Haruka Meylin is an accomplished multi-disciplinary artist who creates surreal and romantic works featuring dreamlike motifs of rooms, dollhouses, toys, and stuffed animals. She started out painting as a hobby but had long nurtured a passion for artistic expression. After experiencing challenges in her career, Meylin took the bold leap in 2016 to launch her own business selling paintings professionally thanks to encouragement from the owner of her favorite thrift store.
This pivotal moment provided the catalyst for Meylin to finally pursue her calling as an artist full-time. She had reached a crossroads where she could either continue on an unfulfilling career path or take a chance to bring the world inside her imagination into reality. With some serendipitous inspiration from her thrift store encounter, Meylin made the life-changing choice to establish herself as a professional painter.
Today, Meylin has created a thriving business offering original paintings and 3D still images. She reproduces her pieces as collectible cards available on her online store, with new collections released one to two times per month. Meylin’s subject matter stems from her own identity and experiences, forming imaginary spaces where viewers can find belonging. She pays particular attention to scale, distortion, and atmosphere in her ongoing mission to capture the ephemeral gap between reality and fantasy.
Meylin aims to construct spatial works that provide a sense of comfort for those who interact with her art. Her paintings and 3D visuals allow the viewer to momentarily inhabit the peaceful worlds of her own design. Whether conjuring a nostalgic childhood memory, a fantastical dreamscape, or a comforting interior, Meylin’s focus on romantic and surreal motifs serves as an escape from the oft-harsh realities of life.
Her recurring visual themes of rooms, dollhouses, toys, and stuffed animals reflect Meylin’s desire to build reflective spaces deeply rooted in her personal identity. These subjects represent comforting touchpoints from childhood and adolescence that many can relate to at a universal level. By immersing herself in this motif-rich environment, Meylin transports herself and the viewer into an imaginative headspace conveying both vibrancy and tranquility.
A major milestone in Meylin's artistic journey came through creating monumental pieces like "The Sweets Witch and the Wise Bear" and "Children's Time for Adults" – the latter using 3D computer graphics. This technology opened up new creative possibilities by allowing her to precisely simulate elements like lighting, colors, and camera angles when planning compositions.
The ability to manipulate and perfect every element of a scene enabled Meylin to achieve her artistic vision with amplified detail and dimensionality. Blending her extensive experience as a painter with the expansive versatility of 3D tools significantly leveled up her visual storytelling abilities. The hybridization of traditional and digital art modes unlocked the full depth of Meylin’s skillset.
In particular, the use of 3D CG allowed Meylin to build out fully imagined environments down to the most minute features. Adding in lighting and camera movements can further enhance the atmospheric quality she pursues in her work. The digital space also provides the freedom to experiment with variations on scale, distortion, and perspective. Overall, the fusion of tactile painting and mutable 3D provided the best of both worlds for Meylin artistically.
To amplify her 3D still imagery, Meylin recently utilized GarageFarm's remote render farm service for a work titled "Diner." The render farm’s speed and capabilities allowed her to complete rendering what would normally take 2 hours locally in only 10 minutes. This transformative time savings comes from offloading the intensive computational tasks to GarageFarm's robust cloud infrastructure.
Meylin appreciated both the significant time savings using the render farm provided as well as the affordable pricing for Blender users. While initially facing challenges with setup and configuration, she was able to resolve any issues with sufficient time and testing. Troubleshooting difficulties is part of the learning process when adopting new technology. With patience and the guidance of GarageFarm's support team, Meylin successfully integrated the render farm into her workflow.
Overall, once configured properly, the service provided a fast, comfortable, and easy remote rendering experience that will transform her approach to project scheduling moving forward. By virtually eliminating the long waits previously required for local rendering, Meylin can experiment more freely and create at an accelerated pace. The render farm technology has upgraded her 3D craft by removing the barriers of limited local computing power.
Moving forward, Meylin is continuing to leverage both traditional and digital techniques to bring her artistic visions to life. She is currently preparing for a November solo exhibition in Tokyo featuring new paintings and 3D works. Additionally, she is contemplating building an expansive virtual world to showcase on a cluster metaverse platform as her first foray into interactive environments.
Meylin values both her painting and 3D CG practices equally, tracing her unique hybrid style back to years of dedicated focus on particular motifs. Her comfort in freely traversing multiple creative fields only enriches her artistic perspective by providing more tools to manifest the worlds in her imagination. For now, she intends to continue working across both analog and digital media as she further develops her skills, in mediums ranging from stop-motion to potentially game design. However, the possibilities of virtual environments also beckon enticingly on the horizon as the next frontier for Meylin's art.
No matter whether she is working with physical paint on canvas or digital spaces unbound from reality, Meylin's evocative work aims to transport viewers into her vivid inner world. As she moves forward in her career, her technical repertoire continues to expand, yet always in service of bringing radiant scenes from her mind’s eye into tangible existence through whichever medium best fits the moment. The only constant is the magical essence of Meylin’s creations that immerses audiences in fantastical realms inspiring both comfort and wonder.
Meylin shares her artwork across several online platforms. On Twitter and Instagram. For those interested in collecting, Meylin releases new paintings and 3D collections on her webshop. The webshop contains all her pieces available for sale.
