The Imperial Escort (1998)
Transitions
In art school you mainly paint in oils. I didn’t take many painting classes, and the ones I did take normally didn’t have instructors who could actually paint, or at least teach one to use paint. Correction, they couldn’t paint in any style relevant to what I was trying to do. So my tendency was to get looser, brushier, and thicker with oil paint, and not in a good way. Somehow my Acrylic work which I did at home between assignments was tighter, mostly.
By the time I left art school I had therefore not gained firm discipline to work finely in oils. I didn’t work well loosely with them, either. But my acrylic technique had been more honed. So when illustration work began I just moved right into it with acrylic. Here and there I’d use oils, for no particular reason from what I remember, but they rarely helped matters. Usually, back then, they hurt.
