ARTIST STATEMENT

Victoria Baronville is an artist with an affinity for character design. Victoria has a passion for creating original art from short stories to original characters and spends most of her time doing so. Born and raised in South Florida, Victoria has spent her entire life (from the time she was able to grip a pencil) drawing, beginning with storybooks made with printer paper clipped together with staples. She was truly inspired to create art as a child when she began reading comics and watching cartoons. As Victoria grew older, the Japanese counterparts of these — manga and anime — fell into her hands and she was hooked. As Victoria began honing her traditional art skills at an arts conservatory high school, she was able to develop her style enough to begin a freelance art career, making private character commissions. At Prairie View A&M University, she began to overlap her character art with graphic design and has utilized them as the focal point of her creative projects.  

THESIS STATEMENT

Manga, or Japanese style comic books, (and subsequently anime) have become a major aspect of popular culture within the last two decades. Many artists (including myself) —whether they are traditional artists, digital artists, graphic designers, animators, or game designers — have visibly been inspired by the medium for storytelling and these things have come to influence aspects of Western media over time. Because of this, manga (and anime) can be regarded as nostalgia-driven media. When looking at the world of cinema today, we may take note of shows and movies that we used to watch as small children reenergized with revivals and remakes. We may notice when watching an animated television show that there are several tropes that feel familiar and reflect tropes and aesthetics of the past. The very energy of something we may watch, read or listen to exude the feeling of nostalgia. Many adults born in the 80s or 90s have been inspired by the likes of Toriyama and Dragonball or Takeuchi and Sailor Moon. These cultural influences have inspired many novices to create their own stories, whether they are middle school students expressing themselves or adult aspiring mangaka. For this project, I created a short one-volume nostalgia-based manga. To create this manga, I utilized traditional manga principles alongside a modern workflow – blending traditional art with digital art programs such as Clip Studio Paint to create a cohesive character-driven story. To facilitate this, I referenced a few manga and anime that have personally inspired me over the course of my life, including slightly more recent stories such as The Way of the Househusband and A Sign of Affection. Alongside my manga, I have created a website using Tumblr to host a digital copy of my manga as well Adobe InDesign to organize for a physical print edition.  

PROJECT WORK

SOCIAL LINKS