Artist Interview 3

After over a week of communication struggles, I finally actually made contact with Ben Templesmith himself, the illustrator and co-creator of 30 Days of Night. He told me that he would be available to do an interview via email if I still wanted to, and even though I had already done my actual interview, I thought that this would be a great opportunity to learn more about art and art specific to the comic book industry. I changed up my questions a little bit and sent them to him.

After reading over his answers I learned a ton. It was really different from my first interview and although it was not face to face, I found it to be very insightful. I discovered a lot about art, comic books, business and technique. I thought that his method of creating artwork was very interesting and it uncovered the veil of curiousity that surrounded it previously. It has also inspired me to try experimenting more. "I draw/paint all by hand, producing a grey tonal work using pens, pencils, acrylic paint and watercolour, then I scan it all into photoshop and ad layers of photo textures I've taken, as well as painting textures, bits of photos and really just add elements and colour to the work I couldn't do on the actual drawing board. About 70% real drawing and 30% photoshop tweaking."

The business aspect was also very interesting. He gets hired through word, but mainly works with one publisher. He does almost all his work electronically (emails and payment). I also though it was really cool talking to him because his work was turned into a movie. I asked him how he felt about that. He said it was really cool working with the director, who was a fan of his, and he thinks that he did a good job of transforming his work into a movie, and was glad that he had say in it.

Coincidenntly, he happened to share almost the same advice as I was given in my first interview. "Keep going. The thing that will make you succeed is you not giving up when the other 98% do. Sure you need talent, but it's the effort that makes you succeed. Seen many an artist with talent go nowhere simply because they don't hunger for it enough, and give up when it gets a bit hard. Be one of that 2% and stick at it. "

In the end, I'm really glad that I got to do this interview because I learned a lot about art and more, but I'm also really glad that I got to do my first one with Edmund Piffard. I learned so much through these two completely diverse interviews and they combined together to be something way more powerful than either one on their own. They balanced eachother out very nicely and I don't think I could have been anymore succesful.