About Me!
Hello! My name is Sullivan Arnold. I am an artist, gamer, and a game developer in training. I am currently at college studying in Game Design and have made three games already: Suits, True Heroes, and King of Villany. As stated earlier I am a gamer, the games that I play the most are Destiny 2, League of Legends, and Splatoon 3. I fell in love with games when I was just a kid with a Nintendo 2ds and a Wii. And as for my Art I will talk about that down below in the other parts.
My Start
I started doing art back in 2018 with the drawing you can see on the right here. I fell in love with a specific art style from a Splatoon artist on Tumblr going by the name of "natsukiia". Sadly, they have not been active to my knowledge since December of 2018 so it is unclear where they are now but I hope they are doing well. After they stopped posting I fell into the artstyle of my girlfriend at the time Sammantha, known as "0-astraldreams-0" on Tumblr. After that I grew with her with our art together throughout high school and things were really looking up for me!
A Roadblock
As a lot of people say, "All good things must come to an end" and the end of my relationship with Sammantha came hard. Over time with her she became more and more abusive to me and it became toxic very quickly. This was around early 2020 when this was happeneing and I felt worse and worse about my work and my passion with each abusive insult or hit against me that she took. Then in March of 2020, the world took a nosedive and went under lockdown. That moment was the lowest point of my life I have ever experienced so far. But it provided me with an oputunity, so I took the lockdown to end the relationship with Sammantha. After that moment, I felt a new wave of inspiration. I was no longer bound to her and developing her art style so after that moment I started working more and more on developing my own style of art and creating characters and stories. Some of those stories and characters are still being developed and built upon to this day and you can see some of them when looking at my work with a sharp eye.
A Bright Future
Right now I feel like I am rising with my art ability with each drawing I work on! Recently I have started to draw digitally and work on that most of the time so I can get proficient in it. And soon I will be starting to make digital games for people around the world to play. But my big goal with all this is to get a career with either Bungie with Destiny 2 or other projects or with Riot Games and their teams. I have admired their work for years and I hope to join them and be a part of their wonderful teams of people.
Whats happening now?
Like I have said earlier, I am currently in college at Illinois State University studying in Creative Technologies: Game Design. I have made three games, two of them were with a group of four people. "Suits" was a card game using a basic deck of cards and assigning abilities and powers to them all to give them each their own personality and ways to defeat your opponent. I hope someday to meet with that group of people again to polish it and make it into a digital game. The second game I have made is called "True Heroes". That game was an improv game that I made solo that used characters in several areas of media and the players arguing and explanation skills to help determine who is the best character. The players would get a random character and get explained a situation, and the goal was to explain and argue with the other players how their character is better than the other player, then the other players at the table who did not play democraticly vote on who won the match up. Whoever is first to five (or less depending on how many players play) victorious characters is determined to be the "True Hero". The third game I worked on, "King of Villany", is a party game where you race other players around a large city map to collect a bomb and a detonator, and rush back to the city hall to blow it up and win the game. But there are challenges along the way, including the Police, other players, and items that can shake up the path to become a true villian. Along with those three games, I am currently working and studying in Unity and Unreal Engine to create games digitally. I have also made this entire website by hand and have made smaller programs coded in Java Script. I am also slowly working in Blender to up my 3D skills. Some of my strengths are in my character design, I have a lot of Original Characters that I have spend a lot of time drawing and writing for. I have also done a lot of bord design and art for the games that I made earlier. Another strength is in my adaptability, my drawing style has developed with every piece I work on, and with some I even treid emulating other artists (Van Gogh is my personal favorite). A weakness that I have right now that I can talk on is that I have not worked that much on hyper realism. I need to work on it more and I will probably make mistakes at first, but I will learn from them with time and will hopefully get better at it once I work on it more. Another weakness of mine is with landscapes. I have worked on it from time to time, but I have not extensivelly focused on it. I do have some strong moments where I excell in landscapes, but its has just been a few times. I currently work part time as a Technical Stagehand here at my university, where I manage lights, sound, projections, and any other technological challenges that comes with having an event in a space like a theater or a conference room. I have been working there for a year now and have learned many skills with it. I have also had 4 years of experience in High School Theatre, where I worked lighting design and spotlight for eight shows with one of them being a Musical. With that time in High School Theatre, I learned about acting, lights and color theory, and how lighting can set a strong mood for a scene or character. Now, going into game design, I am not just an artist with diverse experience, I play the games that I aspire to work for. I have spent so much time in Destiny 2, League of Legends and Valorant, Overwatch, Pokemon, etc. and I am involved with the community, I play the games and try to spread as much positivity as I can. And as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I try to make every space I walk into a safe space for our community where we do not experience hate or discrimination based on who we are.