Today I like to talk about illustration, my thoughts about it and some of my history as an artist and illustrator.

When I was young I really loved the sorts of pictures that were around. One of my earliest memories was of a Frank Frazetta painting called the Moon Maiden. I’ll attach it below. It was on the cover of a paperback book that my dad had. It was so powerful. Of course Frank Frazetta is one of the all-time greats.

It got me thinking even at a very young age about the power of images. The magic that is contained in them. Back then you saw fewer images especially in full-color. I think it's true that the fewer images that you see the more power any one image contains. For this reason modern people are not as sensitized to imagery as we were 50 years ago. This does not diminish the actual power of images, just defuses it.

As a bit of a sidebar, this is one of the reasons that I do not like social media. Instead of a somewhat curated stream of images presenting before our consciousness, we have a barrage of images, many of which we did not choose to see or more precisely, did not desire to see. End of sidebar.

I've talked about my early interest in art before on my blog. I became an artist primarily because, as I became older I also became increasingly aware that I would have to find a vocation and make my own way in the world financially. After considering the career alternatives that would suit my personality I selected artist. I was about 13 years old.

From that point forward I started practicing drawing. The great thing about doing art is that it really helps you to appreciate art. As you work your way through the mechanics of creating images you cannot help but dissect the work of artists that you admire.

It was also around this age that I became an increasingly interested in comic books. Even comic books that do not have art that would be considered great are pretty amazing. When you consider all of the different things that an artist must draw to get a story across its quite an achievement to draw a comic book.

I won’t go too far into my favorite comic book artists. If you dig around in the older blogs I know I've addressed this is a topic in the past. Suffice to say, I knew who was good and who was very good and I would copy artists I thought were very good. I worked very hard at drawing and progressed.

I didn't actually see myself as a artist that would draw a lot of comics but more as someone who could do covers and illustrations. The reason for this was that I didn't have as much interest in storytelling as I did in things like style and rendering. For this reason I worked a lot with pen and ink to finish my drawings.

From my teens up until my early 30s I worked at drawing and inking. Not so much painting, that came later. I had decent drawing skills and was always getting a little better. When the computer age dawned I taught myself about computers and art programs like Photoshop. With those skills I was able to get a job as a full-time illustrator working for a company that predominantly made T-shirts.

Thus I found myself employed as a full-time illustrator. There were other aspects of the job pertaining to screenprinting but I was living my dream doing art full-time. This job lasted for 13 years. Over that time I put together a lot of illustrations both simple and complicated.

I got out of the commercial art field in 2010 and became a full-time fine artist. I have watched out of the corner of my eye the various developments in the illustration field. I think I got out of it at the right time. That said, many people do well and there will always be some demand for good illustrators.

This discourse today has been sparked by me looking at a wonderful book that was part of the Famous Artists Course. It is specifically from the advanced Famous Artists Course and it is a book by Norman Rockwell who is very famous and rightfully so. It's great to see how such an amazing illustrator one about creating their pictures. Inspiring actually.

So that's why I have got illustration on the brain. It's also mentioned in the video in today's blog. Underneath that video I put a link to a wonderful YouTube channel where the artist there are breaks down the teaching in some of these books in his videos. I'll pop a link here as well:

https://www.youtube.com/@skiptothelove

Take a care and stay out of trouble,

Mike

Illustration

Art Instruction

Authenticity