Lombi asked this question on the artcone forums: Lombi: Hey there and welcome to the interview. How are you today?
Ursula: Well, I’m still recovering from a local con, so I’m a little punchy despite having just woken up. But coffee will heal all wounds.

Lombi: Alright, let’s start off with you giving us a little bit of background info … who you are, what you do, where you are from, how old is your inner self, what your foot size is… that kind of thing :}
Ursula: Ah…hmm. I’m Ursula Vernon, I’m 27, and I’m a freelance illustrator. I paint for a living. I’ve moved so often that I really don’t know where I’m from anymore, but I grew up in Oregon, went to college in Minnesota, and these days, I live in North Carolina. My shoe size is 7 1/2. I’m married and have a cat. (I don’t know the cat’s shoe size.)

Lombi: How would you, in your own words, describe your style? What and who were your major influences in the development of that style? Does your soulmate have any bigger influences in what you do? Which artists do you admire and respect for what they do?
Ursula: My painting style is kind of surreal eclectic. I tend to see an interesting style and want to try it, so it can vary pretty wildly. I started out just doing Standard Fantasy, and my influences were basically the Dungeons & Dragons artists–Elmore, Parkinson, Caldwell, etc, and then, once I discovered them, the Pre-Raphaelites. Grew out of that eventually–the more realism I was capable of, the less it interested me, although I still have a soft spot for the Pre-Raphaelites. These days I’m veering into territory that’s more distorted and expressive–diTerilizzi, Froud, and my personal favorite, James Christiansen, whom I greatly admire.
My comic style these days, by contrast, is solidly set in something I call “megascribble” which is a digital black and white thing where I scribble black over white and white over black, then scribble some more, getting smaller and smaller and tighter and tighter until I’ve pulled a fair amount of detail out–the end result usually winds up looking like a linocut. It didn’t so much have an influence as a figuring-out-how-to-do-it.
My husband’s influence is largely subject matter. Every now and then he’ll come in and say “Dude, you should paint a lizard with a little flute, charming a slug!” and sometimes he hits a really good idea and I’ll paint it. (Sometimes he hits a really weird idea and I tell him he’s nuts, but y’know.)

Lombi: What kind of music do you listen to, when you work? What are your favourite bands/artists?
Ursula: Actually, I am one of the evidentally rare artists who don’t really care what music’s on. This may be because I’m about as musically inclined as a dead chicken. I usually just leave NPR on, although if politics are making me yell at the radio too much (as happens a lot these days) I’ll pop in a CD. My tastes are pretty eclectic–I like some folk, like Steeleye Span, and the Pogues, and some…whatever it is…like Tom Waits and Nick Cave.

Lombi: A question everyone wants to know these days … at what point did you want to become the artist you are now … was there any breaking points or such? How did you get started in digital art?
Ursula: *laugh* Unlike everyone who will tell you that they were scribbling in utero, I came to it pretty late. My mother is an artist, and I wanted to rebel and be a scientist. I was in college before I got interested in art at all, and decided “Okay, I’m gonna learn to draw.” It didn’t occur to me that this might not be a skill one could simply learn, like driving a car, and fortunately, I was right. I wound up getting my BA in anthropology, and my art job prospects were actually rather better than my anthropology prospects.
I got started in digital art before anything else, since I had the computer and knew how to use it, but didn’t know anything about the arcane world of paint. I didn’t get into real media until I actually took some classes in college.

Lombi: The second most common question out there (hehe) … what software do you use in creating your artworks, how does the common process look like when you are creating a piece? Do you just see that software as purely a tool used to create or as something more? What kinds of media and techniques do you commonly like to use when you create a piece?
Ursula: Painter 7 is my great love. I am a Painter junky. Photoshop also comes in, because Painter could not be less intuitive if it was written in ancient Sumerian, so I use Photoshop for a lot of the layout, sizing, and general image manipulation, but for actual painting, Painter all the way. The process…well, I go to Painter, and with my trusty wacom, I draw the sketch. This takes awhile, I work in black and white, do the megascribble thing mentioned above. Then I go into Photoshop, do any resizing and layout that needs to be done, go back to Painter, lay down a layer, and start painting over the top of my sketch.
It’s a tool. I dunno, all the media are tools–acrylic, watercolor, the pencil, digital. You use the right tool for what you want to accomplish. Digital is easily the one I’m most confident in, and I can do very complex scenes that I probably wouldn’t tackle with real media. Even if I’m doing a real media piece, I do the sketches digitally, because I’m much more relaxed with digital media.

Lombi: When you create a piece what normally inspires your work?
Ursula: Uh…damned if I know. I just kind of come up with this stuff. I like combining things in weird ways, but it always makes perfect sense in my head at the time–of COURSE if storks deliver babies, vultures deliver zombie babies; of COURSE if there’s elephant garlic, there must be woolly mammoth garlic, and so forth. Then later on people tell me it’s weird and I go “What? Huh? Hmm. Gee, you’re right.”

Lombi: When you are working on a piece, when do you know that it’s finally done?
Ursula: When the white space is covered. I tend to work in chunks–I do the background first, then each figure in turn. I never have the “When is it done?” problem. If I look at it, and it looks good and everything’s been filled in and painted, I am generally not inclined to get too fiddly–I’ll go back, touch up a spot here or there, ask my husband for a last opinion, touch up anything he suggests, and then it’s done.

Lombi: Alrighty, tell us everything you can about your art book and when we will be able to order it :}
Ursula: *laugh* Oh, well, twist my arm….It’s going to be a sketchbook, of black and white work, most of which hasn’t been published on the web. Lots of the sketches that I get ideas from, the sorts that get used as underpaintings and what not, and my commentary on what the hell (if anything) I was thinking. It’s coming out through Sofawolf Press, a small press that’s been doing an “artistic visions” line. We’re hoping to get it out for a convention in late November in Chicago, and on-line orders should be possible sometime around then, too.

Lombi: Tell me how was it like breaking into the digital art scene … i know it’s very hard for young and unknown artists to get their name out nowdays … how was your experience like? What’s the best advice you could give to someone who wants to break into the scene?
Ursula: Phew. Well, I never really thought I was breaking into the digital art scene–when I started, back in ’97, there wasn’t much of a scene. (Or if there was, they hadn’t invited me.) So I was putting my work up on places like Elfwood, back when there was hardly anybody on Elfwood (I think I’m in Gallery 1 or 2 now) and for years, Elfwood was the only site where my work was up. And I got work through that. These days, of course, Elfwood is bloody enormous and most of us have joined other galleries as well, like Epilogue, and DA, and Yerf if appropriate, and whatnot. So in a way, it’s a lot easier to break in now–there actually IS a scene, which there didn’t used to be–but at the same time, it’s harder because there are literally thousands of artists out there, and unless you really stand out, you get lost in the crowd. But my advice would be to maintain a high public profile. Put stuff up very regularly, so that people don’t forget you exist. Get on every gallery you can. Participate in forums. Run a blog if you write well. Make sure you’re very visible.

And do good art, of course.

Lombi: I’ve asked you to choose 5 of your favourite artworks to be featured here along with this interview … so tell me … why do you like these 5 so much, what are the stories behind them?
Ursula: Well, let me see…

Sir Bunny Vs. the Wockwurm
This took a single afternoon, and was the first painting I’d ever done that had seriously exaggerated expressions, and it represented kind of a leap forward in my style. I still love the scream on the Wockwurm. The funny thing about this is that people interpret it two different ways—half of the viewers seem to think that Sir Bunny is about to be a small, damp splat on the ground, and the other half see the Wockwurm (the larval form of a jabberwocky?) as screaming in terror and about to run away.

Walking the Frog
Again, I liked the expressions. And the fat fairy. You don’t see nearly enough fat fairies. And I have a thing for frogs.

Bad Egg
This was one of the first really distorted little human characters I’d ever done, and I was really pleased with it. And c’mon, it’s an evil killer egg. What’s not to love?

Plow Potato
“Farmer Snoggle just couldn’t figure it out. The salesman had said that the Plow Potato could clear as much land as a team of oxen, but once he had it in harness, it just laid there. Not even dangling a stick of butter in front of it seemed to get it moving.
He was even beginning to suspect that maybe the salesman hadn’t been entirely honest with him.”
I just love the idea of this poor gullible lizard getting fleeced by an unscrupulous vegetable salesman. Weird vegetables show up a lot in my art—people getting menaced by turnips,

Another Naked Mole Rat
I really like naked mole rats. They’re the ugliest things in creation, like angry overcooked hot dogs with feet. I keep wanting to make them cute, and this is the best I’ve managed yet. This is the only original I’ve ever done that I didn’t want to sell afterwards—it’s hanging up in the house now, so it’s the first thing I see when I come out of the bedroom in the morning.

Lombi: So tell me … how would you describe the digital art scene roughly around your location? I’ve heard many artists complain about almost complete ignorance towards digital art … especially from traditional artists, galleries and such. Your two cents?
Ursula: *laugh* Well, the beauty of digital art is that it’s not tied to location. I have no idea what the scene’s like around here, because my scene’s on the internet. Also, I just moved here a few months ago, so I really don’t know what it’s like yet—or the traditional scene, either, for that matter. Ask me again in a year or so…

Lombi: Will you draw my character? (Hehe, just kidding. I read your FAQ about half an hour ago and still gigling)
Ursula: *grin* Yes, but only for money, and only if you don’t include your character history unto the Nth generation.

Lombi: What would you do if you were in an empty room (and no cameras anywhere) with a tied-up ripper?
Ursula: What’s a ripper? You mean like an art thief? I dunno, give them a disappointed look, probably. Sigh heavily. I try to keep a pretty relaxed attitude—in the grand scheme of things, some teenage kid claiming to have painted one of my paintings is a petty annoyance akin to treading in dog crap. And it almost never happens to me—I realize people are always claiming that art theft is rampant, and they’re undoubtedly right, but nobody ever steals mine. I’m just too weird or something.
Bandwidth theft pisses me off because that actually costs me hard cash, so I tend to take down the image and put a replacement up with a really scathing haiku.

Lombi: What do you think about the whole online art community thing at the moment? Where would you like to see the future of art go? What are your plans for the future?
Ursula: I like it! Online art is a great thing—more people see my work in one day at DA than would during the whole run of a gallery show. Yes, there’s a great deal of crap—unbelievable mountains of crap—but hey, Sturgeon’s Law. I get a lot of work through people finding me on-line, and it keeps me busy.
The future of art? Err…haven’t a clue. I don’t usually give it much thought. I just like drawing confused lizards and evil root vegetables. For my plans, I’d like to someday be able to stop taking commissions and just do my own weird thing, and sell enough of that to make a comfortable living. But we’ll see.

Lombi: So… put your shameless website plug here ^_^:
Ursula: Metalandmagic.com and what the hell – my webcomic, “Digger”

Lombi: You wake up one day and find out that you have amazingly cool superpowers. What are they?
Ursula: I can telepathically control ground sloths. And if they weren’t all extinct in the Ice Age, I would so kick ass.

Lombi: You find out that you will be relocated on a desert island tomorrow. You can only take one thing with you. What is the one thing you can’t live with?
Ursula: I think you mean “can’t live without,” in which case I’d take a computer with functional internet hookup, and hope that “Howtoliveonadesertisland.com” is running.
The one thing I can’t live WITH, on the other hand, would probably be a crate of giant centipedes. That’d be like my personal vision of hell.

Lombi: Oops, typo i guess. Err … umm… any questions for me?
Ursula: So, uh, why me? Not that I’m not flattered…*grin*

Lombi: Because you are worthy of one undoubtfully. Well, that’s kinda the end of the interview. Thanks for taking the time, Ursula. Any final words of wisdom you would like to share with us?
Ursula: Uh…persistence and dumb luck are the keys to success. Definitely.