people. I spent most of an entire semester working on some random drawings and eventually completed my first ‘series’ which was really just portraits of all members using the same medium and paper. I posted those drawings on my personal Instagram because I didn’t see it being a big deal. It became a big deal.
With enough positive comments, I decided that I wanted to keep working on portraits of EXO and sometimes other K-pop artists when inspired. I wanted to improve and to see if I could get better at drawing faces. As I continued working on shading and texture - especially hair, I began to wonder what other mediums could be used to achieve different effects. I also began networking. I started to follow and talk to other digital and traditional fan artists who used all sorts of effects. I wanted to emulate digital effects traditionally, working with physical media in layers. I went to the art store often and purchased more variety of tools. I got recommendations for brands and techniques from a network of artists that was beginning to span the globe. I had never felt so rich in community as I did around my 2nd year of working on fanart.
Of course, it wasn’t just the community that prompted artistic growth. Not to be biased, but Kai has always been just a little more artistically portrayed in photoshoots. What I consider to be odd fashion preferences became amazing to recreate in charcoal and colored pencil. Still frame movement and emotions were so motivating that at times I couldn’t keep up with the amount of visual content that was coming out and how fast I could draw.
It was a constant race to keep up. I remember that the Die Jungs photobooks were the first that I felt so incredibly motivated by and yet could never draw everything I wanted to from those books before new content was available. When Exodus and Love Me Right came out, I was cranking out 1-4 portraits a day or at least in a week. I wanted to do more series. As EXO members moved on (Kris, Luhan, Tao) I wanted to keep making series that included the 12 regardless. I wanted to merge charcoal with paint and do blends of medium that seemed impractical. It was intensely motivating because I had not just Kai but 12 total muses that belonged on canvas.
At the time of writing this I have produced 692 pieces of traditional fan art. That’s 692 pieces of paper or canvas where the medium was applied by hand via pencil or paint brush. Never in my youth did I think I would ever complete that much body of work in an entire lifetime.
EXO gave me the inspiration to get over a fear of portraits, dabble in more medium than I’d imagined, network globally and make friends, and for the first time made me feel like a legitimate artist. Now, we could spend another entire post talking about the copyright issues and art practices and their validity, but for now - my creative growth is still one of the many reasons EXO is my favorite K-Pop group.
More to follow, thank you for reading.
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