Dear reader,
In an effort to be a bit more active online and to grow my audience on different platforms, I'm starting a new blog here on Artstation.
Firstly, a bit about myself; I'm a Belgian digital artist with a passion for history. I've been creative all my life and since a very young age, I was sure that I'd be doing so for the rest of my life! My parents, recognizing my potential, sent me to the art academy since I was 6 years old. For 12 years, I learned from the great masters before me, specializing in digital art in the last 2 years, which is where I found my calling.
I've been interested (and surrounding myself) in history since I was old enough to understand it. I immediately fell in love with the medieval knights and Napoleonic soldiers of old. My parents (luckily) also recognized this and took me to as many museums and reenactment (living history) events as possible from a very young age. This enhanced my passion a lot and truly sparked my interest in history even further, with my friends in school even calling me, "The pirate," or "the knight." Most kids of my age were more interested in playing with cars and action heroes, while I was building literal armies of historical Playmobil knights and soldiers, recreating famous battle in the living room, like the battle of the Golden Spurs, The landings at Normandy and Waterloo.
Since I was introduced to living history at such a young age, it was only a matter of time before I signed up myself. And yes, I immediately fell in love! Replacing my toy soldiers with uniforms, arms and armour!
I also started (sabre) fencing when I was 8, and never stopped since, eventually, also sparking my interest in Historical European Martial Arts, or "HEMA" for short.
In my historical illustrations, I always try to stay as accurate as possible to the source material, scouring the internet, libraries, or informing with experts to find accurate contemporary sources. This has become very important to me, as portrayals of history in gaming and television these days have been to watered down to much with fantasy in my opinion. And it has become my purpose to make true history, as it actually was, popular again!
Now being surrounded with history all my life didn't mean, I was ignorant to fantasy or science-fiction. I got my first taste with films such as Peter Jackson's "The Lord of The Rings" and George Lucas's "Star Wars." This being very important in my current interest in fantasy and sci-fi stories. My main opinion on these was always that they had to be realistic and based on the real world like the medieval period. Like "The Lord Of The Rings" for example, which did a great job at this. While making fantasy artwork, I always try to stay very grounded and realistic. Having a fantasy soldier wearing practical armour for example. But I'm getting of topic, I'm sure I'll touch upon this again in a future blog post. ;)
I could go on for a very long time, but I'm sure you've now gotten a glimpse of where I come from.
I thank you for reading, and I'm sure, you'll hear of me again in my next blog post!
Kind regards,
Simon Bauwelinck
