TheTrueJack - meet the artist behind our autumnal designs!

Y: Tell us a little about yourself and your work, your artistic style and chosen medium, anything about your art that you feel is important. 
T: Hi, nice to meet you! I am TheTrueJack, a non-binary person living in Abruzzo - more precisely, in the province of Teramo. I've been drawing for as long as I can remember, but I can say that I started seeing it from a slightly more ‘serious’ point of view when I was about 13-14 years old, around the years between secondary school and highschool. I honestly never had any extremely specific artistic references, which is why my style veered in a very personal direction. Certainly, anime, manga and video games have influenced me quite a lot.

Y: What is the art scene like in the area where you live, or where you come from? 
T: I was lucky enough to grow up in Termoli, Jacovitti's hometown: the art high school I attended was named after him and there were many initiatives organised by my school in regards to comics and similar literary media. That's why I had the opportunity to interact with people who, like me, were interested in the subject, to participate in afternoon workshops and also in many competitions with prizes - I even won  a couple of them!

Y: What prompted you to enter the world of digital art? How did you start your artistic journey? Tell us about your course of study. Did you study anything specifically related to art or did your interest stem from something else?
T: After art school, I attended the International School of Comics in Pescara, which helped me grow, especially from a technical point of view. The use of digital was mostly a work requirement, I am completely self-taught.

Y: Art is a challenging, yet extremely satisfying field. What impact has it had on your life so far?
T: Well, in the morning I wake up and think about what I have to draw during the day, at night I go to sleep and think about what I have to draw the next day, haha! I would say that the impact in my life is remarkable, my days literally revolve around that.

Y: Does your art allow you to support yourself financially? 
T: Yes, at the moment I manage to pay the bills. However, I have to say that I live a very minimal and modest life - no eating out, no treats or purchases that are not utilities, no subscriptions to services (I don't even have wi-fi): whatever is left over I put aside for those months when I earn less (or I earn nothing, because that also happens). So you could say that my goal is definitely to increase my earnings a bit more and not to arrive at the end of the month in dire straits.

Y: What platforms do you use to promote your work? Do you think they need to be fixed and improved in any way? Do you think a new platform concerning only digital art could be useful?
T: With experience, I realised that to do this work you have to try as many platforms as possible, discard the ones that don't work and push on the ones where we see more feedback. For me, at the moment, DeviantART, VGen and Etsy work very well. DeviantART is the one where I have been working the longest (almost 12 years!) but at the same time it is also the one that needs the most improvements, first of all the organisation of material within the groups (an unnecessarily slow and tedious process) and the awful chat section (which sometimes deletes messages by itself while you are writing them!).

Y: Have you ever had problems with copyright and its management? 
T: Fortunately not! I'm extremely careful when it comes to it, I always insert the various watermarks and avoid sharing files that are too big, both when I send previews to clients and when I sponsor myself on social media. I have never had any problems so far.

Y: Are you in favour of Artificial Intelligences using your art to enrich their database?
T: I am in favour of it as long as the artists are paid for each work granted to these databases, but as long as the drawings are stolen and used without consent I consider it a serious problem. I, however, would not grant my work for such use, even under payment, because a drawing (being a visual expression of an emotion) makes sense if it comes out of a person's hand and mind, not an algorithm. This is my personal opinion. 

Y: What would you change about the current art scene if you could? What do you expect from the future of art?
T: I would change the low regard in which artists are held, especially in the work environment. Drawing is not an innate skill that comes from nowhere. Just like a sport, it requires discipline, study, perseverance and continuous training. To belittle all this commitment (which lasts for years and years in an artist's life) by not paying artists or paying them too little just because it is a ‘creative’ job (therefore not as essential from a practical point of view as other professions can be) is, in my opinion, as wrong as it gets in today's world. I would add that this is often not helped by the artists themselves, who belittle themselves by giving away or selling out their work.

Y: What do you think about the management of artist alleys at conventions nowadays? Are there any experiences you would like to share with us?
T: So far I have only participated in a few cons with the Scuola Comics booth, so I am completely ignorant about this topic, I apologise! I hope to have a chance to explore this area better in the future.

Thanks again to @thetruejack_art for working for us and for this short interview! We hope his point of view may have helped you broaden your horizons. If our mascots have their ‘autumnal uniform’, we owe it to the willingness and skill of this artist!

Thank you for reading!