Saturday AM met with Ecuadorian artist Javier Sion. We wanted a front-row seat to understand the talent, emotion, and artistic journey of .
Sion is only 19 years old and has a tremendous amount of talent, we were curious as to how someone so young achieved such a high level of skill. Here’s what they had to say about their journey.
“About 4-3 years ago I always tried to fill a whole sheet of doodles, there was never an exception. So I practiced a lot during all those months, just 2 years ago I started with digital art, so to speak seriously haha. I started faithfully inspired by Kenshi Yonezu, a complete artist, to all the solo, from illustrations, animations, and songs, in fact, I also compose for him. Apart from various artists, my inspiration is to one day be able to release my music together with my illustrations, making a comic motivates me a lot, and starting and finishing my digital animation career. I could also say that @mi_na_ha_mu inspires me a lot now, seeing her art made me feel like I wanted to convey things like that, if you see her art you can feel that there is a need to be and feel loved, it’s something rare, you can see that she knows loneliness and love, or maybe I’m imagining too much but I felt like I wanted to explore that in my art, so now I’m taking those directions towards myself.”
As a digital comic brand, we wanted to know if there’s a comic book industry in Ecuador and if Sion reads any comic books in their free time.
“My own country is going to hate me Hahaha, I’m ignorant on that subject, it’s curious that being Ecuadorian I never asked myself that. But generally, I read manhwas, the last manga I read was “boy meet maria” very good, I highly recommend it. However, a work that motivated me to continue drawing was Blue Period, I do not identify with Yaguchi’s initial idea, but his journey as an artist is what motivated me to continue drawing in a difficult moment of my life, it made me value my art and him how I got to where I am, recently I thought about leaving it for personal reasons but now I could say that I owe a lot to the Blue Period mangaka.”
Color Theory is a concept that perplexes even the elite artist, we wanted to get Sion’s viewpoint on how they interpret colors. Do they just wing it? or do they have a routine? let’s find out.
“Sometimes I improvise, generally when I improvise it comes out the way I don’t want it to, why? In the end, it ends up like another work I did, it’s not much of a joke to repeat the feeling haha. But yes, I use cool and warm colors to punctuate these scenes, giving the environment what looks like nostalgia. It depends a lot on what you want to express. Although I use a lot of cool colors for sadder scenes and warmer ones for Happy ones as I usually see them use them, I should experiment with that now that I think about it haha.”
You can read the rest of this whimsical interview in our latest issue here: https://www.saturday-am.com/blog/saturday-brunch-7/
