About


General Info

Usernames: Helyn, SmiteTheeWithApples
Birthday: 11 Oct
Location: Victoria, Australia
Pets: Two yellow labradors. But I've moved out of home and my place isn't dog-friendly so I have to visit my parents to see my dogs.
Blog: Apple Orchard
Deviant Art: smitetheewithapples
Etsy shop: Fields of Clover
Email: forget_it_kid (at) hotmail.com
Who am I?: I'm a graduate student studying genetics. I haven't had any formal art training and have been dolling since 2002. Most of my art is done on weekends as I am too buggered in the evenings or too busy cooking.

Favourites

Colour: Orange
Food: Peanut butter choc chip cookies
Flower: Frangipani
Animal: Labrador Retriever, Red Panda, native Australian animals
Music: Faker, Sarah Blasko, Regina Spektor, and random music heard on TripleJ
Games: The Legend of Zelda series, Tales of Symphonia, Time Splitters 2, Eternal Darkness, Super Mario Galaxy, Golden Sun series
TV/Movies: Stargate SG1, Pride and Prejudice (BBC miniseries, not that crap movie), Oh Brother Where Art Though?
Anime: Spirited Away, Fruits Basket, Ouran High Host Club, Full Metal Panic
Books: Discworld series (Terry Pratchett), To Say Nothing of the Dog (Connie Willis), The Black Swan (Mercedes Lackey)
Manga: Ouran High Host Club, One Piece
Webcomics: Drowtales: Moonless Age, Red String, Devil's Cake, Undertow, The Phoenix Requiem

This Website

For those who have stumbled upon this site and have no clue where they are and what's up with all these chicks:
This is my website to display my artwork. My art can basically be broken down into three types-
1) My dolls. Don't be mistaken, they are not created by dollmakers or taken from some site that offers free graphics. The lowdown is that I take a base (a naked, bald body) and draw on hair and clothes (with pixels. So I lot of dot dot dotting with my tablet). Then I shade it all in and reshade the base. Each of those little dolls are the accumulation of many nights work.
2) My pixel art. Again, not something I pinched from freebie sites. Some things I create from scratch on the computer while others I draw, then scan, then trace over my lines. For some of the things I use references, as in look at photos online to try and figure out how to draw something right. These take a lot of work to make.
3) My other digital art. I draw these pictures myself, then scan and colour them in. Sometimes adding some digital lineart, sometimes not. They are not tracings of other people's art, How-To-Draw books or other people's photos. However, they do often require references. For the poses, I usually take a photo of my own hands and then try to copy them. I may also look at multiple artist's work to get a feel of how to do things that I am less familiar with. These pictures take hours of work too.
So basically, all of the stuff on this site is the sum of my blood, sweat and tears. Please treat this site like an art gallery; admire the pretty pictures, critically assess them, tell your friends all about the cool gallery you went to. But at a real art gallery, you don't just take a picture off the wall and walk off with it (and/or scribble on it and tell people that you made it). So please don't do that here.