MUST READ POST!! An Interview with the Steemit Artist @organduo - What Makes Him Tick?

@organduo, (Real-life Name: Vidas Pinkevicius) Playing the Organ

Here is the first part of the Steemit Art Centre interview with @organduo.

You will know him as the creator of the fun characters Pinky and Spiky.

I am so pleased that Vidas agreed to be interviewed! I hope you enjoy it.

Dee:
I see from your Steemit profile that you joined in January this year making you a relative newbie. You already have very strong online footprint and presence including YouTube videos, podcasts, and Facebook. So what inspired you to join Steemit and what do you hope to gain from it?

Vidas:
First of all, thank you so much, Dee, for inviting me for this interview. I’m delighted to share my own ideas and experience with the Steemit artist community that you are so generously developing. Yes, I joined in January with the hope that I can start drawing again because I was born into a family of artists. My dad was a painter and my mom is a graphic artist and my aunt actually is a graphic artist too. So, the artistic experience was quite near to me. At least until seventh grade, I also kept drawing together with the students of my mom at school and they brought me to special camps where the students could draw extensively all day long.

But I was being raised as a musician and so actually my mom and dad they took me to school to our gymnasium in order for me to start musical studies but my mom secretly hoped that when I would be old enough I would start maybe transferring into Art Department. So it didn’t happen because I fell in love with the music. First I was a choir conducting major then transferred to the organ world but then my drawing experiences kind of stopped. As with many teenagers right? Kids draw all the time but with adolescence, they start to do what their own peers want to do and they’re ashamed of their childish for example passions and they stopped doing what they loved just a few years ago.

@organduo Playing Organ Improvisation on Handel's Alleluia

So that probably part of why I also stopped drawing but also because my music studies were taking a lot of time. So in just this January, I found out about the Steemit platform from reading an article on the medium by @stellabelle. She is also an artist on Steemit and a blogger and I was kind of intrigued because this platform seemed to be creative in order to reward authors and other creators who share their ideas with the world, right?

So I already had my income from internet online activities teaching organ playing people from around the world together with my wife, Ausra. But since Steemit offered a promise of financial reward I felt intrigued about maybe starting to draw again. That was also very promising to me because I kind of also would draw occasionally with my online subscribers, organ students, I would share my drawings from time to time but it wasn’t a regular practice for me.

But since Steemit promised some kind of reward so then I felt really externally motivated this year from January, at least from the middle of January, to start drawing again and doing this regularly and posting on Steemit because I felt really quite unsatisfied with other social media platforms who only exploit authors like Facebook or Twitter or other social media platforms from conventional world.

But with Steemit it was different. With Steemit my primary motivation is to learn to draw, right? And if I just keep drawing and keep sharing my drawings with the world with the Steemit community. I also am motivated every day because they come and they upvote my own posts and it’s been a little bit of financial reward as well.
Every day some droplets of Steemit are dropping into my wallet which is also nice, to have this from time to time, right?. Even though it’s a small amount for now, but my hope is that this platform might be successful in the future and why don’t I keep my footprint in it right from the start, although it’s not the start today in 2018 but it’s the start for me.

Dee:
You’re highly skilled and talented in the field of musical art, in fact, you teach about many aspects of organ music. What is the history of your drawing and sketching art outside of Steemit?

Vidas:
As I mentioned before, I started drawing various illustrations for my blog posts about organ music. For example, I would draw a pipe organ facade and write a sentence or two about an idea from the organ world that they liked, or a summary or a phrase or a keyword about some topic that I was writing in that day in that particular article. So basically drawing and writing down ideas became kind of natural to me, like a diary, right? With your hand, you write and I started doing this with my organ related activities too because otherwise, I would forget other ideas, right? If I don’t write everything down. And if I just drew an illustration about that, that felt like a simple enough method for me to draw into a mini-notebook which would fit into my pocket.

Dee:
What has inspired you to choose the medium of Pinky and Spiky cartoons for your posts on Steemit?

Vidas:
My medium is very simple. I don’t have a command of digital art at least yet, so what I do is I take a notebook or a piece of paper and I use either pen for drawing lines and either crayon or pastel, oil pastel, for making colours and backgrounds. So that’s my medium for making cartoons. The reason I chose this medium is because it seemed very simple and easy for me to carry all day long, right? A box of oil pastels. I can put it into my bag or pocket. I can carry it with me and can make my art anywhere I want and anytime I want. That flexibility is quite inspiring for me.

Some of the Equipment @organduo Uses

Dee:
Pinky and Spiky have distinct personalities. Do they represent you and your wife, Ausra (@laputis), in any way?

Vidas:
This is an interesting question because the origin of Pinky and Spiky is very obscure. A long time ago we had a practice with Ausra of asking one another in the morning of what kind of animal you want to be today. What kind of animal you feel like being today. If you are feeling great maybe you may be feeling like some happy animal or maybe if you are not feeling great if you are sad maybe some other animal, right?

Animals carry emotions so we started developing various ideas about those animals and then drawing those two that we were that particular day on the wall calendar on a specific day. And we were doing you know this for a number of months and years and it seemed very natural. It was like a game for us. So every morning we would draw two different animals. Sometimes a worm, sometimes a bird, sometimes two birds and they would be silent, not talking. It’s not a comic strip but we would put a heart in the middle of them, like one animal loves the other so it was like a secret way of telling each other that we loved each other. So little by little our favourite animals like hedgehog for me and piglet for Ausra became very natural and this format stuck actually and somehow we fell in love with those two characters. We didn’t know if we should name them, right? Like imaginary friends we always wanted but then since I started drawing cartoons of hedgehog and piglet, I thought maybe we should give them a name so Ausra came up with those names. Pinky because the colour of her skin is pink so it seemed natural good fitting name and of course Spiky as a hedgehog, it has spikes and needles, sharp needles so we thought this name would be fitting as well. So those two names have this curious and funny history you see. And it all started from us drawing various animals on the wall calendar. It’s a very nice practice by the way if you have a spouse or a partner or a friend you can do this every day and this will make you and the other person very happy.

Pinky and Spiky with Some Friends

Dee:
You once mentioned to me about cartoon strips forming a book. Is that what you are hoping for Pinky and Spiky?

Vidas:
No. It’s so natural to grow every day for me now because after sixty-seven or sixty-six days it becomes a habit so I don’t have to think about it. I actually feel bad without drawing now, it’s kind of second nature now. It’s kind of organ practice for me too. I feel bad if I don’t play the organ every day and I feel bad if I at least don’t draw a few lines of my favourite characters every day you see. The motto that my dad had was “no day without a line.” He was very hard working and he didn’t wait for an inspiration to come.

His name was also Vidas, like myself and he would paint every single day for as long as I can remember. Actually up until two months before he died. He did it every single day. So this motto seemed quite inspirational to me in many aspects. You can practice organ playing like for musicians for an organist, you can practice writing like for writers or bloggers, you can practice drawing as well every day and once you do that something magical will happen after sixty-six days because your new habit will be formed and you don’t have to even think about it. You will actually feel bad if you have to miss a day and Steemit seems to be very motivating place to share those drawings because if I just kept drawing for myself and never showed to anybody it would seem quite selfish, right? So I have this idea of sharing my art.

Of course, it involves certain ego, certain idea that you are worthy of sharing your art but you see I am not a trained professional, I am an amateur who just happens to love drawing. But you see since nobody stopped me from drawing I felt quite motivated to do this every day. And little by little actually Ausra also started drawing too those two our beloved characters, Pinky and Spiky. And very great deal of inspiration came from these @deemarshall’s #artstorm contests because she would post a theme for every day and lots and lots of people will post their drawings for that day and Ausra and I felt sort of inspired by that because you don’t have to think about what kind of idea you have to draw about, you just follow these schedule which is very creative by the way.

So, there we have the first part of our interview with @organduo.

I hope you enjoyed meeting him.

Tomorrow I will post the rest of the interview. Do come back and hear how Vidas sees the future of Steemit.

One last thing!

Please, please, please spare this post an upvote and resteem.