|
Who is Ninjatron?
My name is Dylan and I go by Ninjatron online. I am some kind of weird artist and generally ninja-like person from the cool place called Toronto.
I'm a ninja mercenary art teacher and I've been teaching kids and teenagers how to draw comic book and animation style artwork for over 10 years. I try to teach my students not just how to draw, but why to draw, and help them to get excited about drawing so they can unlock their creativity. Some kids are pretty young and have a hard time to start out with, but it's refreshing to see how much they love their favorite characters and very rewarding when their work starts to improve. I teach basic drawing skills, color, character design, and digital art. This is not the kind of stuff that kids are likely to learn at the average school, so it's cool to offer these skills to people who are interested in it.
For my artwork, there are many things I find inspiration in. My favorite works are by Osamu Tezuka, Go Nagai, Shotaro Ishinomori, Gendy Tartakovsky, and Bruce Timm. My main artistic influence is my mentor, David Bluestein. He is the one who taught me how to approach a drawing and nudged me in the right direction. My ultimate goal in life is to have my own comic and/or animated series, so that I too can influence on people positively on a grand scale.
I am proud to say that I do not drink or smoke or do any of that stuff. I do my best to live a clean life. My beverage of choice is Gatorade.
Things I like include Anime, Nintendo, Star Wars, Superheroes, Transformers, toy collecting, Japanese culture, giant monsters, robots, ninjas, bandanas, wristbands, chaos, and destruction. I like a lot of stuff. Stuff is awesome. Sometimes I like drawing.
Things I hate include onions and stupid people, though sometimes stupid people are funny. So mostly just onions then. I hate them so much.
Since I was a kid I always liked creating new stories and characters, so that's what I hope to ultimately do with myself one way or another. Perhaps SykoGrafix will help to build an audience as I continue to hone my skills. So until that time when I can make stuff really happen, and probably afterwards as well, I'll be plugging away right here.
About SykoGrafix.com
The name "SykoGrafix" comes from the marketing term Psychographics, which is akin to Demographics. A psychographic is a means of studying the attitudes, values, lifestyles, and opinions of people. And this is kind of weird because SykoGrafix.com is not really about any of that stuff. It's actually quite the opposite. I just thought it sounded cool.
SykoGrafix.com is my personal website where I put my artwork and talk about stuff that I like. I never really felt like I fit in with what the standards that psychographics and demographics dictate. I pretty much just do my own thing no matter what. I wanted to make my own place on the Internet that was far removed from the typical corporate marketing culture of the web. But despite all that, I do care about what you think of this place, so please contact me and let me know.
This site started it meager existence way back in the bygone year of 1997 on the now defunct Geocities network as "Ninjatron's SykoGrafix". It was pretty simple and kind of janky back then, but so was my artwork. I didn't really know what I was doing but some people still liked it anyway. I probably still don't know what I'm doing but I might be at least a little bit better at it now. All the HTML was, and still is, done by hand in a text editor.
On Halloween of the year 2000 I launched SykoGrafix.com as a new domain name with the black and cyan theme that I've stuck with ever since. I expanded the site's focus to have more personal expression and be about the kind of stuff that I like. And that's pretty much it, really.
An amusing fact about SykoGrafix is that, for whatever reason, some people hate it! There have been a number of special individuals over the years, most of whom can not spell, who don't like me or this site very much. That's fine and all, I'm not interested in appealing to everyone. But then they send me badly spelled hate messages. This is also fine, I'm a big boy, I can take it, and most of them are more hilarious than hurtful. What bewilders me is that some of them keep coming back again and again! This doesn't make a whole lot of bloody sense when you think about it. But it just means that this humble art site has developed a crazy rouges gallery, which sure keeps things interesting around here. |