Interview with carpenoctem

Time to get to know a bit more about carpenoctem. You've seen the work, let's hear a little something about the person.

Give us a short introduction about you.
My name is Sandra Hirschmann. I was born on april 16th 1978 and I have 2 younger brothers.

Where did you grow up? Tell us a little story about the young you.
I was born in Frankfurt, Germany and lived there for 15 years. Me and my family moved to a small town near Stuttgart and I'm still stuck here.

Is there a typical topic, story or concept that fuels your creations? Where does that fascination come from?
I never really realized it until I began to sort my pictures by theme. I tend to do a lot of dark and kinda morbid art.

Visual artists and music is like cookies and milk, does music do anything for you?
I love to listen to music, but sometimes I'm so concentrated on a painting that I totally forget to switch it on

Which artists really influence you?
Colleen Doran and Linda Bergkvist influenced me a lot. My first big influence was Wendy Pini and her comic series Elfquest.

What's your opinion about traditional media? Is it an advantage to have experience with real pencils, paint or conventional camera?
Absolutely. For me it's far more difficult to draw digitally from scratch. So, it really is more easy if one can do a decent sketch on paper and then scan it. Experience on "real paper" makes it easier to get into digital art, because you just have to focus on the tools rather then anatomy, color theory, composition, etc. You already know this stuff

Do you strive to be as versatile as possible or do you stick to one thing?
I only draw what I like. I don't have fun doing constructions, architecture, machines, ...anything non-organic. So, yeah, I limit myself but since I paint just for my personal entertainment, that's quite ok to me.

What equipment do you use to create your work?
I have an Intel Core 2, 2 GB RAM / NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS and a Wacom Intuos² A5.
I mostly paint in Photoshop CS2. That's it ^^.

Wich programs do you use and what do you use them for?
I use Photoshop most of the time. It's great tool for coloring, because I have the most control of colors and shapes with it. And it also has some very good tools for color manipulation.
For lineart I used to render my sketches in Painter, but recently I figured out that Open Canvas is a far better tool for it, because it has a better zoom function and with the right settings, it works as smooth as Painter.