30 Characters Challenger: Jared Lewis

Word. My name is Jared, I’m 27, & from the Eastern side of Pennsylvania.

Like everyone else here, I was drawing since forever. What really sealed the deal for me was when I was 5, I met & toured the studio of a very prolific freelance illustrator. The guy’s style was firmly old school, but seeing that someone was capable of producing that much quality stuff over a lifetime had a fairly profound effect on me. That same weekend, I also saw the actual life sized Powerloader & Queen models from Aliens, but there was concept art around & it was really striking to see that no matter what people think up, it mostly starts out with just a sketch.

And ever since, I’ve been an indoor kid, pencil in hand, drawing on anything.

Comics have always been a first love, but my parents always feared (rightfully so) there was no money in them. So for years I developed stories & sketches on the side while I tried to make a career out of making 3D game art. Then some pretty bad experiences kind of turned me off of that. Right now, I mostly work at a local cable station to pay the bills & in my off hours work on honing skills & ideas, in hopes of soon going pro with my comic stuff. In the meantime, I try to maintain a sketchblog, which I tend to update in spurts & post the occasional comic on the sequential art battling site Entervoid.com.

Some friends from there that competed in Zuda turned me onto Daniel Govar‘s work, & from his twitter feed, I found out about the challenge. People always tell me I’m an idea guy, but my biggest problem is lacking discipline & follow through. That’s why I’m signing up for this. I have loads of ‘wouldn’t it be cool if…’ sort of half-baked ideas & concepts I concocted, but never took the time to develop into something meaningful or scribble out onto a page. So this is an outlet for that. I hope that focusing on them will get the wheels going & I can turn them into something constructive down the road. Also, this is great initiative to get things started again on my blog & try to keep it daily, or at the very least a lot more frequent, for more than just a spurt.

Here are a few more examples of my stuff. If you would like to see more, visit FacebusterDeluxe.wordpress.com or check me out @kurohux on twitter.

Really I’m looking forward to this whole shebang, both as a challenger & a spectator. Hope I don’t disappoint on my end. Good luck, Everybody!

Category: Participants