Tomin Vladimir Interview

Tomin Vladimir is a Russian Artist also know as Myaki-Ru from Space-Jump. Myaki is the first to create a wonderful exclusive wallpaper for WallpaperArt. Discover the success behind this ice-cream-and-cats-loving soul in the following interview and refresh your desktop with his amazing artwork. Enjoy!

1. Welcome to WallpaperArt and please introduce yourself. Could you tell us where you’re from and how you got started in the field?
Hey WallpaperArt! Great to be here!
My name is Vladimir, I’m 27 Russian, living in Khabarovsk (you can get there by flying 8 hours from Moskow) + 15 from USA]
Thanks to my friend Sergey I ran into graphic exchange site 2 years ago and since that time I was stunned enough to create Photoshop madness myself.
PS. I love my girlfriend, cats and ice-cream! (If that counts and box on xbox.)

Fight for Alpha

2. Haha! Thank your friend Sergey, because your doing great! Have you followed any graphic design education?
Nope, I have a degree as IT specialist, there is no way getting a good graphic design education in our city because there are no people who can teach me anything good in the graphic design field.

So you are a completely self-taught graphic designer?
Yes, completely self taught. But I was always surrounded by people who helped me to grow. Working in an office brings some benefits in that case. You automatically grows to a level of team you’re working with and if your good enough, you keep growing above.

My New Pet

3. We’ve seen your portfolio, Space-jump.com and we’ve actually seen a lot of traditional techniques. Is there any reason behind this?
My laziness from one side and the lack of photo manipulation techniques from another side. In other words if I can’t find a proper stock in short time I’d rather draw it. Or if I’ve found a proper stock, but it is not that good quality, sometimes I’dtry to paint over it but mostly I just draw something similar myself. Being a motion graphic designer, I get used to create my footage.
Besides, some people say that pencil drawings are keeping me original on the market. Don’t really sure about that though, there are a lot of people doing much better pencil drawings.

2009 reel from myaka on Vimeo.

4. From your perspective what would you say are some positives and negatives of being a freelance designer?
I’m not a true freelancer, only as a part of side money flow and for really interesting projects. Still I do know the pros and cons of being a freelance designer.
Pros: You can be a part of a much bigger project. You have the freedom to choose the time to work with and people to work with. You can set your own price. Well I guess bigger scale and partial freedom are the biggest pros.
Pros of office work: As I said above, working in a team will automatically grow your level up, discipline, constant money flow, you don’t have to talk with clients, no need to deal with paperwork and all those asses who trying to get job done for free.
So biggest Cons of freelance are: Money is not constant, so you can’t really plan your spending and people can fuck you up.

5. Now a little bit about your wallpaper “Core”. What’s the story behind this?
About a week ago MTV Russia asked me to do an opening for their new tv show called “Physics Of Unreal” and they asked to create it similar to style of famous Max Zhestkov. Well, I’m not Max but I did my best to create something similar by atmosphere but more close to my style. After the work was done I realized, I kinda liked working on edge of those two styles so I decided to make a wallpaper using this style. As for the story inside this picture, it is pretty simple.
This image displays futuristic core, a mainframe of some sort, say, a machine for controlling whole planet. The space around it is mathematically calculated (used this grid on ground for showing it).
There is some activity going on. But what’s important here, core of the core (sorry for wordplay here) is still a human !

6. What an interesting story to finish! We would like to thank you for your time and your crazy wallpaper! Is there anything you would like to share with our readers?
Thank you wallpaperart, hope to create more works for you guys in near future. And here is what I’ve learned for last 2 years:

“if you don’t love what you’re doing – do something else.”

Download “Core” Wallpaper

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