GRAD SCHOOL CATCH-UP:
Whoa nelly! What a week! It’s taken me nearly two weeks to recover from the amazing, mind-openeing experience of grad school (and a sinus infection). Where to start!
Robert Hunt was our first presenter of the San Francisco contact period. I’ve met Robert a few times before when attending guest lectures at CCA, where he teaches and was invited to speak to his class once to talk about art direction (back when I still worked at SF Weekly). He’s a great guy and an asset to the illustration community.
Robert is the opposite of me. He uses oil paint, not a computer, he’s focused, not all scatter-brained, and he has somehow got over the fear of starting (and finishing) things. He is constantly producing work, stating that he spends about 50% of his time on personal work. That’s a great ratio if you can manage it.
And his work is beautiful. Maybe it’s more amazing to me because I’ve never once put oil paint to canvas, but he is a true master. Just see for yourself over on his website.
What stood out most to me about his work was not how he applies his immense amount of talent a wide range of subjects and the subtlety of styles within those, but was his branching out into to animation, doing film-house logo intros in particular (the original DreamWorks logo). What was most fascinating to me about this was how the majority of his process remained traditional, doing multiple, sometimes hundreds, of finished paintings to then be used as a sequence of images, morphed from one to the other to create the animations. Robert definitely has more patience than I to pull something like this off but the result is obviously worth the effort.
View his examples of the above examples here.
Thanks to Robert for coming by and sharing his process and knowledge with the Hartford Illustration MFA posse.
SF Weekly cover animation - The Copyright Standoff
