The evolution of my personal style:
The evolution of my personal style:
I was organizing my office and came across some older artwork of mine. It occurred to me how much my personal style has evolved over the years.
For the record, I don’t think styles usually evolve in a tidy narrative like the one you’ll read below. But I did see real shifts in my thinking and wanted to map them for you here.
2003 - Concept art for “Class of the Titans”: These were part of a larger pitch package that landed me the job as lead character designer on an animated series. It was one of my first jobs out of school. I was always interested in how I could bring western animation and anime sensibilities together — and characters with big feet were in at the time.
2005 - Production art for “Class of the Titans”: A refinement of the previous aesthetic. I’m streamlining shapes and getting a lot more confident in my posing. (Not shown: feet were definitely getting smaller at this point).
2007 - Personal work: This was the height of my “angular” style. I was strangely obsessed with the hipster/American Apparel aesthetic and drawing people in their underwear. Also, every character needed to have heavy eyelids — a result of all the imaginary late-night partying and forced irony.
2008 to 2012 - Not shown: Sort of a fallow period in my personal art journey. I was doing lots of professional storyboarding work in animation but basically stopped producing personal work.
2013 - Personal work: I took half a year off from animation to get back into producing my own art. This period was somewhat painful. I could see how large the gap was between the kind of work I wanted to produce and what my skills allowed. This piece was one of the first full-colour illustrations I attempted after years of only doing rough storyboards. Looking at this now I can see that I didn’t understand the importance of line weight, considered shapes, and the use of color and detail to draw the viewer’s focus.
2014 - Personal work: In these three works I was trying to use more colour and light while exploring new aesthetics. In the third image from 2014, part of my “Hermès” series, I tried to take a Tadahiro Uesugi style of painting and marry it with the shapes and compositions I was developing. In the second, “Man on the Train,” I was trying to understand how concept and symbols raise the editorial quality of one’s illustration.
2015 - Arts&Style cover for the Washington Post: This was around the time I discovered the work of Tomer Hanuka, which blew my mind. It’s had a lasting influence on the way I approach figures and shapes.
2016 to 2018: A continuation of the exploration I started in 2014.
2019 - Personal work: This best represents where I am today. Having experimented with more painterly styles in the past I’m now more interested in creating the same illusion of depth and light with flat colours and subtle gradients. The angular shapes and big feet are all but gone.
