Brian Crane, creator of the Pickles comic strip, won the 2013 Reuben Award for ‘Cartoonist of the Year’ from the National Cartoonists Society. Previous winners include Charles Schulz, Garry Trudeau, and Bill Watterson. Crane was born in Twin Falls, Idaho; grew up in the San Francisco Bay area; and graduated from BYU in 1973. He worked for 17 years as an illustrator, designer, and art director before realizing his dream of creating a comic strip—and the strip has been running for 25 years. He lives in Sparks, Nevada with his wife, Diana and they have seven children and fourteen grandchildren.

Pickles features Earl and Opal Pickles who have been married for over 50 years. As his bio states, “Whether observing the differences between genders and generations or taking a wry but sympathetic look at life in the twilight years, Crane’s good-natured wit and dry humor are sure to please readers of all ages.” In 2013, Baobab Press published a Pickles collection entitled, “Oh Sure! Blame it on the Dog!”

You have said comic strip artists are the hardest working artists on earth. What is your daily routine? My daily routine is comprised of a lot of thinking and a little drawing. It is hard to tell that I am working sometimes, because the hardest part of my job is trying to come up with a funny or clever idea for a comic strip every single day of the week. Keeping the ideas fresh is a challenge. But I find it to be somewhat easier now that I am closer in age to the 70-something-year-olds that I am writing about. It has become a case of art imitating life I guess. After I finish writing and drawing a week of strips, which usually takes most of the week to do, I scan them and email them to my daughter Emily, who colors them with Photoshop for me.

You probably grew up with Pogo and Peanuts. Which comic strips really sparked your imagination? The first comic strip I remember reading and being inspired by was Li’l Abner, by Al Capp. Then came Pogo, by Walt Kelly and later on, Peanuts and B.C. They inspired me to want to be a comic strip artist when I grew up. But by the time I was in high school I had given up on that idea, mostly because I didn’t think I could come up with enough funny ideas for a week of comic strips, let alone months, years and even decades. It wasn’t until I was approaching 40 that I decided to finally give my childhood dream a try.

Images courtesy Brian Crane, BYU, and Deseret News.

Visit the Pickles website.

Brooke Smart is a talented Utah-based illustrator who creates, among her many projects, a fascinating collection of custom portraits of individuals, couples, and families. She has also completed the first two legs of the Mormon Triple Crown with her work in The New Era and The Friend.  As her website explains, “she spends her days gathering ideas for stories and her nights telling those stories with her pen and paintbrush.” She graduated in 2007 from BYU in illustration and is cousins with another talented artist, Hillary Henslee.

You do a lot of custom portraits in your distinctive style. My artistic career thus far has taken many turns. I’ve always loved to draw, and to draw people, in particular. Growing up, I was drawing and painting constantly. This led me to the illustration department at BYU, where I fell in love with fine artists and illustrators alike. Along with my illustration courses, I ended up taking figure drawing and head painting classes each semester. Portraits became my passion. There is so much to be said in the human face and form, and it’s an exciting challenge to capture each specific person in paint. After college, I studied with Jeffrey Hein and began my career as a fine artist. Since then, and with many moves around the country, I’ve done a lot of fine art, illustration, and design work, including many jobs designing patterned paper and craft supplies. These portraits are sort of a marriage of all that I’ve learned to love in my art. It combines my oil portraits and my illustrative style into one.

I think your backgrounds are sometimes more fun that the subjects of your paintings. I’d never thought of it that way. The patterns in my backgrounds are meant to enhance the portrait and tell a story about the person I’m painting. I have each of my subjects tell me about themselves before I paint them and I like to think that their face as well as the pattern I’ve made for them describes who they are. My goal with these portraits was to do something new and all my own. I like them to look formal, as traditional portraits do, but to also have personality and whimsy, with a touch of folk art, like my other illustration work does. I want them to tell a story, and I hope that is what the backgrounds are doing.

How would you describe Mormon art these days? Mormon art has definitely evolved over the years. It parallels the message that is being conveyed through the ‘I’m a Mormon’ campaign, which is that our points of view within in the church are varied, beautiful, and often unexpected. Like music, it’s a way to worship God. I am constantly in awe of many painters within the church and hope to be numbered among them someday.

What projects are you hoping to do next? I would love to do more published work, perhaps illustrate middle-grade novels. And after pulling out my oils recently, I’m excited to do a lot more fine art in the near future. The goal is always to create beautiful, meaningful work and I want to constantly continue with that goal in mind.

Visit Brooke Smart’s website.

Follow Brooke Smart on Instagram.

Normandie Luscher is a soon-to-be New Yorker with an Illustration degree from BYU. We are highlighting all of the pieces from her project Our Sister’s Sorrow.

Explain a little about Our Sister’s Sorrow: It is one of the biggest projects that I’ve done. I’ve been working on it for over two years now. I had sketched out lots of different possibilities and then one night after I had been struggling with depression for a few months, I remember sitting in my living room and wondering when I would ever feel better. I had started reading the story of Job from the Bible and it just kind of clicked and I decided to paint the story of Job with a female character. I took the idea to some of my professors and then to the Laycock Center, which is a collaborative center at BYU that funds different art projects. They encouraged me to make the project more collaborative and I ended up working with an old friend in the music department. He wrote music to accompany the pieces.

My favorite element of the project was collaborating with the Center for Women and Children in Crisis. The project took on depth and incredible meaning as we interviewed women who came from abusive situations and were trying to get back on their feet and to repair emotionally. I felt honored to have my artwork begin to represent the many women who had gone through real despair and redemption and working with them has changed my life. The final project ended up being a fundraising event for the Center for Women and Children and we had my art up as an exhibition with Zane’s music and we had speakers from the community talk about women’s issues. I was so over joyed with the way everything turned out. We’re actually just finishing up a documentary about the project that will come out at the end of this month on Vimeo.

Abandoned (above): Abandoned is a simple piece that I made to capture that feeling of loneliness in a vast empty landscape.

Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar (below): This pieces shows Job and her friends. They are infamous for their advice that isn’t always so encouraging or helpful. It’s complicated.

Nightmares (below): In the Book of Job he says talks about how he wants to find rest from his trials at least in his sleep, but even then he has nightmares.

Beware of Pride (below): Beware of Pride is about personal introspection and the moment of awareness that maybe you are the one who got yourself into trouble.

Leviathan (below): In the Job story, the Lord finally answers all of Job’s complaints and inquiries with an example of the Leviathan, which is usually depicted as a giant enigmatic sea monster. The Lord basically says that suffering is a part of being human and you can’t change that.

Offering (below): Offering is a repentance piece. I wanted to focus on the joy of repentance and being forgiven as opposed to the anguish and suffering of repentance. I like the idea that repenting is a deliberate action of offering up a broken heart and contrite spirit of humility.

Poured in His Spirit (below): This is the climax of the repentance process. It’s not necessarily apart of the Job story, the last few pieces are more personal interpretations of having a Spiritual experience, but it’s that moment of reconciliation and God’s acceptance and renewal. The title actually comes from Jacob 7:8.

Renewed in His Hand (below): This is the ending where Job has found peace and understanding.

Tell us a little about where you grew up and how you became an artist. I grew up in Virginia, just a few hours outside of D.C. I’m still in love with it and I really feel like my hometown is one of the most beautiful places on earth. I think it helped to grow up near the National Gallery; I still remember the first time I went and saw Degas and Mary Cassatt on a second grade field trip. I started taking private classes with a few different teachers including Rose Datoc Dall. When I was looking into undergrad options, there was really no other option for me than illustration.

What was your experience at BYU? Going to BYU was an amazing experience and I think I was there at exactly the right time. I liked having professors with different talents. Robert Barrett and Richard Hull helped me to strengthen my technical ability and Bethanne Andersen is like the person that I want to be when I grow up. Chris Thornock was definitely the most influential for me conceptually. Chris is an expert on everything that ever existed and so he is able to give each student the advice that they specifically need. He helped me to develop interest in folk art and that’s when that became really influential in my work. I also had incredible classmates who made a huge impact on my knowledge base and artwork.

Visit Normandie Luscher’s website.

Follow Normandie Luscher on Instagram.

Greg Newbold lives and works in Salt Lake City, Utah and is one of the most accomplished and prolific illustrators in the Church. You can find his work in magazines, newspapers, children’s books, and in private art collections. He has received awards from  The Society of Illustrators, Communication Arts, and many others. Newbold agreed to let us publish this post from his excellent blog describing an engagement he did with The New York Times to illustrate Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba.

Newbold: I got a call from Minh Uong, art director for The New York Times. I had worked with him a long time ago when he was with the Village Voice, but somehow we had not had another opportunity to work together for the past several years. As we caught up on things he offered me a project that I could not pass up. I mean, can you really pass on a front page business section feature illustration in The New York Times? I certainly couldn’t. The article was to be an in depth look at Chinese internet tycoon Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba Group. I have to admit, I knew absolutely nothing about Jack Ma before taking on this project, but a little time on the internet solved that problem. Ma’s network of online businesses include China’s version of Ebay, Amazon, and PayPal among other offerings. Since Alibaba’s founding in 1999, Ma has become a billionaire and one of China’s most powerful businessmen. He turned out to be a very interesting character with a unique face and personality that I was determined to capture. I watched several interviews with him as well as looked at countless photos to analyze his features.

Newbold: The concept that Minh and I discussed for the art was to show Ma as the leader of this new global marketplace but with a lighthearted nod to the Mao era Chinese propaganda posters. I loved the imagery in some of those old posters depicting the heroic worker. I decided to use the color and feel of those old posters but avoid having things feel overbearing and communist. Since I had a relatively square format to work within and I knew I wanted Jack Ma to be front and center, I designed two options to present and then gave those two options a different treatment visually.

Newbold: One version would be painted in my usual full color style and the other would be a more graphic version similar in feel to some of the old propaganda posters I had seen that were more like ink drawings with blocks of color. Minh told me that it was a tough choice between the two different aesthetic options but they ultimately wanted to go with the full color painted option. In a final touch, the flags in the background would bear the logos of the various Alibaba group companies as well.Newbold: One of the editors also felt that he needed to look less like a worker and more like a businessman, so I added the suit jacket and tie. I was also asked to smooth out the jacket a little by making it a more tailored and less rumpled. I smoothed out a few of the wrinkles in the sleeves and jumped in to the finish rendering.

Newbold: I really wanted to give this one the aged feel of an old poster that had been folded and worn, so the last step was to add some distressing and folds that I created on a separate piece of paper and added over the top of the finished piece. That last bit of grunge and folded paper I think pushed it from good to really good. I am thrilled with how it turned out.

Visit Greg Newbold’s website.

Visit Greg Newbold’s blog, Life Needs Art.

Ashmae Hoiland is a prolific artist, teacher, and writer with a successful website and online shop. She Kickstarted two childrens books and is working on a new series called We Brave Women. She lives in Palo Alto, California with her husband and two kids.

Among your many projects I want to focus on your bird series. It’s funny because I actually started to draw and paint the birds after I graduated with both my BFA and MFA. I was in Portland for a summer and feeling pretty inadequate for the real world and oddly enough, really afraid of drawing. I had learned to paint, do installation work, think critically about art, but somehow, all the way through school, I had avoided much drawing because it terrified me. I just felt no good at it at all and didn’t want everyone to see me fail. I started painting the birds and fish because they felt totally non-intimidating and I knew that I could just have fun with them. They felt joyful and funny and full of good lines. I painted everyday for hours and I genuinely loved it. At that point, I didn’t have a website, or any sort of online presence, so I made the fish and birds with kids I knew in mind.

When you paint birds and animals what do you paint from? What governs your choice for colors? When I look for a subject, I often look for the ugly or outcast animal, in this case, bird. I love the ones that are a little bit awkward and maybe under-represented. I look for ones that seem to be saying something funny. As for colors, I just love color. I can’t say it boldly enough, I just really love love color. It delights me and probably out of the whole art making process, seems the thing that is most natural for me.

What size of paintings do you prefer to work with? I live in a small grad student apartment (my husband is working on his PhD), and I have two children, ages 2 and 4, so I work small. Like the size I can keep in a drawer, or that my kids can pull out and look at. Maybe at some point I’ll work much bigger, but I love to see my work in the hands of people, so I work to that end.

You completed a successful book project on Kickstarter. How was that experience? What would you do differently next time?  I did publish my first two children’s books (The Lost Party, Animal Parade) through the funds I received on Kickstarter. It was a wonderful and invigorating process to see people rally around an idea and push to see it come to fruition. I shed a lot of tears of gratitude during that month because, as always, I lacked a lot of confidence and hardly expected to make it to my goal, let alone go $10,000 beyond that. There were definitely times of stress as I took on the entire process of writing, illustrating, designing, printing and marketing both books. Don’t do that. Hire out to people who do specific things well. I learned so much in the process and am glad that I do know how to format a book, design layouts, work with printers across seas, but next time, I’ll just stick to the writing and illustrating.