FLIP Featured Artist
Mike Knapp In His Own Words

I pretty much always drew, always knew that drawing was what I wanted to do for a living. I liked comics, but wasn't an avid fan. Loved Disney films. For a while, I wanted to work in animation, but then I came to my senses and pursued illustration instead. Ha! Little did I know... I also painted murals for seven or eight years while in high school and college. Learned to paint on the job. Not very well, mind you, but I got really familiar with acrylics painting murals.

I spent A LOT of time at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh growing up, but I'm not sure any one art movement influenced me more than another. As far as individuals who's work affected me - Alfonse Mucha, J.C. Leyendecker, Alan Magee, Guy Billout, Charles Bragg, Brad Holland, Chris Van Alsburg, Lane Smith, William Joyce, Tim Burton, Mary GranPré, Gary Kelley, Lizbeth Zwerger, Carter Goodrich, Brian Froud, Bill Watterson, Mike Mignola, Bill Plympton, the short animated film Balance, even films by Jean-Pierre Juenet, Marc Caro, Terry Gilliam and the Coen Brothers. What about all these people's work most appeals to me? Strong graphic sensibility, great sense of color and atmosphere, and/or their sense of humor. 

I began my formal art training at Carnegie Mellon University in their pre-college fine arts program. After a taking a year off after high school and working as a gopher for a graphic design agency in Pittsburgh, I attended Ringling School of Art and Design as an illustration major. As for mentors, I've been extremely lucky to have some amazing teachers in both high school and, of course, at Ringling. I was in a six week class with Alan Cober while at Ringling, and he had a huge influence on me. Less in regard to style and more in regard to how I approach and think about creative challenges.

I got into film through Brandon Oldenburg, one of my best friends from Ringling. He is the creative director at ReelFX in Dallas. When I was still solely a freelance illustrator, he would occasionally throw some vis dev work my way, and one of them was for William Joyce. I got to meet Bill, and we had a lot of fun working together. He told me about another project he was working on with Blue Sky Studios - Robots - and got me in the door for an interview. I didn't have any film experience, but I was able to mimic Bill's style well enough, I suppose, and they brought me on board. That was almost seven years ago.

The two comic spreads (above) are from my story Newsbreak in the comic anthology Out of Picture, Volume 1. The story is about a guy who becomes addicted to the 24 hour doom and gloom of cable news. His pessimistic obsession manifests itself out on the streets.

The bird illustrations were for the most amazing assignment I was ever given, to illustrate an entire issue of Diversity Inc. Magazine - 12 articles plus the cover.  The platypus piece is about diversity training and tolerance - in this case regarding the bird equivalent of a trans-gender employee. The owl piece is about employee retention, and the rooster piece is about communicating a company's success in having a diverse employee base.

The Veggiemobile piece (below) was for one of my first and oldest illustration clients - Gary Cravener at Pitt Magazine. It was for an article about a student who converted his car to run on vegetable oil.

All of these paintings are digital. Photoshop. I usually do relatively tight pencils which I then scan anywhere from 300 to 600 dpi depending on the print size of the final piece. I use Photoshop almost exclusively to paint, although for a few pages of Newsbreak, I used  Corel Painter a little on a few of the underpaintings. It blends colors really well so I found it useful for finding richer color harmonies. Generally, I find Photoshop to be faster, and I've been using it for a long time so I stick to what works for me. 

I used to paint my illustrations in acrylics, so I tend to approach my digital paintings as if I was still using acrylics. First I scan the drawing, then I usually lay down a light tone - often an ochre or neutral color that supports my color scheme. After that, I wash in my rough shadows and start hashing out my value structure. Once the values are working and my silhouettes are reading, I block in my local colors. So far, all this is usually done on Multiply layers. From this point on, though, I tend to paint more opaquely on Normal layers. I use a few of the faux finish brushes that come with Photoshop which give a less digital look to the brush strokes. One of my goals when I started doing digital work was to maintain the appearance of my traditional work - partly because of my aesthetic tastes, and partly because I didn't want to unsettle my clients. There's a richness of color and ability to blend more effictively by painting digitally that I was never able to achieve with acrylics. I was able to come close with oils at one point, but I just don't ever have the drying time to use them.

c.2007 Moore Studios, Inc.
contact

And
Mike's Music

This is a song called Bitter Bookends from my most recent band Yearbook's self-titled album. It was one of the first songs I wrote for Yearbook which was the only band that I've ever played bass for. Writing from a bass player's perspective was an interesting challenge as you really focus on laying a solid foundation on which to build the rest of the song. 

I've been in and out of bands since 1992. As a kid, I had played piano for a few years, but I didn't really start playing and writing music until I went to Ringling. My first year there, I was asked to sing in a band called the Superimposed Willies which played a lot of covers and some originals, and I got completely addicted to performing and writing. I loved the collaborative process.  As I started writing songs on my own, I slowly picked up guitar, and two years later I was the singer/guitarist in my third band Dig Miner Dig - a power-pop 3-piece influenced by bands like Hüsker Du and the melodic hardcore scene in Florida.

After Ringling, I moved back to Pittsburgh and was in a post-punk 4-piece called Sunday Driver. We were a 2-guitar/2-vocal outfit with a lot of back and forth interplay on the guitars. Huge influences were Fugazi, Jawbox, Hurl, and the Pittsburgh indie rock scene which was a lot of fun at the time. I loved the richness of having the second guitar where we'd do a lot of odd counterpoints and try to work out a lot of textures in our arrangements. We broke up right before I moved to New York City in 1999.

A few years later, Greg Hoy - an amazing guitarist who played bass -and at one point drums! - in Sunday Driver (he also moved to NYC) called me up and invited me to replace his bass player. We started writing, and Yearbook emerged our efforts. A return to the power trio for me, but this time on bass. It had a different energy than Sunday Driver - more straightforward rock in the vein of Mission of Burma or Guided by Voices, but I think our arrangements were tighter than SD's. Plus, we had Dave Sharma on drums, and he's just amazing. Some people would just come to see him. We played for about 3 years and recorded one album before everyone's lives got too busy. We still have some outstanding material we'd like to record at some point. I never say we broke up - I prefer to say that we just haven't played in a while.

You can still find the Yearbook record on iTunes or CD Baby. Feel free to brush away the cobwebs at www.yearbookband.com!

see more of Mike's work at
michaelknapp.com