About Me

Hi!

My name is Nik, or as the online community knows me: data2048.

I am a full time music educator, and I am currently a Master's student studying School Counseling.

Where does art fit into this? Well, I've always been an artist. I enjoy drawing and it has been one of my longest lasting hobbies. It really wasn't until a couple of years ago where I truly found my style and that I became passionate with sharing my work with the online community.

Why "data2048?"

a name that just kind of stuck

My online handle was given to me by my older brother, who created my deviantArt account way back when as a way to share my art with people. (He had a friend that posted on the site as well)

I want to believe that the wording was selected because I had a character named Data at the time... but to be honest, I have no idea where the numbers came from. He's an engineer, so who knows!

I had one or two other online names that I used, such as "thesimpletondiaries" on Tumblr (which has since been changed to data2048), "ToaLightning" or "ChibiTahu" during the peak of my Bionicle phase.

After all of these years, the name just stuck with me and people recognized me as "Data" for a long time.

The Journey of Art

I started really drawing when I was in 5th Grade (which was probably around 2003), right around the time that I was first introduced into anime.

My very first manga was "Dragon Knights", and everything I tried to draw from that point for the next couple of months was an attempt to copy that style (it didn't go well), and was then shifted into copying and tracing from Christopher Hart's How to Draw books (both the cartoon ones and the anime/manga ones).

In 6th grade, a good friend of mine and I decided to humanize the cast of Bionicle. So from that point on, anything I drew up until the end of 7th grade was me trying to draw humans. By the end of 8th grade, I wanted to make my own manga... which is what became the basis for my Bionicle manga today.

I started creating my own characters and developing my own stories as the years passed. I wanted to make comics and publish stories based on my own work, and one day I will!

I went through a lot of different style developments through the years. I was told on more than one occasion that I would never get anywhere drawing the way I did. Unfortunately, comments like those are why I never took art more seriously in high school and college.

It really wasn't until a couple of years ago where I finally said "enough is enough," and just found that I connected with this more anime-like style. Its been fun to develop this style and figure out new ways on how to create and design.