Fandom Spotlight: kingcael

Meet Cael! Known online as ‘kingcael’, he’s a 29-year-old Canadian artist who has done a lot of gorgeous tarot-inspired work in multiple fandoms!

Describe yourself in 3 words.

I contain multitudes.

How long have you been creating art? What is your favorite medium?

I’ve been drawing from a young age, and always had a compulsion to draw, probably helped by my grandparents always giving me paper and pencils and using the fridge as a gallery. I started actually thinking I could pursue art about twelve years ago, so I’ve been practicing a while. 

My favorite medium is probably digital, I use a mix of Procreate and Photoshop.

What is it that drives you to create fanart? Why do you think it is important?

When I create fandom art, I think about a unique perspective I can offer, or sometimes I’m just super inspired by a description and am utterly compelled to draw it. 

Fandom and fanart are important because of the community aspect of it, I think. Finding like-minded individuals creating together, interpreting things in different ways has elements of being in a studio, where you’re constantly inspired and being inspired. Using media we all have a common interest in creates a place to start and we can sculpt and transform the canon into more personalized things to suit us. 

 

 

How much planning is involved with each piece, and how long does it usually take you to do a typical drawing? 

For me, a lot of my process is just sitting with a concept, thinking about composition and symbolism and sometimes resigning myself to the fact that I really have to draw super detailed hands or completely extra hair again for the composition to work haha

For something like my [The Magnus Archives] cards, the Arcana Vigilo series, with lots of tiny details and symbolic elements, they can take between 4-6 hours roughly. I listen to podcasts while working a lot, so I definitely lose track of time. A card like my Yennefer [from The Witcher] card was certainly longer, just from all the time it took to shade her hair, and the fur collar. I really find working on shading dark hair therapeutic, so it was almost meditative to render.

I actually had this process pic for planning out the Geralt [from The Witcher] card, which is pretty rare since I draw over my sketch to make lineart more often than not. So that’s pretty neat!

 

 

I also have this real sloppy sketch for [a card featuring Jonathan Sims and Martin Blackwood from The Magnus Archives] which was just me figuring out the layout and where certain elements would go. I knew for sure that I wanted lots of fabric, and I did this sketch before arranging my bedsheets and blankets to reference. 

 

 

What is the process like for creating your tarot cards? 

The process for creating a tarot card has more preamble than some of my other drawings, just because I have to do quite a lot of research before I even begin. I’m interested in both tarot and floriography (the language of flowers), so I first have to assign appropriate flowers and a card to the character in question. Assigning flowers can sometimes be tricky, since the meaning has to be appropriate, but also finding flowers that go well together can be a challenge. [For The Witcher cards] Jaskier’s in particular was serendipitous, since the Ace of Pentacles suited him so well, with the little side joke of “Toss a Coin to your Witcher” worked well with it, not to mention Jaskier means buttercup, and he’s referred to as Dandelion, so adding those was pretty obvious but worked perfectly. 

I enjoy working on sets since I can create a template for myself to work with for cohesion purposes, and still add uniqueness and individuality to each card within those confines. So overall there’s differences, but they still work together as a clear set. 

What do you find the most challenging to draw?

I find backgrounds most difficult to draw, and I think that mostly come from the fact that I don’t find the process of drawing them particularly enjoyable so it’s difficult to improve. Hands are still challenging to draw, but I really enjoy working on them so they don’t count [laughs]. 

 

 

What about your art or process do you think has improved the most? What do you think made you improve?

I definitely have a better mind to hand to paper process now, where what I visualize in my head resembles more closely the finished image. It was always a frustrating thing, when I first started, that I could picture something amazing but was never able to properly make it happen, so I’ve been getting a lot better at that lately since I understand how the process from that imagination zone to a completed image actually works. 

Studying different types of composition from different artists has really helped, as well as drawing out of my comfort zone. I suppose that’s fairly standard advice, but when I talk about drawing out of my comfort zone, I only mean a little bit in each drawing. Like for my Arcana Vigilo series, I draw some pretty extreme head tilts, so using the basis of what I know about portraiture, and then just pushing it a bit further expands my ability to draw those things without going to extreme and making learning something new insurmountable. 

What fandoms do you currently consider yourself in?

Currently I’m quite active in the Magnus Archives and Final Fantasy communities. The Magnus Archives definitely snuck up on me, I really thought I would like it a normal amount, but here I am [laughs]. I had heard a bit of chatter about it on Twitter, so I decided to check it out when I had caught up with Welcome to Night Vale, and fell deeply in love with it. The fandom is diverse and creative, and thriving, full of inspiring and creative works almost daily.

Final Fantasy has been a very consistent fandom for me, some of my closest and dearest friends were made during community events like Kupocon, and the [Final Fantasy] family is one that’s always been good to me.

 

 

What has been your favorite work of art you have created? What do you love about it?

I had to think about this question for a little while, but I eventually settled on this one, of my original character Solomon. Whenever I think about a new style idea, or a different way of working, I usually test the idea out on my [original characters], since there’s a certain amount of creative freedom that comes with your own characters. 

This one felt like a chapter break, between a way I used to draw, and a new way of doing it, mixing the different styles and colors and techniques I’d used for different styles into one image. If I had to show one image to summarize my visual library, I think this one would be it. For whatever reason, that bright cyan is becoming a color I use in almost everything. 

 

 

Do you have any upcoming creative projects you are working on?

In the last year or so, I’ve become totally enamored with the idea of making decks of cards (probably a latent holdout of watching Cardcaptor Sakura as a child) so I have plans to make either my own Major Arcana, or a Deck of Many Things inspired by the item from Dungeons & Dragons. 

What has been the best part of your fandom experience so far? 

There’s something I particularly like about being part of zines and other charity works like that, where all the love that a community has for something just overflows and we all get together to do a little bit of good in the world. I’ve been in zines for Final Fantasy mostly, and even ran one myself, and the collaborative efforts and time people put in is always admirable and amazing. 

 

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Stunning work! Do you like what you see? Here’s where to find Cael online!

Twitter: @kingcael

Tumblr: kingcael

Instagram: @kingcael 

Website: kingcael.carrd.co

Print Shop: kingcael.storenvy.com

Tip Jar/Commissions: ko-fi.com/kingcael