Category — Illustration

Jill Pantozzi has written for a number of websites including Newsarama, MTV Splash Page, and The Mary Sue. A geek-girl of the highest order, I’ve seen her at several conventions, and her love and knowledge of pop culture is astounding.

Just this past weekend I illustrated an installment of The-Gutters.com, a webcomic lampooning all sides of the comic book industry, from the characters and stories to the creators themselves, and even some picking on the fans from time to time too. (We certainly deserve it.) It was an awesome experience and I can’t wait to do another.

Last year, I was asked by my friend Eric M. Cooper to create a few illustrations for his novel Knight Seeker. If you’ve been to a comic convention, you’ve probably seen Eric in artist alley, dressed in his blue Knight Seeker costume and sharing info about his wonderful story to everyone around. I had been familiar with the book for a while, but Eric told me he was in the process of putting together a new edition where a different artist would create a few illustrations based on each of the chapters. Of course I was in.

Just wanted to drop a quick post this evening to show some older work. Even though I am known mostly as a chalk artist, I still consider myself an Illustrator first are foremost. I work in a number of different formats, and don’t like to lock myself in to the chalk art mold as that ignores so many other things I like to do. Since I was a young child I loved to doodle with a pencil as much as possible. Unfortunately this included inappropriate times, like when everyone else was working on math, and in inappropriate places, like ON my math book!

Zombies. Everyone loves them. C’mon, admit it. Even your Grandmother thinks zombies are awesome! They make for great movies and for great illustrations too. For anyone who has even approached the art form of sequential storytelling and comic books zombies are a MUST draw from time to time. They even play a role in a graphic novel I am working on. Truth be told, they probably play a part in most peoples would-be graphic novels these days and there are probably one hundred thousand zombie concepts floating around in artists heads. But for some reason, they keep coming back, I guess the undead have a way of doing that… coming back.

The last time I talked about entering the Creature of the Week contest over at conceprtart.org, I showed a few examples that went over well with the group, but never got me very close to being the top vote getter. This illustration and concept art weekly contest is very competitive sometimes, and a number of the best artists working in the field today browse these boards regularly and take part in events, so you really have to up your game as much as possible.

If you look at my blogroll to the right of the page, you will see a link to one of my favorite forums ever. conceptart.org! This is a site for professional and non-professional artists alike to gather, show their work, critique the works of others, and take part in community events that will help improve your artistic abilities! The feedback you can get here is alone some of the best around, and were talking for people who have been working in the industry for a long time.