Sabina Janicka
Despite lacking a formal art education, Sabina Janicka – a Polish gamic creator who signs her works under the name of Menaria – has become an influential figure within the Source Filmmaker (SFM) community. Her works have frequently been featured in community sites, and prompted the formation of fan groups around her own comic characters. Sabina has been interested in comic creation from a young age, because ‘there was simply something very appealing in the ability to present someone with a story the way I would like it to be seen’. She got her chance to do this when her comic series Strict Soldier Guide for MvM (2013-2016) gained popularity. The original purpose of the series was to teach players in a humorous way about ‘Mann vs. Machine’, a co-operative game mode for Team Fortress 2 (2007) introduced in 2012. As she explains,
In addition, Sabina also creates stories revolving around comical adaptations of her own personal experiences in which a loose representation of herself is used as both a character and narrator. Examples of which are the webcomics Narcissism (2018), Bad Influence Part 2 (2015) and Work (2016), all made in SFM. Before the software was released, her portfolio was filled with 2D digital drawings.
Unsurprisingly, she did not show much interest in the software when it was released in 2012, as it was mainly advertised as a 3D animation tool, but she became curious about its alternative uses when the fanbase galleries started to fill with image renders, and ended up experimenting with it two months later. The software gained overwhelming favour and many artists started to import models ripped from other games or created with other software to SFM, as it was very easy to use: ‘I personally have over 100 Gigabytes worth of downloaded models, with which I created my own pictures and comics’. However, she notices that working with SFM also has important downsides:
Moreover, the impossibility to monetise the works as they are based on third-party intellectual property convinced her that it was time to move on from the tool.
This was not an easy decision and, although she still occasionally engages with creating artworks with SFM, she is now mainly focused on getting commissions for digital paintings through her social media accounts. Regardless of the switch in medium, the experience working with SFM has defined her stylistically and as an artist, ‘till this day I am occasionally told that my non-TF2 artworks look a lot like that game’.
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