Rocket Grunt
Who is Rocket Grunt?My real name is Chris. I grew up in New Jersey, but I'm living in Brooklyn now. I used to work at an advertising agency in Manhattan, and now I'm freelancing as a graphic designer for a few different companies. New York is alright, but I'm kind of a shut-in and work takes up so much of my time that it's really difficult for me to explore the city.
I went to school for graphic design, but sometimes I wish I had gone into animation or illustration or something like that. When I was younger, I figured that it wasn't very grown-up or realistic to make something like that into my career, and I heard frequent warnings about how risky an artistic field would be. I got scared, and honestly I've always been kind of ashamed of what I was interested in, so I didn't pursue it in school. Graphic design seemed more buttoned-up or professional or more "normal," and I figured that I could find work more easily. I'm realizing now that thinking this way would only continue to make me unhappy, and I've been trying to turn it around.
Smogon BiographyI played a lot of NetBattle in high school, and Smogon had a popular server going at the time—this was back in the early 2000s. I changed pseudonyms a lot and had a hard time relating to anybody in the competitive scene. Actually, it's always been kind of difficult for me to make friends through video games, even MMORPGs, so I didn't make any lasting relationships until I started posting drawings on the forums. I was mostly using Smogon as a place to learn from good players, and I'd go to the website for moveset ideas or to try to come up with my own counters for the sets that they had listed. I was very much into using my favorites and low-tiered Pokémon though—I felt weirdly ashamed about it—and even with Smogon as a resource I wasn't fantastic at the game. I tried college right after high school, but I wasn't ready for it and I had to leave. I stagnated for almost three years after that. I was trying to drop some bad habits and harmful relationships too, and it took me nearly all of that time to do it. I worked a few different jobs. In between shifts I doodled on deli paper and on the backs of redundant invoice copies. On my days off, I used a mouse to draw on Marriland's oekaki board while saving up for an Intuos. After a while, I started putting my drawings up on other websites. In the beginning it was mostly imageboards—my first couple posts on Smogon were even hotlinked from threads I had posted earlier. There's also some old stuff of mine on Newgrounds' art portal under the username Forty-One. Art PreferencesDrawing Pokémon is comfortable and familiar to me. I guess it's because I've been a fan of the franchise for such a long time, I don't know. It feels weird to talk about it, but I know that whoever reads this will probably understand. I can play around in ways that I couldn't otherwise. Like, if a client asks me to draw something for them, I don't want to do a bad job or make them upset or disappointed, so I always kind of restrain myself from getting too crazy; but when I play it safe like that, the drawing can come out stifled and rigid. I mean, I'm not saying that it's bad to try to challenge myself, because I still want to get better, but I think that change only happens gradually and with discipline and consistent exercise, and having a familiar place to return to when I was having trouble helped me get myself together again. I just want to feel a little better and relax when I draw, and I could always manage that here. It built me up over time and eventually I had skill and confidence enough to pick myself up again.
LinksContributionsSmogon's Flying Press
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