Meghan Murphy - Kawaii Not
kawaii_not

1) What name do you go by for your art?
Meghan Murphy (just my plain old name)

2) What drives you to create?
I'm not sure if I have a good answer for this. All I know is that I'm cranky when I can't make something.

3) How would you define your style?
Silly, cute, and a little deranged.

4) What things inspire and influence you and your artwork?
Comics, cartoon, manga and anime, kawaii culture, classic pinups, vintage advertisements, children's books. Anything I find cool or shiny.

5) Do you listen to music when you create? Describe your perfect creative work environment.
A quiet environment drives me bonkers. I need music (usually randomly selected from my iTunes library), or sometimes a podcast to fill the silence. Other times I'll have a movie playing up in the corner of my computer screen as I work. It's either that or I start talking to myself.... okay, I lied -- nothing stops me from talking to myself.

6) What mediums do you work in the most? Why do you use them?
My typical process involves sketching (often very loosely), scanning the results in my computer, then bringing it into Adobe Illustrator and messing around. It usually is in this last step that a piece really starts to resolve into something for me. I like being able to instantly change the colors/shapes/positions of different elements of an illustration before I am satisfied that it doesn't suck.

7) If there was one style of art that you could take up, what would it be?
Pulp novel covers.

8) As a child what did you want to be when you grew up? And now?
I always wanted to be an artist. I'm very lucky in that regard.

9) Name a few of your favorite artists.
Mary Blair, Jim Flora, Junko Mizuno, the Sanrio company, anyone in my Favorites section of my DeviantArt account. Oh god, I'm sure I'll think of more as soon as I finish this interview. I'm inspired by mostly everything on which I set my ever-roving peepers.

10) Where can we find your work online (Flickr, myspace, livejournal, official website, blog, etc.)?
Murphy Pop (my illustration portfolio)
Kawaii Not Webcomic (my ridiculous webcomic)
DeviantART (a looser version of my portfolio, with more experiments and such)