Today we’d like to introduce you to Unkaged Ink.
Hi Unkaged, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
We’re a team of two artists, we’re both brothers, Aarman (36) and Isaiah (30). We have always been into art but have slightly different backgrounds, one in graphic design and the other in film and script writing.
Originally Unkaged Ink was put together by somebody Aarman had met by coincidence who was looking for an artist and it started off with the idea of making 2D motion-capture lip sync animations, after a few different ideas and no real direction to go, they decided to try and source funding from various programs. Eventually with the idea to enter a popular short film festival they wrote a script and started to work on the animation, using a unique blend of 2D and 3D.
Having shown interest in film production and script writing, Aarman took the script to his brother to have a look at and make edits to. After having been involved, Isaiah eventually moved on to helping with the colouring for the animation as they needed an extra pair of hands and over time became part of the team.
At this point the direction was shifting slightly still, but this person Johnny who brought us all together understood how to work the program we were using at the time (3DMax and After Effects) and wanted to blend a hand drawn look with computer animation, so we’d essentially colour the textures by hand and draw all the assets and he’d compile everything and make the animations on the computer.
Eventually, this person wanted to move on to other projects and enroll back in college leaving us with Unkaged Ink. At this time we had no idea how to animate or use the programs, but before he left he gave us a basic rundown of After Effects, which we still use to this day. Because we are total amateurs we had to not only learn everything from scratch but try and figure out and refine our style as Unkaged Ink.
It has taken a long time to get to where we are now because we’ve had to do everything from the ground up but how we see it now is a passion project we’ve dedicated our lives to. The goal is to make stuff we like, improve as artists and share it online for feedback so we can keep growing. We’re hoping that if other people like what we’re doing they can follow along our journey. Our current goal is to create and cultivate a community of artists online who can improve together and learn from each other
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
We’re just having fun with it! We have grown up being the type of kids who would constantly draw whatever we were into at the time, so even if we didn’t post to the internet we’d still just be drawing and trying to get better so it has been a fun process but having the feedback along the way and not being in an echo-chamber has really helped us improve and get us to where we are now.
It’s a hobby but we treat it as a business, but because our main focus is to just keep drawing we are just happy taking it at our own pace and doing what we want to do so we’re really happy with how far we’ve come and the support we get
The biggest challenge is trying to get time off work and manage your life around getting more time to draw, because animation takes up so much time we both really have to structure our lives around that and make certain sacrifices because of it.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
What we do is create animations and other artwork based around whatever we’re interested in, which is most of the time Dragon Ball. That is a series that has taught us many things as artists and we’ve dedicated ourselves to studying and improving on that artstyle because we love it so much
Within that category we like to create fan animations, concepts that wouldn’t really exist or things you wouldn’t get to see in any offical media. We feel like our personal interests make us a bit unique in this category, for example the things we like to animate are characters that are typically less popular, forgotten about or who you wouldn’t normally get to see interact. Other times we spend our time animating something that would be typically serious and put a comedic spin on it. We also like to show our personality through editing and blending in music that we like into the animations as well.
Beyond that, I’d say the main thing about us and something that we feel sets us apart from similar creators in our niche is that we blend both digital and traditional animation styles. We used to do almost everything by hand but over time we have started using a tablet more to draw frame by frame but still keep all the colouring and backgrounds a mix of coloured pencil and oil pastels. We also have a sort of “flipbook effect” on all our animations which we feel is part of our signature style. This is created by colouring each frame in the sequence but also colouring each still frame up to 4 times so we can loop it. This Unkaged Ink signature style we like to refer to as “flicker” Originally the way we used to do it was quite jarring and hard to keep in place without jumping out of the lines, over time it’s become more and more refined as our skills improved and now it works as an effect the way we’d like it.
How do you think about luck?
Sometimes online as a content creator it can feel like everything comes down to luck, even when it comes to some of our own posts it feels like ones we are quite proud of don’t perform as well as we expected and other older work we aren’t happy with any more gets a lot of traction. It’s important for us to take feedback into account both positive and negative but for us we feel it helps to try and separate “going viral” or getting great retention with how much we’re growing and improving.
Every time somebody leaves feedback we remember that and take it into account for the future, other than that we aren’t really relying on anything. Of course it feels good when a post does well or we get really good comments, but no matter what the second we finish a project and post something we’re already on to the next 5 that we have planned and have been waiting to start working on
I always had this idea about luck and posting online, cause I see artists and animators every day that are more than double as good as we are and doing things that we wish we could be doing and they have a great following and seem to be doing well for themselves. I feel when it comes to art, it speaks for itself. Somebody is going to like it or not and the only thing you can do to change that is try and become the best you can. I suppose the luck lies in people coming across your work, but at the end of the day the only thing we can control is providing a better product and hopefully the rest should follow
Recently however, we’ve been getting a lot of feedback from people saying they’d actually buy one of our artworks as prints and we also happen to have the know how to make T-shirts as well so we’ve been working on opening up a webstore in the background where we’re going to be trying to sell things for the first time! It should be fully ready within the next few weeks actually so we’re quite excited to be opening up this new chapter! hopefully some good luck comes our way, fingers crossed!!
Pricing:
- T-shirt $35.00
- Prints $15.00
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unkaged_ink_animations/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@UNKAGED_INK_ANIMATIONS
- Other: https://pci.jotform.com/form/262510701752853
