Bummer
Who is Bummer?
I'm an amateur artist living in northern Sweden, where I support myself as a clinical medical scientist working in a microbiological laboratory during the days. You can usually find me chilling in #smeargle or the Art Room on Pokémon Showdown, trying my best to spread a positive attitude and annoying puns. I've been active on Smogon since January 2011 and has maintained a steady presence since then, be it helping out in the studio or completing quick art requests left and right. I still play Pokémon Games whenever they come out, and my favorite version to date is Pokémon Gold, with Pokémon Black being a close second.
Smogon Biography
I joined Smogon to plug my own webcomic I was working at the time called Rare Candy Treatment, and the positive responses made me stick around. Since just posting in my own art thread wouldn't do much good, I eventually started checking out the rest of the studio, as well as talking with other artists in #smeargle. It didn't take long to discover that Smogon, particularly The Smog and on-site Articles, was in need of art illustrations, and on August 25th 2012 I earned my artist badge.
Over time I became more involved with The Smog, contributing more images to the various articles, helping out with maintaining the art index, as well as writing and participating in various articles as well, Pokémon Biology and The Arterview being two such article series. On May 13th 2013 I joined the Smog Staff to lead the Art department alongside Birkal, where we evaluated the work of applying artists and tried our best to produce artwork for all articles each issue. I later on became the sole art leader, which was a position I held until The Smog, along with other media outlets, merged into Article Workshop.
When I worked as The Smog's Art Leader, I had for the most part a good idea about the progress of many artists as well as how often they contributed to the site, and could therefore nominate various artists for the art badge to Zracknel and Birkal, the Artist Badge leaders at the time. But when Birkal stepped down from that position, Zracknel asked me to co-lead with him, and I was thus promoted to super moderator March 2nd 2014, a position I'm still holding at the time of writing this bio. During this time, I expanded the quality control we originally had for The Smog to cover all media outlets and online articles, where artists needed to become approved before contributing to more demanding areas, and to be eligible for receiving the art badge along with their art contributions. That way, the art badge no longer becomes an easy badge to earn, but instead shows that anyone wearing it possesses a valuable skill of good quality.
Apart from the media forums, I lurk most other forums as well, with the occasional posts in Firebot, Rarely Used and CAP. While I'm genuinely interested in the mindworks of a Smogon battler, I personally don't battle all that much on the simulator, even though I keep telling myself I'll get serious one day.
Art Preferences
I've used a dusty version of Photoshop CS2 my whole life, and I still don't see much reason to upgrade. Alongside it, I have a scanner and a Bamboo Wacom tablet to bring my artwork onto the computer, where I nowadays purely use the latter for both sketches and final touches. I have a "quick and dirty" style for the most part, drawing both lineart and highlights with a thick brush to create a cartoonish result, but I've played around with various techniques before and can put in some extra detail when required.
Links
- My art thread — This contains my very earliest posts on Smogon and is a place where I still share some art that isn't already featured elsewhere.
- ium's Arterview of me — If you're still curious about me and some of the opinions I have on stuff, then this is the place to visit.
- Rare Candy Treatment — The webcomic that I was involved with during my early Smogon years and quite some time before arriving here, which I officially ended June 20th 2014. From the first to the last strip, it's one of the primary reasons why I continuously tried to improve my art, and while there are a lot of comic strips I now feel awkward looking at, it still fills me with joy to see the progress I've made since then.
- DeviantArt account — Don't post there as often as I used to, but hey, if you're on dA, here's one way to check out my earlier works.
- Tumblr — Because everyone has one of these nowadays.
Contributions
Smogon's Flying Press
The Smog
The Player
The Competitor
Facebook
Articles and Letters
Create-A-Pokémon (CAP)
Tier Sections
