Artist Analysis - Skottie Young

Skottie Young 

Skottie Young is a comic book artist from Chicago, Illinois, He has worked for company's such as Warner Bros, Image, Upper Deck and is currently employed by Marvel comics. Skottie is known for his crazy illustrations but he is most famous for his illustrations in Marvel comics. He has also illustrated a revamped version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz which won him an Eisner award and also won the New York times best selling award. Skottie utilizes the traditional comic book style and distorts it to generate his own way of working. Brush pens are used to create hard black lines which are normally used to structure the solid outline of the character, Skottie on the other hand uses this pen in a very loose way to create jagged wavey lines which give his images the unfinished look. Skottie works both digitally and on paper, his style shows through on both media but the outcome is completely different. Skottie got his job at Marvel by showcasing his work at a comic book convention, CB Cebulski liked his art and gave him his card, they worked on some comics together for a while until Marvel asked Cebulski if he knew anyone who could draw for an issue of ICEMAN, Skottie got suggested for the job and has worked with Marvel ever since.
             

Skottie does a daily drawing on his blog, they are normally quick sketches which can be about literally anything, he focuses a lot on comic books and computer games when looking for inspiration for his drawings. This image was done using a brush pen, nothing is fully coloured in but the overall scale of the image and the ammount of wispy lines and random swirls make the image appear to be really detailed. Comic book characters normally have an incredible amount of shading and are anatomically correct, we reconise those images because we can relate to the human anatomy. Skotties characters are normally not in proportion at all but his images have a lot of elements, the more there is to look at the more appealing the image is.

Skottie's style also shows through when he uses a nib pen.

Skottie normally uses wacky vibrant shades to colour his work and his colouring technique is just as loose as his line-work. Within comic books the black lines normally keep in the colour and make the image look neat, in Skottie's case his loose lines allow the colour to escape making the image more free.

This is one of Skottie's ink drawings coloured in digitally, he uses a Cintiq graphics tablet to  get this awesome effect, this image works better for books and comics, this is because of it's awesome visuals and brilliant colour. This kind of imagery would work well as a graphic on stickers or maybe a skateboard. 

       

This is one of Skottie's comics, i believe this one was for the Spiderman series, his linework is a lot neater here and the choice of colours make the image settle in well with the background, his cartoon like style still shows through in this comic page but he has modified it to suit the comic. 

This is one of the images that Skottie drew for the OZ series, these books were published by Marvel and technically count as graphic novels but officially they are children's books. Skottie's style is very flexible and unique, his ability to structure a busy image as well as be able to story board his own ideas make him a strong candidate for a job as either a comic book artist or a children's book illustrator. His fantasy style imagery also works well in both fields because a lot of Marvels comics contain impossible hero's and situations, children's books normally feature a fictional character and setting, this is done so that a character can be molded to the strangest of stories. The wizard of Oz is an odd story to begin with, Skottie was in his element making illustrating these books.