Spotlight on an Epic Danmei Fan Artist: Rauch

Welcome to a new edition of Danmei Dreams’s artist spotlight, featuring Rauch!  These spotlights highlight some of the incredible, creative, and cool artists making danmei fan art. The artists will share some of their favorite work, talk about their process and approach, and you can find out how to follow and support them.  You can read previous editions of artist spotlights here.  Today we’ll be focusing on Rauch, whose stylized illustrations are phenomenal.

Why I Love Rauch’s Art

When I finished Heaven Official’s Blessing (my first danmei) I was in one of the worst book hangovers of my life.  I was craving more content, more interpretations, more Hualian.  Some kind soul took pity on me and sent me a link to a gorgeously animated youtube video.  It was different from any of the official art I’d seen, but captured that incredible angst, depression, yearning, and intensity of the low part of TGCF so well.  I was in absolute awe at the incredible talent of the TGCF fan community, and of the creator in particular.

Well, it turned out that creator was Rauch.  A year later, when I started to commission art for Danmei Dreams and look for artists to feature, I found Rauch’s carrd.  I looked through his portfolio, each image more stunning than the last.  I feel like Rauch’s art unrelentingly evokes the grandeur, magnificence, and epic stories of the danmei he illustrates. 

The use of color in Rauch’s pieces is superb.  He shifts from bright palettes to dark ones, from rich fully saturated hues to muted, depressed colors. The choices always reflect with perfect accuracy the mood of the piece.

Rauch’s compositions also help tell his vision.  The compositions vary, from a centralized form of martyrdom being disrupted by a concerned lover in a Guardian piece above (a recent commission for Danmei Dreams), to a disrupted diagonal in his buried Fangxin piece, to a partially off-canvas Xie Lian preparing to enter ghost city, not fully visible as he approaches a place of danger and uncertainty.

And while Rauch uses the tools of his artistry to extraordinary effect, it is always in service of showing the emotion of a scene or the characters.  The muted palette of roses, reds and grays of the buried Fangxin, whose body is diagonally cutting across the canvas, shows us pain, suffering, decay, depression.  Contrast that with the image of Xie Lian and Hua Cheng galloping on horses in full view, their steeds frolicking across a canvas full of fluffy clouds and heavy blossoms.  The true beauty of these images is the way in which they innately connect the viewer to the emotional heft of the image.

Without further ado, let me introduce Rauch!

Meet Rauch

Creative Process

What is your preferred medium and tools for creating your art, and why?

I prefer to stick to digital art. The main program I use is Clip Studio Paint. I used to draw traditional art a lot, like doing academic drawing/paintings or simply doodling in sketchbooks and on any piece of paper I could find. But later I realized that it simply didn’t work that well for me.

First, art supplies are expensive. Like yeah, a pencil and a sheet of paper are all you need to start, but drawing with high-quality materials makes the process and output really different. Unfortunately, we choose to survive in this economy rather than own a kolinsky brush set.

Second, the thing artists love about traditional mediums is what actually makes me dislike it. It’s imperfect, it’s unforgiving to mistakes. For me, as an artist who can’t visualize things in my head, it’s a crucial part. The sketches I post online are more-or-less presentable, but what my followers don’t get to see is that there are 3–7 layers of messy unintelligible lines underneath, which took me maybe 5–7 hours to do, where I’m trying to figure out the basic shapes and mass. I used to be really jealous of my classmates who could pick up a ball pen and draw a perfect lineart of a character in a dynamic pose in one go, but now that I have found a medium and a process that works for me, I try less to compare myself with others.

How do you choose which danmei scenes or characters to illustrate? Are there specific moments, themes, or characters that inspire you the most?

At first, I had a goal of simply illustrating scenes that weren’t illustrated before by others, or at least not that often. I’m still proud of myself for drawing a scene from TGCF with a mecha-style fight, because everyone seems to be afraid to tackle it 😀 But now I have shifted more to an “oh, that’s so nicely described, I bet it would look beautiful as an art” mindset.

Also, I love Hua Cheng. I bet you can tell. He’s just meant for creative expression and artistic experiments.

Artistic Style

Are there any particular artists or art movements that influence your work?

I can’t say there are many particular artists or movements like that. I try to memorize things I find interesting/beautiful in other artists’ works to use them later in my own art. Obviously, I forget most of it like 5 minutes later and even most references I save are rotting in my folders unused.

But some things that leave a deeper impression on me stay with me unconsciously.

Though one artist I’d like to highlight is Kuri Huang. You may already be familiar with their work, through Onmyoji games, various posters or book covers they made, like the mainland edition of TGCF.

Fandom & Community

Have you received any particularly memorable feedback or reactions from fans of your art?

I love all types of feedback, from emojis to expansive comments where people share their emotions with me. But the most memorable ones are from people who say they’d like to see a book or a short movie illustrated in my style. I would like to try my hand at officially illustrating something, but given how excessive the publishers’ (and art community’s) expectations in my country are, that’s not likely to happen. Also, I know their rates, so… I just continue to share my works with everyone for free at my own pace.

Art & Storytelling

Do you try to stay true to the canon representations of the characters, or do you incorporate your own interpretations and styles into your art?

It’s easier for me to rely on existing interpretations, so I usually use it as a base and then sprinkle my own details on top for my liking.

I know this can be a very heated topic in the fandom spaces, which can often lead to harassing creators in the name of “the author” who didn’t write it like that. But at the end of the day, just like with the people who push censorship in the name of “the children”, there are no children or authors with us in this room. As a fan creator, I’m not obliged to closely follow the source material nor cater to anyone’s tastes. No matter how canon adjacent the art would be, it’s still a fanwork, so I might as well have some fun with my own interpretations and scenarios while I’m at it.

Of course, I’m still trying to be respectful of the other country’s culture and traditions as far as I can with my limited knowledge, and it can be fun to research topics like that to later use them in my art.

Future Plans & Advice

What’s next for you as an artist? Do you have any upcoming projects or themes you’re excited to explore?

Truth to be told, it’s getting harder for me to enjoy creating art for fun as my freelance work takes more and more time and energy from me. I can’t say where I’ll move to next or whether I will create any fan art in the future at all, but there’s still one danmei-related project in the works I’d like to challenge myself with. I don’t want to say “please stay tuned” or to reveal more details, because I’m afraid of the weight of expectations people will place on me. But I’m slowly but steadily working on it. If it eventually gets to see the light of the day, it’ll be the most complicated thing I have created so far, which involves way more skills than just drawing. So, please wish me luck instead.

What advice would you give to someone just starting out in danmei fan art or art in general?

Don’t be afraid to make bad art. If you’re afraid—do the bad art while being afraid. Chances are, you’ll never think your art is good enough, but the improvement will happen anyway.

Focus on drawing what YOU want to see and what’s important to YOU, rather than trying to provide something that others will like. Doing art out of love for something is the key to improvement. Sometimes the key to improvement is also starting to use CSP’s 3D models, despite how tremendously annoying setting these up is, but you know, whatever works best for you, there’s no single way.

Appreciation

Look, I was giddy when Rauch accepted my commission, in awe of the final result, and tickled pink when he agreed to do an artist spotlight for Danmei Dreams.  Please take the time to appreciate his work, follow him on social media, leave a tip, check out his digital goods, and consider commissioning him.  There’s no possible way you could regret it.