Illuxcon

This year I attended Illuxcon in Altoona, PA. What a fantastic show. I was four days amongst the best fantasy artists in the world. I was able to meet in person, Jon Schindehette, who has recently taken me on as a mentee to help me become the fantasy artist that I want to be. I met and had dinner with several of my favorite artists, Mark Nelson, Todd Lockwood, Lars Grant-West, Jeff Easley (sorry for the lack of link, Jeff. I think I must have the wrong web address for your site), and Cyril Van Der Haegen, whose work I was only familiar with in passing and has since elbowed it's way into a 9 inch space among my favorites.

I met John Jude Palencar (holy moly!), bought a drawing of his and we talked about Ireland. Later, while telling a horror story about an 8 track player left on overnight, he sang a few verses in the voice of Tom Waits. I was able to watch Todd paint, and hear him speak about composition. Donato Giancola gave an excellent talk on abstraction in realism. Mark also gave a couple talks about critter design, and inking over pencils. I learned a tremendous amount from all these goings on, and absorbed so much more from the other artists on the scene, Steve Prescott, Mark Poole, Justin Gerard, Ralph Horsley, Jeff Laubenstein, Tyler Walpole, Steve Ellis, Jordu Schell, Kara and Tom Kuebler, Pat Jones, and Lauren Cannon. It was utterly amazing.

I mentioned Jon's mentoring, and I'll get back to that in the next post, he had some excellent insight for me about becoming less line dependent in my pieces. And he had some praise for my work in Trickster, which really made my week. Cheers, Jon! But yeah, more on that later.

So I come home from Altoona, with a little more steel in my blood, and a hopper full of theories, insight, and the dampened sawdust that is usually up there keeping my hairs rooted in place. I got way more out of Illuxcon than I ever expected. I'll be going back next year. Take it to the bank.

Thanks for show Pat and Jeannie, you really know how to make it happen.

Huzzah!