Originally posted on Blog.com

 

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Red n purpleWhen I first met Kamila (or Amel for a friendly nickname cuz she has a lot of nicknames) one of the first things I noticed was her fondness of Emily The Strange. She stored some Emily pictures in her computer and played Emily flash games from the website, sometimes showing me some of the stuff whenever I’m around. I had this idea of making herself a version of Emily the Strange and that’s when she got her first username, Amelstrange. Short for Amel the Strange, which was all black and purple, because red is already taken by Emily.
I had no bad memories from this color combination, all I can remember were the sweet times she and I tried copying Emily the Strange pics found online into Amel The Strange drawings on MS paint. We laughed a lot too during the process cuz MS Paint is bad (unless you know how to work with it) and I knew how to use Photoshop back then but both of us still had no pen tablets, so we drew using a mouse and boy were our artworks tacky.

Nowadays I wanted to re-live those memories whenever I see a random Emily the Strange pics online, but sadly Amel has changed her username & no longer goes by Amel the Strange although we both still are pretty tight and she would laugh along to the memories of back when Amel the Strange still lives.

On a more recent event, I’ve copied Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s birthday music video Furisodeshon in 2013 to draw something for myself on my birthday. Kyary’s color scheme is red and white based on the classic furisode, whereas I used purple and black to match Cangkir the cup’s color scheme.

Pink n aqua
This color pairing kinda seem no different from bluegreen & redpink, but the backstory is in fact different. In 2006 i watched a lot of Lazytown with my baby siblings (usually before school) and I don’t know why (but no surprises) that Stephanie caught my eye. She’s one of the three human characters there besides Sportacus and Robbie Rotten, and it’s probably cuz Sports and Robbie doesn’t have all their things painted in their signature colors. Sportacus’ blimp is all white and only some of his sports stuff are blue. Surprisingly Robbie’s lair are all blue, except for some of his costumes (which are red and purple as usual) and his orange couch. When it comes to Stephanie, EVERYTHING IS PINK… except for maybe her yellow bedroom walls, cuz she is after all living under her Mayor uncle’s roof.

One day i was at a souvenir shop with my friend and her parents, and I came accross some gel balls in vases. There was a vase with bright pink ones in it next to another vase containing bright bluish green ones. I’ve always liked aqua and teal cuz of their refreshing nature, but at that moment I subconsciously thought of Stephanie and I don’t know why I wanted to see an aqua/teal version of her. And that’s when I created my character Seattle… and eventually her little brother Tex (who is all black & red based on my main favorite colors that time) and seeing that i was addicted to Fall Out Boy songs that time (besides My Chemical Romance and Panic! At The Disco) i made those two siblings FOB fans as well (over the time Seattle had taken a liking to Owl City but that happened years later).

Seeing that I’ve got two characters ready I thought it would be a good idea to make a parody of LazyTown with those two, myself and of course the members of Fall Out Boy. Initially I was gonna draw comics but that never happened cuz I had no time to do them. In the parody, Seattle took all the role of Stephanie while Tex took Ziggy’s since I felt as if those two have the similar amount of hyperness. I would be playing Pixel’s, Trixie’s and Stingy’s roles all at once while FOB play the adults, and for some reason I thought it would be funny to give the Robbie Rotten role to Robbie Williams. With all these ideas in my mind at that time I . It was pretty funny and reading back I sort of wondered what drug was I high on when writing it.
One regret about all this is Seattle’s character design kinda looks too simolar to Stephanie’s, only differences being different hairstyle, jacket, and color scheme, and DEFINITELY music taste but thats not visible. The rest of the characters are different… way too different from the original cast though and theres no possible way to fit one character from this parody into one character from the actual show. The whole idea of this parody now seems embarrassing and unexecutable, and COME ON I can’t pass Robbie Williams and Fall Out Boy as characters in MY parody. They’re copyrighted.But that’s all ok cuz I still wrote that fanfiction. Not much artworks however, but still, I’m not sure if there are a lot of Lazytown fanarts out there but if I come across some pics that focus on Stephanie and Ziggy i’d draw another version of it with Seattle and Tex, but for now Seattle remains as a regular character of mine, and I’d just draw however i feel like portraying her.
Green and purple

This is probably the one color combination with the worst memories of all despite its sweet feeling. It’s one of the moments that I severely copied from someone a tad too much.

It was 2007, the peak of my deviantART popularity, but as the year goes it seems I got more notorious than famous. I got into drawing fanarts of my favorite bands and got to know some awesome artists that are from the bandoms.

From My Chemical Romance fanarts, I met Denorii, one of the two members of Evil Squares inc., famous for jer MCR fancomic W.A.Y back then. I noticed that theres a green mug with a smiley  face that’s always getting featured in the comic strips, which then later revealed that it’s a character from Hyphen, the webcomic Den’s partner-in-crime Kuriru (now Kurisquare) belongs to. Of course, Tacito the mug (its name is simply a diminuitive of Tazon = Mug/Cup) got popular among our community and just for fun, some of us made cup or mug characters just like it.

Initially I started drawing a red mug in my comic, with a face resembling Bon Jovi’s album Have A Nice Day. Feeling uneasy at the fact that I used a copyrighted face on the mug and cant make it my own mug character, I later made another character, a purple cup with a face similar to the Spitfire logo for some reason, just because I found a purple cup in my cupboard. I named it Cangkir, which basically means Cup, and filled it with psychopath characteristics and murderous intentions. I created Cangkir along with Ashe-08, initially as a joke.

During this short period of time I kept comparing Cangkir to Tacito, even making parodies of artworks featuring Tacito in it so Cangkir could have its little piece of fame too. Also, I love parodying things. Parodies rock, but looking back now I’d say it was just plain copying instead of parodying.
Eventually someone else joined the cup-creating game. It was Art-Munkey (now DisforDelirium), creating a blue cup character called Kappu (also basically means Cup). Kappu had a =^.^= face, which kinda resembles a cat’s. And thus another addition makes it a new sub-color-scheme, but still in the same sense.Green n purple n blue

And YES, I’ve written about this before. With that in addition almost EVERYONE wants to make their own mug/cup character  Den putting Tacito in W.A.Y as Mikey’s mug was partially to blame, cuz to make things fair fans of the webcomic wanted to make a signature cup for the rest of My Chem’s members. Until one day, for Tacito/s sake, Kuri gets pissed and put up a warning that she doesn’t want these mug characters around anymore.

Somehow Cangkir and Kappu managed to still be around (of course I kept Cangkir alive out of rebellion, but not DisforDelirium, cuz she discontinued Kappu but another friend of mine  took over and kept Kappu alive. I owe you one, buddy).

The whole year my mind was treating these three like equals. I had that “if they can have that kind of luck, why cant others like them have that luck too?” attitude, practically a mixture of deep envy and equalizing. Eventually that feeling blinded me from basic copyright laws and all I could care about was if X happened, Y and Z should happen too, and that was what’s embarrassing and regretful about this memory. I even lost a few good friends along the way (usually when I lose friends it’s because we’ve grown out of each other, but this is a different case). Plus the horrible grammar and always typing in caps lock kind of personality that I’d really like to erase just adds the sdfghjkness.

Although I won’t regret our active fandoms of the bands we love, the crazy inside jokes from and for comics and music videos, how my closest deviantART friends were very supportive of my parodies and crazy ideas and actually thought I was a trendsetter, and one more thing: Singaporean canned drinks called Anything and Whatever. I know it’s weird to mention them but they added that pinch of sweetness in my 2007 lifeless internet life, starting out as inside jokes from one of my friends, then after samples of those drinks got sold in where I live (I was in Brunei that time) and getting to taste them for the first time, turned into somewhat of a sensation I’ve had whenever I reached my “sweet victory” successfully copying someone, mainly the Evil Squares members… which then later turned into bitter shame when they found out.
But still, those drinks combined with the bands I listen to that time define my version of sweetness. And all that can be triggered whenever I see stripes and dashes of green, blue and purple anywhere.

After that I haven’t come across any particular copycat-esque color schemes eventhough I might’ve copied a great deal of artists or people. Maybe I stopped paying attention to color-coded themes, or maybe these people dont have signature colors to begin with.

[DISCLAIMER: Some of the images I used here are mine and some aren't. To make things safe I've trackbacked the links and they'll be redirected when the images are clicked.