Justin Williams

Accuracy and contrast have always been my 2 biggest goals when creating art. It doesn’t matter if it’s a pen and ink or watercolor, a architectural rendering or something abstract and not of this world. In my process I choose the places on the canvas that are going to be the darkest and lightest before I lay down a single stroke of a pen or brush. The piece is done before it’s ever begun.

My earliest influences were Marvel, DC and my family. I always had my nose in a SpiderMan or BatMan comic book or was pestering my brother Jason to draw some action figure or something out of Dungeons & Dragons, and my style has been influenced by everything in between. Finding my style really didn’t start to happen until I moved to Oklahoma when I was 20 to study illustration and graphic design at Oklahoma State. It was there I started to take pen and ink, stippling, and cross hatching seriously as a main instrument in my artistic tool kit.

I took a break from making art for close to 15 years. I’d draw an occasional portrait or crank out a abstract watercolor every now and then, but I took my graphic design and marketing business much more seriously. That’s what paid the bills after all. Then I found that despite the graphic design and marketing making me able to put food on the table, I felt hungry and hollow. I didn’t get into design because I was a big fan of David Ogilvy, I did it because churches aren’t paying anyone to paint their ceilings anymore and design and marketing gave my creativity an outlet. But was I making “art”?

Hardly.

And that’s where I’m currently at. I’m drawing and painting more and happier because of it. My main goal is that it makes someone else happy too. If anything I’ve made does that, then I consider myself a “successful artist”.