Alexandria Neonakis is a true gamer girl - and an artist. Due to her passion for games, she became famous for her Team Fortress 2 & Left 4 Dead Valentine Cards. The result? Valve now sells Left 4 Dead plush and greeting cards, designed by Alexandria. Beauty of Games talked to her about Valentine's Day, Gabe Newell's fan mails, golden age animation and girls shooting people.

Would you say you are an artist playing games or a gamer doing art?

This is sort of a chicken vs the egg question. I was very inspired by games to do art, but being involved in art also draws me to certain games. I really like the game TF2 partially because of how much I love Moby Franke's character design... I'd have to say artist playing games though. I spend way more time drawing than I do gaming nowadays.

So since when are you doing art?

Since I was very little. But I started seriously drawing with a focus on making it my career when I was 13. I'm 25 now.

You have a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the NSCAD University. That’s a quite understandable fact, but why did you study Neuroscience?

I don't have a Bachelor of Fine Arts. I went there for one year to try new things that I hadn't experienced yet like sculpture and photography. I went into neuroscience because it was a more practical career choice than trying to do animation which was what i wanted to do at the time. The animation industry was not doing well, so I followed my second passion, science. After 4 years doing that, I realized you have to do what you love, you can't try to force yourself to do something just because it's "practical" you'll never find happiness that way. I still love science, and it frequently inspires my artwork.

I taught myself most of what I know about art using books and the internet. This year I attended a workshop in Kansas City called The Illustration Academy. I highly recommend it. Things like this have helped me quite a bit.

This is maybe also a nice advice for people out there who try to get into the game industry. E.g. when I told my parents that I am really into games, they asked me if I dont want to do something serious.

I always tell young people to follow their passions. If you are really interested in being a part of a team that puts games together, then by all means, do it. It is a serious career. There's lots of money to be made in games. I will say, from my experience on a dev team that it's not all just sitting around playing games having fun though. Playing video games is not at all like making them. It's a lot of work and a lot of overtime. But if you love it, it's worth it. Parents want what's best for you. You can't fault them for that. My advice to young people who want to get into the games industry is not to whine at your parents, but to show them that it's a viable career choice. Do your research. Find an area in games that interests you. There are many areas you can look into, programming, game design, sound production, concept art, graphic art, to name a few. Find out how much people breaking into your specific area of interest are making as their starter salaries. Find out whether or not you need to go to school for it and how much it'll cost. Find out where the companies you're interested in working for are based out of and how much it costs to live there annually. If you show your parents that you've done your research, it'll show them that you're serious about this. They'll be more willing to take you seriously.

Yeah! Golden age animation style. I mean like old UPA, Disney, Warner Bros. from the 40s and 50s. Particularly Mary Blair, X. Atencio, Walter Foster and Eyvind Earle. Also early illustrators such as Norman Rockwell, Charley Harper and Sokol. Some modern illustrators as well, I love Ragnar. I'm also really inspired by fine art. My favorite fine artists at the moment are mostly abstract expressionists. I really love Kandinsky. I think that it's important to have a wide range of influences.

Your deviantArt website contains a huge variety of cute and funny stuff. But there is one section of images, you don’t like. What’s wrong with them?

[Laughs] They're just old. I don't want to throw them away. I feel like it's important to have that history so you can compare what you're doing now to what you were doing then. You can see where you've improved and where you're still going wrong. I just don't like it being part of my main gallery because it doesn't reflect what I'm doing right now.

What is the best about being an artist?

Right now I'm working freelance so I make my own hours. That's pretty great. If I don't feel like getting up early, I don't. Sometimes when I'm sitting here designing characters I kind of laugh to myself because I draw cute little zombies and someone pays me for that. It is the best feeling in the world.

Do you have a certain formula of how you approach a new project?

Yes. I always start by getting the client to send me any information I need to start doing sketches. So say it's a character, I want to know a basic description, any history the character has. I want to get to know the character. Then I start looking up references. So for example, if the character is a young boy in the 1820s, I want to know what young boys wore in the 1820s, so I'll find a bunch of pictures in books or online to use as a reference. Then I start sketching ideas. I start with silhouettes to get something that reads well, then I put in details much later. I try to give the client as many options as possible. From there, if they want changes, I make them in the sketch stage, it's easier that way. When i get approval on a sketch, I do finished work, which would typically involve really nice cleaned up turn arounds or whatever it is they need for the project.

What's your most favourite tool when doing art?

I do everything digitally, but I still really love drawing with pencils on paper. Tablets and software have come a long way, but they've still not mastered the feeling of drawing with a pencil on a sketchbook.

You just mentioned the workshop in Kansas City. What can a Alexandria Neonakis still learn? Will we see Kandinsky-like art next?

Oh man there is so much still to learn, I still consider myself such an amateur in so many ways. The workshop in Kansas was a bunch of pro illustrators like Gary Kelley, Mark English and Anita Kunz teaching us how to make good pictures. These are people who have been doing this for decades. They are incredible artist with so much to offer and teach. If you're an artist and you've stopped learning, you're doing it wrong [laughs]. Also if you don't know who any of those people are, look them up immediately! And no I'll never be Kandinsky, he was a master, I can't even hope to have the design sense he had, but I can certainly pull influence from him!

Read the second part of this interview on the next page.