Senior looks to carve out career in graphic arts

Sometimes the Internet works in strange and mysterious ways. On YouTube are videos of people playing video games, narrating as they go along.

This might sound as exciting as watching paint dry. But added to that, sometimes artists will do renditions of the people playing the games. It’s called “fan art.”

The artist, in turn, e-mails the finished drawing to the person playing the video games on YouTube, and if the person likes it, they’ll often put the art into their next video.

Charlene Mundel knows this because she’s drawn fan art and passed it onto the YouTube performers.

Thing is, the artwork is really, really good. The Columbia Falls senior begins her drawings from scratch on a computer using a $50 drawing program and a Wacom tablet. In a matter of minutes she’s sketched out the character, and once she has its basic shape and form she’ll begin adding details to the flesh.

“I mainly do digital and graphic design,” she explained last week. “I don’t use a reference. I do a lot of it in my head.”

Mundel has been drawing since first grade, but over the years her art has refined to a graphic-novel like style. Her characters look like a blend of Anime and the graphic novel Sin City. She also writes stories to go along with the characters.

“A character takes about three to five hours,” she said.

Mundel’s already had some commercial success. She recently sold a storyboard of a commercial for the Family Fun Zone and has sold other drawings to individuals.

She also does art for colleagues, creating Dungeons and Dragons characters — a popular fantasy game — for her friends. Her dream job is to work for a video game maker like Nintendo or Sony. She plans to attend Flathead Valley Community College in the fall to study art.

Mundel was posting her work to an art-sharing website, www.deviantart.com, but she quickly learned that if you’re good, people will steal your work, trace it and call it their own. Art theft isn’t relegated to the world of paint and canvas by any means.

Still, she does most of her drawing on a computer and continues to hone her craft. Computers have a practical side.

“They’re best for me,” she said. “Art supplies are expensive.”