| About Joe Born in a large family of artistic talent, my talent became evident as early as five years old, drawing seemed to be my favorite past time. In highschool I started painting in florescent paints when blacklight posters were popular in the early 70's, dragons and comic book super heroes would be my favorite subjects. Then in 1980 a friend of mine who was a commercial artist, gave me a book on the airbrush art of Philip Castle, I love the way he used the airbrush to paint everything from hollywood starlets to the metallic surfaces of airplanes. So I went out and bought my first airbrush, a Paasche VL and taught myself to use it. I first started painting professionally working in the back of a motorcycle shop painting motorcycles, bikers always wanted Frank Frazetta or Boris Vallejo paintings on their gas tanks. After a few years I wanted to take my art more seriously, so I went back to school for a commercial art degree. I learned to Illustrate for ad agencies and print shops. But now the computer was coming on the scene, so it was back to school where I learned everything from 3D animation to illustrating with desktop publishing programs. When I learned Adobe Photoshop I found I could apply my painting and airbrush skills and paint productively on the computer. This is a big help when doing a piece for an ad agency that is always wanting revisions of some kind. I still paint using all traditional mediums, paintbrush, airbrush, electric eraser, etc., when doing a painting for myself and that I have a limited number of prints made. In working with digital format I can be productive and still use all the illustrating skills learned when illustrating in traditional mediums, the work must still look, and in a sense be traditional. About The Art I used to paint with airbrush exclusively, but in a lot of fantasy work I started using more brush and eraser work when I wanted more variety of texture. I have always liked to paint very tight and as realistic as possible. Even if it is a fantasy figure like a dragon, I will study the texture and colors of a variety of reptiles to give the painting a realistic look. When illustrating women I also use more brush work after I bought books on Vargas and Sorayama and studied their use of water color brushes and erasers. After learning Photoshop, I would first scan reference material and arrange it in Photoshop to get my layout for a paining. Then I bought a Wacom tablet and after a lot of practice, found that I could paint on the computer. Painting digitally allowed me to be more creative giving me the ability to experiment and look at different possibilities before deciding on a final piece. |
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