I interviewed Ekah a while ago but due to Uni work it's taken me a while to upload it. I'm now going through my Legends thread for my next interviewee. Enjoy.
Hi Ekah, Tell me a bit about yourself and what you do.
Hey Scouts, I recently graduated from senior high school, where I studied media with the focus on the graphical area in media.
How did you get into graphics and involved with GameBanana?
It started with me playing CS in the early days and wanting to learn how to skin, and sprays of course, to do this I realised I would have to learn how to use photohop. I loved makings custom sprays. I never read any guides about photoshop it was all trial and error.Once or twice my brother entered the room and showed me a new way of doing some awesome effect or some useful tool. I remember back in the days when Nintendo2012 ruled the spray section with his pixel animated sprays, everyone loved those. We used to talk quite a bit and he taught me how to create animated sprays. After that I started using photoshop even more to play around with photos I found on the internet.
I used to photoshop pictures of this girl I used to talk to, I always challenged myself and came up with different things. She later became my girlfriend and we dated for two years. It was obvious for me later to study media. I graduated with top grades in everything that had anything to do with graphics or media.
I became a mod of the spray section because I loved browsing FPSBanana. I spent several hours every day posting in the forums, checking the spray section, rating skins, visiting the black hole and it was awesome. I knew pretty much the entire mod team and did an active job in cleaning up, but after a while I had too much school and work to be able to keep active as a moderator.
Most of your sprays are inspired by band logo’s or marvel comics, is this an insight into your life?
Yeah, now most of my sprays have been removed by mods for various reasons such as screens stopped working etc. I think I had over 300 sprays at the top of it all from movies, tv shows, musicians, comics, games and anything that would make a good spray. Art has always been a huge part of my life, I like to be creative with whatever I work with.
Are you working on anything at the moment? I've seen some of your photography for example.
I've done some art for a skateboarding team, logo for a fitness program, dubstep music project and next I'm going to make the album cover of a local band. I also do alot of private photography and manipulations just for fun.
Your manipulations are quite 'dark' should we say? What's all that about?
Well I've always found it more fun to try and make something that's a bit scary. If you think about it a horror movie is one of the hardest genres to make a good movie out of. I think the same goes for art that's a bit disturbing or creepy, it's what I find more of a challenge to make. If you look through all the photos I've done you'll find your share of potatoes, flowers, needles and blood.
What advice would you give to anyone starting up in graphic art?
Limiting yourself is one of the stupidest things to do in the business of art and always have photoshop open.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me!
No problem :)
Ekah's favourite work:
Sprays:
Manipulations:
