World-Building Artist Interview: Gassler's Art and Aurora

A while back I introduced an intended series of posts focused on the art of world-building. The idea was the promote speculative fiction, science or fantasy fiction, through artists as opposed to writers. I’ve always been more attached to aesthetics of visual art rather than the rhetorics of literature and having been a member of the Deviant Art for several years I thought it made the most sense to focus attention upon members of that community. Andrea Claudio Gassler, otherwise known on his profile as JuniorWoodchuck, is one such member I have been fortunate enough to converse with regarding his artwork and world-building on several occasions. What follows is a Q&A between us regarding such subject matter. His impressive portfolio encompasses everything from speculative xenobiology (including fan art for Snaiad), post-humanity, and Martian and future zoology. Check out his amazing artwork, especially his Aurora world-building project! 

What are your general interests as an artist? Is there a particular genre or medium you are most attracted to? 

Most of my pictures so far are either pencil or ballpoint line-art just because it’s an easy way to quickly put ideas down on paper and mistakes can be fixed quite easily. In the last couple of months, especially with the start of my new future biology project, I started to add more details and shade my pencil drawings as I grew quite dissatisfied with just the simple line work. It’s a way for me to visually convey more information about the organisms as well as add some more value to my own art.

In addition to that, I recently bought a Wacom tablet, on which I am trying to experiment with digital art and different techniques as often as possible as it’s something I want to explore further and maybe even fully transition to colored digital art. This is also mainly because I want my art to look more professional and realistic to properly illustrate what it is I see in my mind. The problem with that is just that I can be quite impatient, especially with myself, so I often get a bit discouraged when something takes too long.

Were there any particular works of art (including literature, television, film, or video-games) or artists themselves that were major sources of inspiration for your own art?

I grew up in a pretty artistic family of designers, artists, architects and photographers so drawing came quite naturally to me. As I have always had a vivid imagination, those imaginary creatures just came to me for as long as I can remember.

My first introduction to speculative biology and what really got me started in it, was Dougal Dixon’s fantastic "After Man". There was a copy of it in a local library and it was usually the only book I borrowed. I must have read through it hundreds of times and memorized all the different animals and how they came to be like that. His works did not really influence me on an artistic level though but more just in the way I approach speculative biology.

Terryl Whitlatch, particularly the work she did for the Star Wars movies, is one of the main and earliest influences on my art. After that, Wayne Barlowe and C.M. Kosemen have also greatly influenced me not only with their art but also their xenobiology projects Darwin IV and Snaiad. And of course, all the other great artists on DeviantArt have inspired and influenced me quite a bit ever since I joined the site.

Do you have a particular process you follow when designing your creatures?

When I start drawing, I usually have a pretty clear mental picture of how I want my design to look like. I then start with a very light sketchy outline to define the creatures proportions, how it is positioned and posed. I refine this outline until I’m happy with it before making the lines stronger or inking them, adding details and maybe some shading. This process is pretty much the same no matter the medium.

For your art that has a narrative attached, what is its relationship to your art typically? Do you have an idea in mind and build a creature around it or do you find the narrative forming around the creature?

That really depends to be honest. Sometimes I come up with an idea of how I want a creature to behave, what traits I want it to have, what niche it fills in its biosphere and other things like that and then model the creatures' designs around these ideas. Other times, it’s the other way around. I sketch some creatures until I have something I’m happy with and then create a narrative around the design. With Aurora, it usually started out with a very basic idea that I then translate into a design around which I create a narrative. Oftentimes, the design and the narrative develop and evolve hand in hand.

What is the importance of narrative to your artwork? Do you merely see it as a context to help your audience interpret your art? Or is the narrative a form of art in itself to you?

The main focus usually lies on the designs with just a few lines of description to convey the information that would not be evident otherwise. Mainly just so the viewers can get a rough idea of what they’re seeing. That does not necessarily mean that I place less importance on the narrative but I often struggle a bit with finding the right words in English. I do however have some upcoming projects where the narrative and art go hand in hand and even some purely text-based ones… So I certainly do think that the narrative in itself can be its own form of art and it’s able to bring across ideas that could not be depicted otherwise.


For your worldbuilding projects, such as "Aurora", do you find yourself coming up with a world first and populating it with creature art or is the world an afterthought to organize artwork you have already generated independently?

Well, Aurora is a bit different from most of my other worldbuilding projects…

My first xenobiology project ever has been about the organisms that inhabited a cold and barren Mars before an asteroid wiped them all out. All my other xenobiology projects since then have basically been alterations of that initial project and though the names of the planets have changed a few times, the features are usually pretty similar - cold, dry, and rather barren.

With my first few worldbuilding projects, I have been playing a lot of attention to biological accuracy, trying to make my designs look as plausible as possible. This was especially problematic for my xenobiology projects as the only reference I had was Terran wildlife. Because of that, all my designs turned out looking rather mundane and unimaginative - in my eyes at least. For a long time, I struggled to come up with something I was happy with until I decided to throw all logic out the window and just create something that looks cool. That’s how Aurora came to be…

That project is also different because I usually just created a creature and then kept it like that forever. The designs of Auroran animals are in a constant state of flux because I usually create them without too much attention to similarity. I then modify their designs depending on relation to other groups or just because I grew tired with it.
Had I not done that they’d still look like pudgy cone-heads or weird mosquito-horses.


What is the relationship you see between yourself, your worldbuilding and your audience community? Are the worlds an artist creates something "owned" within their own imagination or is it something open to an audience to populate with their own creations? 

Aurora as well as most of my other projects are very much an extension of myself and my imagination. It’s a way to process my thoughts, ideas and emotions. They are all worlds I have experienced in one way or another, be it through dreams, reveries or through the themes I cover in them. In addition to that, they are all just worlds or stories I want to experience and since they don’t yet exist, I have to create them myself.

I like to be the owner of my projects and I’m usually quite protective of my designs. On one hand, it is because they are all very personal to me but also so I have total control over them and can take them where I want them to go. Some sort of audience participation, in which I allow them to create their own flora and fauna is planned for the future - albeit only for a limited time.

I did start a rather fantastical collaborative project with my friend and fellow DeviantArtist Ryan Bowers. We were hoping people would take an interest in it and populate it with their own creations but due to our other projects, we weren’t really able to get it off the ground. It now lay dormant for quite some time before we decided to call it quits. There might be more collaborative projects in the future but for now, I want to focus more on my personal projects.


What do you want your audience, particularly other artists, to take away from your own artwork? Do you hope that they want to contribute to your worldbuilding, start their own projects, come away with some appreciation of the world around them, etc.?

I’m hoping to fill my audience with the same sense of wonder and awe I experienced when I discovered Snaiad, Darwin IV and all the amazing projects that can be found on DeviantArt and hopefully motivate them to start their own projects.


What is the value you see for yourself in your speculative and fantastical form of art? Is there a motivating purpose to worldbuilding and designing imaginary creatures and giving them explanatory narratives beyond the pleasure of exercising one's imagination? 

I’m not quite sure… I have never really thought about it before. It was just something I did because I enjoyed it. In some way, art has been a way for me to escape my sometimes unpleasant reality to a safe place over which I have total control.

I do think that coming up with these alien worlds can give you a deeper understanding and appreciation for your own one as you hear a lot about it by researching and by adjusting the different adaptions and laws of our world to fit your own. In a way, it’s a form of learning about our Earth by proxy.


Do you have any ideal, long-term goal for your artistic worldbuilding? Do you hope to organize it into a work of literature or website or is it merely for spontaneous pleasure and inspiration

Even though there is not that much of it online, I have tons of concepts for Aurora at home. I have been working on it for quite some time now and I feel like I have come to a point, where I’d feel comfortable with it coming to a conclusion.
But because I still have so many pieces and information, I have not yet published it and because it has been with me for such a long time, I’d feel bad just letting it die like that. Because it has been, and still is, such a big process and my biggest project so far, I do want to give it a proper ending.

So what I’m planning on doing is creating entirely new, digital illustrations and compiling them all together with informative texts on the flora, fauna, the planet itself and many other aspects of life on Aurora and turning it all into a pseudo-scientific book along the lines of Expedition or After Man. That would also be where the audience participation would come into play. My viewers would be able to take part in form of a contest to get their creations featured in it as well as maybe a physical copy of the book.

As of now, I’m not quite sure yet what I’ll do with it once I have created this book. Maybe I’ll actually try to get it published, maybe I’ll just have some copies printed for myself and friends (and maybe everybody willing to pay for it to cover my expenses) or I’ll just put it up on the internet as an e-book. Although it sounds like I have pretty well-defined immediate plans for it, it will still take a long time until it will actually become reality.

At the moment, I’m taking a break from Aurora to focus on my future biology project as well as on writing a novel and a (web-) comic and to improve on my digital art until I can do it justice and properly depict all the organisms. As I’ll also start studying soon, I don’t yet know how much time I’ll actually have to work on any of it so I really cannot tell when it’ll happen.