I do the majority of my work in a basement studio in our two story house on the edge of the woods. It’s not yet my dream studio, as its partially unfinished and needs a bathroom of its own, sound proofing so I can blast my music, a couch to lay on and read, more shelving for all my books, tools, trinkets and other quirky treasures (see Studio Views for some photos of what I get inspiration from when I can’t get outside) and I’d like to have cameras set up at the front door, back yard, and living room so I can see if the kids are eating anything sticky on the couch when they shouldn’t be, or beating on each other. The idea with the cameras is that if the door knocks and it’s not somebody I absolutely must talk to, I won’t, or if the kids are being good, I’ll know it, and if there isn’t a bear or pack of coyotes or a damn cougar in my yard, I can relax and keep working without leaving the creative shrine.
           While working in the studio is best, especially if I need to focus on a deadline or do something extra challenging, like drawing or painting women or actions scenes, then it is nice to take my work up to our patio during the warm months or sit at the dining room table and draw with the kids. While children can be a lot of work and be distracting, they are also an immense source of inspiration, creativity and innovation. If you give them a stack of paper, some glue, scissors, markers, pencils, tape, and paint, they’ll come up with things that have never been seen before, ever. That’s kinda rare in this age of unsurpassed creativity, and I’d have to say that having kids is probably the best thing for any creative person, even if the allowable time such an artist might otherwise have will drop due to childcare and sleep deprivation, it is still worth it. On the other hand, I repeatedly recommend to young or emerging artists, especially females, to get their foot in the door of their art career before getting married, or especially before having kids. Why? Because, if you have a family to support, and you aren’t already making money as an artist (freelancer or employed artist), you will not have time to study the craft in the time abundance you’ll need to both develop your skills and style, and work on a portfolio, web site and marketing campaign. I mention that females should be especially diligent about getting their art career off the ground before settling into being married with children because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen an exceptionally talented woman give up her art as soon as she gets married or with child. I have strong opinions on this because it’s frustrating to see talent vanish into the ether of time and untapped possibility, as if raising children negates or supersedes one’s personal creativity and sense of self. Sure, a screaming baby demands attention and can’t be ignored until one finishes cross hatching a scene or completing the flesh tones on a painting, but, once the child is seen to and all is at peace again, get back to the easel or sketchbook.
            As a matter of fact I do know what I am talking about as I have three kids now and another on the way. While attending to my brood of kids I have also worked at the kitchen table, changed diapers, fed babies, and cooked meals, going so far as to work on a painting while having a baby strapped to my chest. Likewise, often when cooking something I can step away from the boiling pasta or frying leftovers to work on a painting or drawing in four or five minute stretches. It all adds up.
           I’m just saying, if you do have kids, and your a stay at home artist, you need not set aside your creative expression to be a good parent, in fact, imagine growing up in a household where there is art around you from your earliest memories? Imagine how positively that would affect you later on. My kids are all enthusiastic little artists, and even when I am not drawing at the table, they are now independently inclined to just draw whenever there is paper and pen handy. They are able to entertain themselves without much prompting and are now trained that when Daddy draws, they are encouraged to go get their own sketchbooks and pencil boxes and pull up a chair.


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How McAusland Works
My creative process is not unlike so many other speculative artists, many of which I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. For the most part, my work is split into two types: Client Assignments and Personal Creations.  
           Client Assignments are collaborative undertakings, with the customer setting down the illustration details such as medium, size genre, style and the actual scene description to be depicted. Budget and the press ready art due date are also part of this, but not something I am affected by once the creative process set upon, since I always strive to do my best work regardless of the budget, and I never take on a deadline that I can’t make or wills tress me out. With speculative illustration work I usually read the assignment text, review any stickman drawings or reference supplied by the client, gather my own reference if needed, then sit down at the drawing table with a cup of coffee or tea, audio-book, music or a favorite podcast playing in the background (see my links page for some great podcasts).
            Personal Creations are often inspired by something I observed in a movie, on the web, or a scene I imagined from a novel, dream, nightmare or simply scribbled out spontaneously as a free drawing from no identifiable place at all.  Like many artists I know, I spent my high school years drawing on the backs of assignments or exams, day dreaming about other times, people and places, weird creatures, myth and magic, if God was real or not, and what was going on in the role playing games I’d been recently immersed in. day dreaming leads to doodling, which leads to wanting to get out a sketchbook, which leads to warm up drawing and before you know it, you’re painting. Free drawing and personal creations are something I do for my own entertainment and growth, on a whim, with no project or story in mind, often initiated prior to working on client jobs to warm up.
           Warm up drawing is important for me, especially if I’ve spent time away from the drawing table or been using the mouse too much on the computer. Yes, there are similarities between painting with a Wacom tablet, real oils, acrylics watercolors and drawing, but the differences are such that an hour spent getting reacquainted with the pencil never hurts. I usually do my warm up drawing in the same sketchbook within which I render my finished pencils for a painting; it helps me get over my resistance and fear of failure on the upcoming pages, as well as satisfies my inner spilled brat who want s to draw aimlessly without regard for proper anatomy or reference, trying stuff simply because I can, getting my creative core charged up and the joy of drawing at hand.
            My drawing style is greatly affected by the countless hours I spent at the easel, especially when I did huge fine art landscapes, ten years ago now. Painting, even today and especially with real paint, forces me to dab, peck, and drag in strokes or swashes, applying color in sections. Drawing, meanwhile, should be done in continuous, fluid lines - not scratches - as I so often do when returning to pencil or ink after a long spell at a painting. It is this scratching and pecking when painting that I must recover from during warm up drawing, trying to render the whole line, using the wrist to ‘pull’ the form from the blank sheet of paper instead of chisel it centimeter by centimeter as I would with a loaded brush.
            Painting, either digitally or traditionally is dealing with blocks of color or shape, while I find drawing deals more in lines. The two forms of image creation demand different ways of using my hand with the more hours spent on one, the longer needed warming up to the other. While I go into considerable detail under Mediums of Choice, I can say that how I work is often affected by the medium I am working with. I tend to be able to paint much longer than I can draw because I tend to be more relaxed and thoughtful when I paint. Drawing for me, meanwhile, is frantic and inspiration driven, wherein I treat my poor hand like crap, pressing too hard, drawing furiously, crosshatching as if my life depended on it, erasing here and there, using my thumb to smudge, and basically going as fast as I damn well can before the image in my mind goes away, or the phone rings or I am interrupted by one of a thousand possible events which comes with the territory of working in a home studio, a facility with little kids and a big dog. It is the drawing phase where the original ideas and scenes spring into my head, often as my pencil moves across the paper, however it is in the colour work where the characters and scenes come alive.
            When I paint, I either use one of three wooden easels, or more likely, a drawing table on which I have permanently bolted a huge light table (where I normally ink as well). When it is time to paint I simply place a large sheet of board over the surface and set my illustration board, masonite or canvas on this. I always work at a 45 degree angle, my water or solvent on my right side, my paints and palette sit on a wheeled trolley to my left, a pair of speakers flank the set up and another four speakers are distributed behind me in various locations to provide excellent sound quality. While working, it is like being in an ‘artistic cockpit’, with a good supply of snacks, beverages, coffee or tea available, a phone with a headset in reach, and my computer nearby.
            The stage set, I can get down to painting in a near perfect environment. Once I start, especially when a podcast is on, I rarely get up to answer the phone an instead just let the machine take the call. If I am starting a new painting, I get my palette ready by pressing tinfoil onto a plastic palette (one with a lid so I can close it up and use the same paints for days if not weeks, stuffing the sealed pallet into a few plastic bags if oils, or spraying the paints with water from a mist sprayer every ten minutes if using acrylics, and then spraying inside the bags before sealing them with twist ties when completing my day’s work).
           I approach the painting like many traditional artists, regardless of genre, by blocking in the main elements and starting with the furthest part of the scene first, usually the sky or far walls if an indoor scene. I always work from a pencil drawing which has been transferred to the board or canvas by way of an older ‘artograpgh’ ( opaque projector), however in recent years I have started to use paint to draw the lines on when projecting, as they are less likely to smudge off. If I do use pencil, I like to coat the surface afterward with clear acrylic medium, again, in order to avoid smudging away my underlying pencil drawing.
            Once the image is on the board, and after blocking it in, I quickly get the tones established by covering any ‘white areas’, or parts of the raw illustration board, canvas or masonite which are showing through. I need to quickly figure out how dark to make the foreground details, figure out what’s important to push back and what needs to come forward in the viewer’s eyes. Of course, I’ve already determined where the text is going if it’s a book cover, but even among figures, there needs to be a hierarchy of importance, and this can be shown by either the size of the most important figure, the detail, the pose, color or overall layout of the image, (example: Have all the other characters looking at the main character, or, have objects and shapes in the scene forming points toward the most important aspect of the scene).
            I am a detail freak, I love the last part of any image I render, be it in ink, acrylic, oils or digital. Getting in there and doing the jewelry or chain mail links, the eyes, wisps of hair, dot of light in an eye, glint on a blade, of lights on some facility or vehicle… I love it. When to stop adding detail has been my longstanding problem, and something I think I am gradually getting over.
            The point in a painting when I know it is done is often arrived at without any warning. After hours or days, even weeks on an image, I will just stop, sit up, roll my chair back, and stare at the image as if waiting to hear some voice tell me to leave off. There might be some touch ups or corrections to come back to later, even client changes in some very rare cases, thank God, but more often than not I know when a painting is done. If the completed image is small, I scan it on the flatbed and get a jpeg to the client, if it’s too large, I usually wait until the lighting is good outside for a photo shoot, or, set up the studio with the proper lighting and do it indoors, or, take it to a professional and have it done at the extra expense and time.
            I’m not sure this answers how I work. How else can I say it? Do I work hard? Yes, especially if I have a deadline looming or a temporary over abundance of client jobs with overlapping deadlines.
            On the matter of deadlines, I do take them seriously, but I am also not the machine I used to think I was, and realized over the past few years that I need to eat properly, get more exercise, spend both more and higher quality time with the wife and kids, walk the dog, have some sort of social life, devote more time to tabletop gaming, reading fiction and basically get the hell out of the studio once in awhile.     
             I simply can’t ink for 16 hours a day… my hand just stops cross hatching after 7 hours. Painting is another story. I can seemingly use traditional brushes for sixteen hours straight, so too, when I work on a large illustration board, I move around more, stand up, and use my left hand, thumb elbow, whatever … it’s just easier.
            My working schedule is dependant upon the schedules of our kids. Some are in school, one is in pre-school, two have swimming, another soccer, and to this mix there are birthday parties and other events. The days, therefore, are broken up into smaller sections of free hours when I can work, as I share the chauffeuring of our brood with my wife and also work around her work schedule. Whenever possible, however, I fall back to my natural bio-rhythm, waking at 10am and going to bed at 2am, anything other than this natural schedule feels out of balance for me and doesn’t allow me to operate at peak efficiency, happiness, physical fitness nor creativity. I have gravitated to the 10am to 2am mode throughout my entire liberated adult life, and while I can coexist with fellow humans, work, cook, and get places on time if forced off my bio-rhythm, I am not really all there.
            I try to put in a total of 8 hours a day in the studio doing client related work, with about a quarter of that writing emails or on the phone, invoicing, working up quotes, reading and signing contracts and all the other administration duties of running a freelance business from home. With about 6 hours of the day I mix it up doing pencil drawing, ink and painting. This blend of different artistic activities is not due to being bored with a project and needing to do something else after two hours, but rather that my right hand gets very sore if I do the same thing all day, especially ink or anything on the computer, so I find that by mixing up my chores, I am able to do this sort of work day in and day out without suffering for it. Occasionally I’ll have an impending deadline or get obsessed with a project and work on it way longer than my hand can handle, and then I need to take a day off and do something less demanding, such as reading, research, yard work or just chillin’ with a beer, hot wings, nachos and a movie.
            That said, I usually work 6 days a week, and even on the 7th, often sneak away to check email and address any issues or questions a client might have. I don’t actually mind working every day at this career as its always interesting and challenging, and for the most part every client I have is easy going, intelligent, clear on what they need, pay on time (or even in advance these days with paypal), and are just plain cool people with innovative ideas and a great projects. Fantasy and science fiction, and other speculative genres forms, presented in Roleplaying games, computer games, board and card games, short stories, novels and other related products are my favorite topics anyhow, so illustrating for them is an honor and I count myself very lucky to work in this industry.
           I look forward to hearing from new clients and old, discussing potential projects large and small.

Best regards, 
WM

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Mediums of Choice
Without a doubt, I am coming from a traditional illustration background and even now, as I switch over to digital art on more and more assignments, every image starts at the drawing table with pencil in hand. Usually, I have a drink ready when I sit down to draw, perhaps even a beer or glass of red wine if it’s in the evening and I feel like loosening up a bit with some warm up drawing, sketches or whatnot. Often, Music is playing, the dog is lying in the middle of the floor, and one of my kids is at a table drawing his or her own dragons, cyborgs or horses.
         Every image I create begins in a sketchbook regardless of the end medium requested by the client, if they care about the materials or process at all. Often, a client simply leaves the medium up to me, or assumes it will be digital in this day and age. Typically, the customer will simply ask for the same look, style or medium as a piece they saw on my website. Occasionally a client will provide me with an image done by another artist, and ask for something along the same lines, without ever knowing who the illustrator was who first rendered it. In all these cases, I tell the patron what I am going to do the final image in, and how I am going to supply them with the finished image.
       

Pencils and Drawing: While the images seem to come alive when color is applied, my favorite part of any illustration is the sketching phase. When I draw I tend to use wooden pencils of the ‘F’ lead hardness, switching to HB or 2B only when I need to apply very dark areas to an image. Why ‘F’ Why not H or 2H? And why don’t I use mechanical pencils?
        I have several of the mechanical pencils and I do use them when I need to use templates, French curves or a lot of ruler work as when doing proper perspective drawings, but I find the warmth of the real wood appealing, the change in the sharpness useful and the ability to hold the pencil almost on its side and lay down swaths of graphite handy. I also do a lot of drawing while traveling or waiting in the van for one of my kids to finish school or a class, when I am riding the ferry boats to and from Vancouver or Saltspring Island, when I am at the beach, camping, or at a coffee shop. The constant sharpening required when using a mechanical pencil becomes tiresome for me, and I find that I don’t loosen up as fast when using such a serious looking drafting contraption.
         ‘F’ lead, furthermore, is ideal for sketching in the wire bound Strathmore sketchbooks I work in, since when I travel with these books, the action of the pages rubbing together doesn’t smudge the drawings within. Also, when I am drawing, ‘F’ is soft enough to use a stomp (also called a smudger around here, with the finer rolled paper ones called tortillons) or my finger to blend or fade out the drawing where needed, yet is hard enough lead to crosshatch, outline or add detail where required and still keep a point long enough to pull off the drawing without constant sharpening. The problem is, it is very hard to get a box of 12 ‘F’s at Office Depot or Staples of late, as usually those big box stores have stacks of HBs for pennies a pencil. I am considering ordering a life time supply of ‘F’ lead pencils from the manufacturer.
           

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Graphite drawings, of all mediums, appeal to me the most, and I love few things more than to see an artist’s sketchbook. The lion’s share of all my creativity is expressed in the pages of my precious sketchbooks, where the ideas bloom, the creatures, characters, machines and locations come alive in the imagination. Using finished graphite drawings as the basis for a digital painting, or to be scanned, tweaked and converted to an old masters style ‘conte’ look, as seen on the right in this drawing of a Kobold (click to view larger), is a rather recent undertaking of mine, which I am very excited about and after a year or so of experimenting, have decided that if I get the time to do a graphic novel, I will render it using this digitally touched up pencil medium. As mentioned above, graphite drawings are also the basis for most of my digital paintings, which I scan in, covert to RGB, duplicate separate colorized layers for each main portion of an image (metal, rock, skin tones, back ground, vegetation, etc.), and proceed to work each layer by erasing what doesn’t belong, using burn and dodge to establish values, and adding color at about 80% opacity. Working on each layer allows me to move objects around, or save any element for a stand alone promotional or spot illustration ( in grayscale within the text ) , but for the most part, when I am concentrating on a aspect of the image, I work on it just like an illustration board on my easel.
           

Inking: I find ink illustration to be a great challenge and only set about inking when the conditions in the studio and home are just right. I need to set up, have everything in order, snacks ready, a drink set out, the music or podcasts lined up, and absolutely no interruptions or impending visitors. I guess it’s a bit stressful, since there is little to no room for an error as I hate to have to go back with white out on an image, as that correction shows on the original. Of course, it’s fine to clean up the image in Photoshop later on, but again, I don’t really like to do anything to an original unless absolutely necessary.
            For years I’ve used Winsor & Newton Black Indian Ink with various sized brushes, and then Sakura Pigma pens of the micron line. I used to buy the 005 size but the nib wears away so fast they are hardly worth it, so now do about 90% of my ink work with the 01 size, and the 02, 03, 05 and 08 as needed. There are brushes in the micron line as well, and for the first session or two they are awesome, but become fuzzy quickly on the paper I use, so I gave them to my kids to play with.
            When I do make errors, I try and fix them on the physical paper with a mix I’ve made up and put in a baby food jar. This mix contains a 50/50 ration of gesso and white acrylic. Either one liquid alone is useless to me, as the white acrylic is too smooth and doesn’t cover well enough, while the gesso alone is too thick and gritty. Mixing the two mediums together has results in an excellent white-out liquid which I can paint onto the afflicted area and cover it, or cut into images to get a poor man’s ‘scratchboard’ look, however, the medium is often too thin to cover ink in one coast, and two or three visits to a correction are needed. After the substance dries, I can go back to the image with ink again to re-draw.
            I ink on the same sketchbook paper mentioned above, the Strathmore, usually recycled and found in wire bound books, the pages of which I slice from a designated book. I use Bristol or other  paper at times if I need a much heavier or smoother surface, however, thicker papers are often hard to work with when using a light table since thin lines and gray areas in the underlying master image are often undetectable.
         

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Paper: I draw on acid free Strathmore sketch paper, even ink on it or gesso a page to brush acrylic color studies on. While I’ve filled up sketchbooks by other manufacturers, I seem to gravitate to the Strathmore brand because I like the slight tooth to the paper. Another advantage to the Strathmore paper found in the wire bound books is that the paper is thin enough to stack two sheets together when working on the light table, which I do often, using a ordinary stapler to bind the rough and the soon to-be inked sheet together, removing the staples to separate them once the jib is done.
        As for the size of book, I seem to have settled on two sizes, one for working in the studio and the other for coffee shops and drawing on my lap in the van or on a ship someplace. I do 80% of my drawings on the 9 x 12 sketchbooks, as they are big enough to get some good sized drawings going, but are small enough that when it comes time to scan an image on my flatbed, I can fit the page on the 8.5 x 11 scanner bed. The smaller, travel sketchbook, also wire bound measures 5.5 x 8.5” and of these I have several on the go, one in my satchel and another in the van with its own pencil case at the ready.
           As mentioned with mechanical pencils and feeling that they are too serious, perhaps intimidating, I also find that the paper I draw on impacts how ‘loose’ and creative I am – at least when starting the first drawing of the day. I find that I do some of my most creative, off the wall, twisted, politically incorrect or cryptic images on the backs of envelopes, receipts, bills, bank machine slips, or contracts from clients. Sure, I have a whole shelf of brand new sketchbooks of various sizes, but damn, the idea of starting one can be so daunting! Initiating a new book is especially  challenging because I know people will eventually look through my sketchbooks, often without asking, and admittedly not every drawing I do turns out or is worth finishing, and I never tear sheets out of my sketchbooks no matter how rotten an image might turn out.
         Why do I feel this anxiety with anew sketchbook? I suppose, the idea of putting down that first image in a new sketchbook is nerve wracking, almost as if that drawing somehow sets the quality level or creativity for all the rest of the pages to follow. I know that this notion is superstitious and weird, but that’s how I feel, and feeling has a lot to do with the quality of a session’s work, and well, I do exhibit tendencies towards believing in some sort of superstition, good and bad omens, lucky charms, dreams, visions, flukes, deja vous and other metaphysical crap… as much as I’d like to deny it. How having a belief system in some sort of universal law or consciousness affects ones art is a big subject, and maybe I’ll address it on my blog after talking to some other creative types. I can absolutely tell you that as far as being a fantasy artist, harboring spiritual suspicions about our world goes a long way toward adding motivation and wonder to your work, not to mention the rest of your life.
       Besides drawing on regular sketchbook paper, I also utilize a much Thicker Bristol paper, such as when I am doing a very dark or exceptionally detailed ink rendering. Again, I buy Strathmore smooth Bristol in pads. For tracing, I've used a lot of different brands of paper, but whenever possible, buy the Seth Cole pads. I find it to be the clearest, and smoothest tracing paper , which resists tearing and rippling better than other brands, and is actually more affordable at most supply stores.
       

Painting: As for color work, every project demands that I tackle a job by either traditional colorization methods or digital means. The choice is sometimes set down by the client’s wishes, however increasingly, they either leave that decision up to me, or, they hadn’t thought about it or care as long as I meet the deadline and they love the end result. Both painting methods have their advantages and disadvantages, and I enjoy each system regardless of the many issues and debates I personally have with there being an original ‘physical object’ after or not.

Traditional painting: My favorite painting medium is acrylics, rendered on either illustration board, canvas or board mounted drawing print-outs. I use jar acrylics, not tubes, as the later are best suited to impasto or heavily textured illustrations while the liquitex or Winsor & Newton ‘Galleria’ flow formula acrylics are smoother, they cut with water or retarding mediums better, and can be used in an airbrush for costume design or on the original image if desired. I have an airbrush but have never mastered its use. The randomness, mask cutting, prep, clean up and whole mask wearing hassle never really grabbed me, although what I have used it for has made it invaluable. I plan to use the air brush on upcoming costume, model making and prop making projects so I’ll keep the equipment around.
         When traditional painting, I work on an older drawing table, project small 4 x 6” clippings of my pencil drawing with an ‘artograph’ opaque projector onto illustration board or another suitable surface, then, coat the transferred drawing with a coat of clear acrylic so I don’t smudge my pencil lines. After this, I block in the whole image in a monochromatic scheme, often blue, brown or even purple if the image demands it. I like to cover the entire board as fast as possible, blocking in all the shapes and getting an idea of the color relations before doing any of the detail work. Once I am happy with the base painting, I go in with the small brushes, and I mean small, using 000 rounds for hair, eyes and other details.
         Once a physical image is completed, I either take it to the photographers or set up a photo shoot myself outside in the back yard if the light is right, or set up lights in the studio and try my best with my fancy digital SLR.

Digital Painting: I use an older version of Adobe Photoshop, version 7, and although I should probably buy the more recent version, I just can’t see how it can improve upon the software. I suppose I feel that so long as the unlimited undoes are there, the clone tool, dodge, burn and all the standard issue tools and option… I am more than adequately outfitted given the way I digitally paint. I’ve tired the Corel Painter 10 demo but the interface felt foreign and a little clunky to me, and I’ll admit I am just too busy to learn another program right now.
            When I do work in Photoshop I try to use as few layers as possible, no filters or other tricks which still feel like cheating to me other than the burn and dodge tools, since I avoid doing anything to an image that I can’t do in a real live hand painted illustration.
            Yes, a real digital painting is ‘real’ and you have options in the CG format not available to traditional mediums, but the lack of a physical original painting to hang after, only copies, still eats at me. Other artists may not have this concern, especially younger ones who didn’t grow up and learn their craft in an age prior to Photoshop, as I did. I spent a few years doing fine art, mostly landscapes on huge canvases, and I collect art by other artist and so the appeal of the original is something I will probably never let go of.
            Current trends in fantasy and Science Fiction art tend to favor digital illustration these days. When I pour through my copies of Spectrum, or cruise my favorite portfolio web sites, it becomes very apparent that some of the most cutting edge and amazing art being done in the genre is digital. There is a look to this new work which emits a confidence and atmospheric feel which makes me think that the artist’s behind such work were exploring the medium, taking chances, playing around a bit, pushing limits and doing stuff they wouldn’t dare try with oils or acrylics. Digital art gives even an emerging illustrator a range of options that have never been seen before, options which go far beyond the obvious benefits of layers or undos, but instead, allow the user to flip figures if they are on different layers, enlarge one element, place it either behind or in front of other elements, fade back, darken, lighten, make elements semi-transparent, apply contrast changes, as well as colorize a single item, or change the color of the entire image at a whim. The creative possibilities are only matched by the time savings and possibilities to make changes. To modify the sky behind figures and scenic elements in a complex oil painting would take days, but the same image done in Photoshop or Corel Painter, if the sky is on a separate layer, would take less than a minute to change the sky color, or add clouds, a fog bank, or distant ruins.
            I started toying with digital illustration about two years ago and have been doing increasingly more assignments and personal projects in that medium. In the next year I plan to produce dozens of new digital paintings and make Photoshop my main creative tool, unleashing a new look, promoting the resulting imagery online and introducing myself to new clients. It isn’t simply that digital illustration is faster and offers more control, nor the fact that it eliminates harmful fumes, mess, drying time, storage of boards, or photography, or even that it seems to be what art directors are looking for, but rather, as an artist, whatever tools I have available to get the image before me as close to the vision in my minds eye, the better. As for the debate regarding original art to hang on the wall, I guess I can always get a large print out done using archival inks on acid free paper.
            WM

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Copyright © 2007 William McAusland. All rights reserved.