Evan Squires

I’ve always had a fascination with stories, and a love for the characters they contain. Characters are brought to life not only by their actions within their stories, but through their visual design as well. I’ve grown to love the act of bringing characters to life in this way and use my art to do it. building a character visually through gesture and outfitting I can also ask questions about them involving their personality and the world they’re from that I can use to inform their design and vice versa. Characters are perhaps the most vital part of storytelling, and so I attempt to render characters as both a reminder of their stories and a story themself. As a result of these motivations my artistic process is particularly focused on feeling and emotion. I invent new characters and stories as well drawing existing characters, When I draw, while I am concerned with accuracy as far as pose and proportion in space, I focus on getting face shape and clothing styles right, as those features are typically vital to a person or character’s identity. I am also focused on capturing how what I’m drawing feels, and what emotions you can feel from them I spend time finding a few words I feel can describe a person or object, and I try to find ways to draw those words as a feeling. In this way I am able to draw from life the same way I would a character, with a focus on feeling. This is mostly done through facial expression and body language. I draw quickly and use wide strokes to apply an energetic texture to my drawing with the marks it creates. I feel makes them feel alive and helps to imply motion.

I use both physical and digital mediums, but prefer digital because it affords more options for tools both types of marks and subtle alterations to improve image quality, as well as more options for color. I also commonly work in many verities of pencil such as graphite, colored pencil, and pastel pencil. Light and color are very important to capturing feeling in drawing. I often make use of dramatic colors. By using particularly dramatic colors I’m able to capture mood more easily and move the eye across the page in certain ways, as well as give characters more distinct designs.

The most important thing to me is for my work is to bring enjoyment to others. The feeling of joy when one sees a character they love brought to life through art, is a feeling I strive to share with others through my work. I want people who view my work to be invested in the characters and worlds I create and want to know more about them. When representing the characters from existing stories, I want others to see them in the same light I do and see the stories behind them them that inspire my art. My work is a way for me to bring a little more joy into the world.