Essay: I Forgot About Illustration

It’s tough finding time to draw now with my new promotion. I’ve only managed to get out for lunch maybe five or six times in the past month. But this has given me a lot of time to really think about art and my current artistic path. I’m sure things will shift eventually, but for now, my creating is limited.

Anyway, I’ve come to the realization that I’ve really veered away from what originally got me started on this art journey.

Graphic art. Fantasy. Illustration. A chance to escape reality. Artists like Frank Frazetta, Jeffrey Jones, W.M. Kaluta, and Barry Windsor-Smith.

Four or so years ago, I got super sick of looking at terrible Magic: The Gathering art. Sure, it’s technically correct, but there’s no sense of wonder. No personality. No feeling or emotion. It’s too real now. Just concept art. And honestly? It’s shit. I can rarely tell one artist from another anymore. Every time someone praises that generic, soulless style, I want to hit them.

So, I set out to learn about creating my own fantasy art.

I dug deep. It’s how I found Frank Frazetta, Roy G. Krenkel, and Jeffrey Catherine Jones—not to copy them, but to learn what inspired them. From there, I learned about the grandfathers of American illustration who started it all: Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, and the Brandywine artists.

It was hard to find material about Pyle that wasn’t just his own writing (he was a multi-talented creator who both wrote and illustrated classics like Robin Hood and King Arthur). But N.C. Wyeth had a richer trail of books and retrospectives.

The first book I picked up was Three Generations of Wyeth Art, where I not only learned about N.C., but discovered someone who would influence me even more: his son, Andrew Wyeth.

At the same time, while diving into Jeffrey Catherine Jones’ influences, I came across three other important names: George B. Bridgman (a master of anatomy), Gustav Klimt (a giant of Austrian painting), and George Pratt—who, to my surprise, is still alive and teaching online classes!

A couple of years ago, I emailed Mr. Pratt and, to my delight, he responded with some encouraging words and around 2,000 drawings and sketchbook pages in some PDFs for me to study. These included artists from all walks of life, including himself. I saw works from Rembrandt, Egon Schiele, Käthe Kollwitz, Adolph Menzel, Dorian Vallejo, Jules Pascin, Francisco Goya—just to name a few. I still have them saved on my iPad and look at them often.

That only fueled my growing fascination with fine art. I heard that Frazetta, N.C. Wyeth, and Jones all had fine art backgrounds but ended up in illustration. Most illustrators didn’t take that route. Allegedly they just learned how to render and make things look “finished" without actually learning how to draw.

Not fully understanding what that meant, I kept digging. I joined a local atelier. Took life drawing classes. Studied the same Charles Bargue Drawing Course that Van Gogh, John Sargent, and Pablo Picasso had. I dove into art theory. I read about Eugène Delacroix, Henri Matisse, Egon Schiele, Paul Klee, Frida Kahlo, Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit—dozens of artist stories and essays that really had nothing to do with illustration; just a bunch of self-expression and masturbation. And somewhere along the way, I forgot about illustration.

I ended up balls-deep in the world of fine art: a space full of criticism, theory, fluff, and networking—where “success” is often decided by connections rather than work. It made me overthink everything. I got stuck in my own head. It didn’t stop me from creating, but I found myself overthinking and making sure I had some sort of deep reason to cover my ass for drawing or painting what I wanted.

So what pulled me out of that limbo?

Well, first: George Pratt reached out a few weeks ago. After two failed attempts in the past years, his class is being offered again in Fall 2025. I’ve already signed up.

Second: Heavy Metal—the adult comic/fantasy magazine that Frazetta, Jones, and the studio artists often contributed to—is being published again after a long hiatus. I stumbled upon it during one of my Thursday Magic: The Gathering visits to Wizards Alley, a local comic/card shop. So of course I bought it.

These two events—and the realization that I was overthinking my work way too much—snapped me back into focus.

Back to my original goal: illustration.

Ultimately, I think I ended up exactly where I was meant to be. I’ve got four years of drawing behind me and a wildly expanded perspective on art (except modern Magic: The Gathering art—still hate it).

So, what does all this mean moving forward?

Nothing really; this is just a personal mental shift I’ve had. I’m still doing life drawing on Sundays. I’m still drawing and painting whatever, whenever I want.

I knocked out my most recent oil painting, The Sermon, in just two days’ time. I didn’t sit around and mull over deep meanings and fluff. I just dropped an umber wash on a canvas and threw color on it after it dried. It felt great. Is it gonna sell? Is it a masterpiece? Probably not. But that’s not why I make art.

I’m still gonna focus on drawing women and landscapes; but I’m gonna stop trying to find complex reasons and philosophies other than I just want to draw them.

My wife worries about real-world problems, but me? This is the kind of shit that keeps me up at night.