Featured Artist: Anson Jew

My Background: I've always been interested in storytelling with art. As a kid, I used to make my own comics and animated films. In college, I drew editorial cartoons and had my own weekly comic strip. I was an art department intern at the Modesto Bee and spent a couple years working as a graphic designer at the California Horse Review Magazine before landing a job at LucasArts, where I stayed on as an animator for nine years. In 1998, I began self-publishing a comic book called "Saturday Nite", using a grant I had won from the Xeric Foundation. In 2000, I began freelancing full-time, mostly doing pre-production work for various multimedia--including storyboards and character designs for corporate and music videos as well as creating Flash animation for the web. Some of the companies for whom I've created work include PeopleSoft, Electronic Arts, Pileated Pictures, WebVan.com, Weird Al Yankovic, Pacific Sun Wear and WritersCorps. Due largely to the good response I've been getting to the illustrations that appear in my comic book, I've recently been trying broaden my activities to include more "comic book style" editorial illustration in addition to my pre-production work.

My Technique: When I was growing up, I had a lot of books about cartooning. Occasionally, in a lot of these books, black and white ink drawings would be reproduced many times larger than normal to illustrate detail. I really liked what that process did to the artwork: a posterizing effect on the lines and brushstrokes, often magnifying the rough edge of the ink against the surface of the paper. In my illustrations, I try to reproduce this effect. I typically draw my illustrations smaller than published size (the opposite of what most artists do) and on cheap paper with cheap pens. I then take the drawing to a photocopier to enlarge. Sometimes, I'll even run a drawing through the copier several times to degrade the art additional generations. I then scan the art into my computer and color it in Photoshop. The actual drawing style is derived largely from comic book style illustration. Alex Toth, Mitch O'Connell and Serge Clerc are among the comic artists who influence my drawing style.

My involvement with the Guild: I've been with the NorCal Graphic Artists Guild since April of 2000. I had a table at Peepshow, and helped out a little with some of the pre-event preparations. I try be as active as I can and try to make the monthly luncheons whenever I can.

My Favorite Client story: I had done some creature designs for a music video that was a parody of the Star Wars movies. One design was an odd, vaguely doglike alien card player. A rubber model had been made of the alien's head and filmed, but I never saw the finished product. Later, my brother told me that my creature was appearing in a Hong Kong romantic comedy starring Maggie Cheung called "Sausalito" that was playing at the 4-Star Theater. Apparently, the person who built the model later went on to work on "Sausalito" (which was shot in and around the SF bay area). The model ended up as set dressing in the lead actor's "office" (Leon Lai plays a dot com entrepeneur with a lot of weird junk in his office). I haven't seen the movie, but from what I understand, at one point Lai picks up the head and ponders it Hamlet-style.

All artwork © 2002 Anson Jew. Not to be used without permission.