The City Scoop! ~ Art Showcase ~ May 8, 2009

Arts Showcase In The Scoop By VexXxa Monday has arrived. There is going to be a showing at Pocket D and I am hoping to be able to meet the artist that the show will be featured, DARK JEDI. When I read his name, I feel like I should be hearing some sort of thunderous dun-dun-dun music in the background. My old friend Neko Fury, who is also an artist, is in town for a few days and has agreed to join me for the show. Neko and I plan to leave early to try to get there before the crowd that is bound to attend the event. We arrive to see that this is a red carpet affair with cameras and bright lights everywhere! We exit the limo and are escorted quickly to the Lord Recluse Gallery. As we enter the gallery, we receive glasses of champagne and spot several celebrities of note. The room looks totally awesome with dim lights and candles all over. The artwork is placed about all around the room. Some pieces are hanging on the walls, and others are on fancy easels with golden lights shining onto the work. I am quite impressed with what I see, and the gallery is quite crowded with many of Dark Jedi's supporters and fans. As Neko and I are escorted into the main gallery, we are brought over to the man of the evening, Dark Jedi (aka: Light-Speed), who looks very nice in his black and gold tux. Very classy! I ask Dark Jedi to tell us a little bit more about himself. "Well, " he starts off, "I have been a member of the City of* family since day one – launch day. Actually, about three weeks before launch when I received my beta invite. I have lived on Victory ever since then. Victory forever! I have also been a member of a really strong Supergroup named LoneSTAR since right after launch and we've all stuck together through the years. It's a great group of people. " Dark Jedi brings us over to the piece he did on Comrade Hero. Awesome piece of art! Dark Jedi says to us "Comrade Hero was described to me as a powerful hero of the Russian people, and therefore needed to be placed in front of a notable monument. The Mamayev Kurgen was selected and I modeled her to be placed in the background. A very impressive piece. There is soft classical music playing in the background among the softly lit gallery. The ambiance is fantastic, but I wonder where the orchestra has been hidden. I see a huge mural across the room where the music seems to be coming from. I'll have to see if Dark Jedi can bring us to that one sometime tonight. I ask Dark Jedi about how old he was when he started dabbling with his artistic talent. "I remember having my mother show my drawings to other family members when I was about 5 or 6 years old. I also have vague memories of correcting other kids' drawings in second grade and they actually listened to my critiques, so I guess it was pretty early. I'd always been an 'A' student in art, but looking back, I don't think I did anything good until college. Before that, it's all just simple line drawings on school notebook paper. " We walk over to an art piece of Juggertha. Also, awesomely done! Dark Jedi fills us in on a little bit about this piece. "Juggertha was a lot of fun to pull together due to the opportunity to render his destructive path. Computers render relatively clean environments, so I spent a lot of time 'dirtying' up the setting. " Next to that piece was another City of Heroes piece, which was naturally fabulously done. Dark Jedi smiles as he explains this piece to Neko and me. "Here we have The Vanguard League. This piece was done for the Vanguard League, a supergroup located on the Victory server in the City Of Heroes. I received a ton of screenshot references for their in-game models and tried to replicate the characters as closely as possible. As a result, this piece took several months to complete. Ensuring every character had equal treatment was an added challenge, but I'm very happy with the results. " I was curious to know what Dark Jedi's art pieces were like when he was growing up, so I asked and he replied, "I used to draw Easter Bunnies. Yes, Easter Bunnies. Complete with a basket of eggs and everything. All the time. Hey, I was 6. I used to draw in school all the time. It was kind of distracting having sketches everywhere and no actual notes, so my mother took my pencils away. She figured if I had nothing but ball-point pens, I'd have to pay attention. As a result, I can now draw very elegantly with a ball-point pen. It's amazing the level of shading that can be achieved with a pen! " As Dark Jedi leads us over to the mural, LoneSTAR Lineup, where the orchestra is most definitely performing behind, I ask Dark Jedi what is his favorite piece of work that he has done thus far. Dark Jedi shares, "I would have to say I'm caught between two. One of my favorites is the piece I did for the cover of Fanzine number 1 that features Statesman and Lord Recluse fighting back to back against the Rikti Invasion. My other favorite for its sheer scope HAS to be the piece I did featuring my entire supergroup; 42 heroes all modeled and rendered in 3D. It took several months of daily work to assemble and is over 6 feet wide when printed. " Neko and I stand staring at the amazing detail of the LoneSTAR mural. I turn to Dark Jedi and asked him what he used to create it. Dark Jedi said with a proud smile, "I've become a huge digital art fan. I used many of the standard 3D programs including MAYA for the core modeling, Poser for the human models, and VUE for the rendering processes. Of course, a liberal amount of Photoshop goes into every stage, too. " As I take another look around the gallery, I am so amazed at what I see! I ask Dark Jedi where he gets his inspiration from, and he thought for a moment and then replied, "I read a lot of comics, watch plenty of Science-Fiction, and play computer games almost nightly. I have a sketchpad next to my computers so when a commercial or TV show sparks an idea, I can scribble a thumbnail immediately to preserve the immediacy of the concept. If an image gets overworked, it can suffer... so getting that initial energy is vital. " The evening was getting late and I already had ideas for my article floating around my head. I asked Dark Jedi if he wanted to say anything special to his fans and the City Scoop readers. He quickly replied, "If someone wants to be an artist, just keep drawing! Listen to other's feedback, but make your own choices about what you want to do creatively. Learn from observing, and don't be too proud to criticize your own work. My own personal 'self-improvement plan' is, whenever I finish a piece, I try to find three flaws in it that I could do better next time. That way I'm always pushing forward to make each piece better than the last. " With that, Neko and I thanked Dark Jedi for his hospitality and congratulated him on the success of his show. Writer's note: For anyone who is interested in viewing Douglas Shuler's (aka: Dark Jedi) art work, you may visit his websites at http://www.douglasshuler.com/ or http://douglasshuler.deviantart.com/ "Bring me your visions " - VexXxa