What’s With the Elf?

One of the fun things about being a tech nerd and a creative at the same time is finding the blind spots where one community has no idea about the other. When dealing with anyone who doesn’t know about artist culture, the concept of a persona definitely falls into that gap.

All over my site I call myself a technomancer and use drawn art of an elf to represent myself – but it’s not really a character thing. This blog isn’t written by a fictional elf (shocking, I know), it’s written by a regular person who’s using that elf as a persona – which is a common thing among artists.

The rules around personas are somewhere between fuzzy and nonexistent, but the general idea is that a creator will invent a unique character to use as a stand-in for themself in comics and social posts rather than taking photos or drawing their own likeness.

Creating a persona is a creative exercise that shows off skills and styles, but also a practical one if you prefer not to share your face on the internet. It’s also becoming more popular outside of artist circles because of new technologies, like VTubing and VR, where a model is created once and used as a personal avatar in multiple settings. People are starting to commission models and persona designs for practical uses rather than making their own for creative ones.

Personally, my persona is all of the above. I created it originally to use in dumb meme-ish comics, then used it because I didn’t like posting my face online, then started using it as a vtubing design, and then got more into the design aspect as I created a bunch of costumes for my streams.

Why an elf instead of a human? Why purple hair? It’s not exactly deep, it’s just because I like those things. So many of my characters are elves that my family used to find it annoying – and I remember once drawing a fruit bowl with two creatively placed bananas for my grandmother who complained that I never drew anything without pointy ears. Designing your persona to reflect the things that interest you is a part of the process, and a part of why I find these new commissioned personas a bit confusing… Although that’s a topic for another time.

Somewhere after coming up with the design I ended up with some character lore where my persona is an interdimensional traveller who jumps between game worlds… but to that, I say we all have to have our hobbies. Some people consider themselves to be snipers because they play them in videogames, or racers because they compete virtually – can I be an interdimensional traveller because I jump between videogames all of the time? Why not.

So, what’s with the elf? Self expression, that’s what.