Mitch V [NSFW]
Mitch V offers us a 5+ year retrospective of his art across three different subject matters, showing an evolution from pencil drawings to digital paintings and back again. Thanks for sharing, Mitch!
I’m a freelance illustrator & concept artist, self-taught until this past year where I have been studying in the atelier of realist figurative & portrait painter Mark Kang O’Higgins at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle. In addition to commercial work I also paint representational art inspired by folk art, music culture, comics, graphic design and psychedelia.
Website: http://mitchv.com and artblog at http://oolong.livejournal.com.
Group shows: OK Hotel Gallery (upcoming), Gage Academy of Art (Seattle, WA), Gallery Nucleus (Alhambra, CA) Publications: GRAFUCK 4, Prism 2008 LGBT Guide to Comics, What’s Up! Magazine, The Betty Pages.
Mistakes I’ve made – one of the biggest is probably thinking fingers had two joints instead of three up until a couple years ago, when I had 10 of them in front of me to look at the whole time? Doh. I guess the biggest thing I wasted a lot of time worrying about was having a consistent style while I was still at a stage where my first priority should have been doing studies from life and from books of anatomy, color theory, perspective, etc. And another thing – don’t be afraid to do copies of works by painters and draftsmen you admire or try and imitate their style in your own sketchbook or whatever, even tho you don’t end up with a piece you can take credit for, this is by far the best way to learn how they did it!
Someone smart once said that you have to draw a thousand bad pictures (or comic pages, or paintings) before you’ll start to draw good ones, so draw for hours every day, draw everything you see and can think of to get them over with. Also, don’t worry about ‘wasting’ your best ideas, because by the time you’ll be ‘good enough to do it justice’ you’ll have moved on to a different idea anyway. But above all, seek advice and criticism of your work from peers and experts as much as possible and listen to all of it politely and be humble, even if you don’t agree!
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