This week’s artist spotlight focuses on Tumblr user tinytmas and her awesome and unique Orphan Black edits.
The Artist’s Spotlight is a Hypable weekly feature that will focus on someone who has caught our attention for fandom-related art, whether it be drawings, songs, crafts, or more! Every week you can expect a new talented artist we think you should be aware of!
My name is Maria, I’m from Serbia (a place in Europe that no one knows about, according to everyone I met online). I don’t like living here but hopefully one day I won’t have to. I’m currently studying foreign languages and culture in college, and I would love to travel one day. The world is a really big and beautiful place and I want to visit as many parts of it as I can.
I don’t think there was ever a time in my life when I didn’t spend all day watching TV. It started with Cartoon Network and as I grew up it moved on to sitcoms, crime shows, medical shows, sci-fi… I always loved making manips, I started when I was about 10 years old. I didn’t have photoshop back then so I used Paint to crop pictures and it could take a few days to crop one. Then my uncle gave me a CD with Photoshop and made my life 100 times easier and my manips 100 times better.
What’s your favorite edit you’ve ever made?
My favorites are definitely AU edits, but I don’t think I could pick just one. From the recent ones I really love the one I made for Beth’s birthday. She’s an April Fools baby and someone made a post about how no one could get mad at her when she pranks them, so I made a photoset based on that idea. Everyone would be like BETH!! and she’d just say “but it’s my birthday,” so I thought that was funny and really cute because I love Beth so much. Also, one of the things she did was rickroll Dr. Leekie.
I also love my Soccer Cop series. In one of the photosets I made a .gif manip of Beth and Alison lying next to each other in bed and I really love that one because of the reaction of people on tumblr. So many of them said “WITCHCRAFT!” but even though it looks cool it was made like any other gif.
Have you always made fandom edits, or did it start with Orphan Black? If so, which fandom(s)?
I’ve been editing pictures for a very long time, but on tumblr I started with The Vampire Diaries and Pretty Little Liars. Then I started blogging about many shows and I made gifs of all of them – Glee, Grey’s Anatomy, Charmed (I really love giffing Charmed), Gilmore Girls, Bones, Rizzoli & Isles, Orange Is the New Black… Glee was my main fandom for a long time and I loved making manips of Faberry, especially based on the famous SHAfD fanfic.
I think most of the fandom’s favorite episode was episode 6, Alison getting drunk at her potluck was hilarious. Everyone started using a gif of Alison holding that glass and laughing, we love that gif so much. So I made a transparent drunk Alison picture and then I thought “how about I put her in some random moments in other shows?” and then people loved it so I thought “wouldn’t it be awesome if I put her in some really awkward situations where it would be inappropriate to laugh?” So you have a sad scene from a movie or a show and then there’s Alison totally clueless and drunk just laughing in the background of a tragic scene.
Why’d you stop making Drunk Alison edits?
In episode 6 (the picture I used for the meme) it was really funny when she randomly got drunk at a party and started bumping into things, yelling, sleeping/snoring, and trying to kiss Paul. But the more I watched the show the more I started to realize that she has a serious problem. In episode 8 she gets drunk and it’s not funny this time. She’s really sad and scared and confused, and she’s crying, and Alison is my baby so when she’s sad I’m sad. And then season 2 happened.
Now Alison didn’t just get randomly drunk once, now we see that she has an actual problem and it’s not something to be laughed at. She has a serious problem with drugs and alcohol and it’s an indication of how bad she is, mentally, and not only did she get hurt (by getting drunk and falling off the stage) but there’s a serious chance that she could lose the custody over her kids, because of her addictions, if she divorces Donnie. So, even though those manips were funny, I don’t feel like laughing at drunk Alison anymore.
What’s your favorite edit to make now?
Definitely my Soccer Cop series. It’s happy and sometimes funny, and totally ignores the canon tragedy. Though I’m running out of scenes I could use for it, since Sarah doesn’t look like Beth anymore. I’m praying that we get another clone who looks like Beth. Or, you know, they could just give us Beth back, PLEASE.
How did you learn to make these edits? Was it all self-taught or did someone help you?
I loved drawing in Paint when I was about 10, and with time I learned that I could actually crop pictures there, so I started cropping them and placing them on other pictures and that’s how I started making manips. It wasn’t easy making manips in Paint, it took hours and sometimes days to crop one picture but it was basically the same like in Photoshop, with the only difference of really rough edges. And then my uncle got me a CD with Photoshop on it and I started looking for tutorials and learned to make better manips and eventually gifs.
How did you get into the Orphan Black fandom?
I was talking to a tumblr friend, Mindy, on MSN one day and she sent me the link for Orphan Black episode 1 and said “We’re watching this. Now.” so it’s not like I really had a choice, did I? And then we binge watched 9 episodes that were out by that time.
Clone Club is the best fandom I’ve ever been in. I’ve been in so many fandoms and they’re all so divided and they keep fighting over ships and characters, but Clone Club is so nice and everyone lets you ship whatever you want. Though my friends Bianca and Asmy got a few Anon messages saying things against Lumberpunk but they always had a very good and civilized response so there was no follow-up messages with hate, just those few, so that’s good, that’s not much. Many fandoms make a lot of hate posts but I rarely see them in the Orphan Black tag and I go through it every day. Maybe it’s because we’re a small fandom, but I hope we stay this nice even when more people join.
You can find Maria on Tumblr at http://tinytmas.tumblr.com/!