| Featured Artist: Gordon Studer My Background: After an attempt at playing football at Penn State,
I needed to raise my GPA to stay in school. So I took a group
of classes that I thought would be easy. One of which was a drawing
class. That was it, I was hooked. I ended up graduating with a
BFA in drawing and painting. Then it was off to Washington D.C.
(I was to chicken to move to New York City) for an exciting career
as a bartender with a BFA, there were lots of us. Getting desperate
to get my foot in the art / design world, I took a production
class at The Corcoran School of Art. My teacher, Andrea Schamis
ended up hiring me on at Redtree Associates were she was Creative
Director. Taking me under her wing it was off to sunny California
and a job at the once noble Oakland Tribune to work for Bob Maynard
as a illustrator / designer. Then it was over to the Examiner
before the Tribune ship sank. It was at the Examiner that I was
introduced to the computer as a illustration tool. This was an
exciting time for the development of computer illustration in
the Bay Area, with other illustrators like John Hersey, Mick Wiggins,
Ron Chan, Steve Lyons and Lance Jackson. 10 years ago I made the
break to as a freelancer. It's been clear sailing ever since. My Technique: In the beginning my work was very geometric. Illustrator
and MacPaint were the only choices in the beginning. Things started
to change once Photoshop came out. My work ended up developing
into a retro photo collage style. Here's a quote from a book I
was in [Studio Secrets] about working with photos in my illustration
"The idea is to strip the forms down to their bare minimum and
play with unrelated abstractions inside the forms. If the photograph
wasn't there to identify the image, it would break down into a
few simple circles and squares" All the photos I use are from copyright free CDs or taken myself.
Now and again I am still asked to do the older geometric look.
That's o.k. with me it keeps thing interesting. Although I've
been illustrating with the computer as long as anyone, I'm defiantly
the farthest thing from a tech guy. I'm always using the oldest
equipment and software. For a series of lectures I was involved
with the title of my talk was "How Simple Can It Get?" My Favorite Client story: I've had pretty good luck with clients.
The bigger the $$ jobs usually the bigger the headaches. One of
my biggest jobs was a series of posters for the Postal Service.
After 2 weeks of changes I as them "have you ever seen any of
my work before?", they hadn't. They couldn't get the photo collage
guy they wanted and someone had told them I use photographs in
my work. I now start any conversation with a new client with "what
work of mine have you seen before'? All artwork © 2002 Gordon Studer. Not to be used without
permission.
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