Q A JASON LONGSTREET

Character Concept Artist

Is it ever too late to follow your dreams? Duluth artist Jason Longstreet is creating his own answer to that question as he gains momentum in the world of comic art, a passion he has had for a lifetime.

Q: Tell me about your journey into comic art.

A: I started out professionally as a color artist for Shot in the Dark Comics about 10 years ago, but I’ve collected comic books since I was a kid. I soon realized it wasn’t as much for the stories but more for the art. I grew up collecting as many Dan Jurgens, Michael Turner and Todd McFarlane comics as I could get my hands on. I would try to collect art books and tutorials they put out in libraries or the rare comic book with sketches in them. To this day, I watch Todd McFarlane do his live tutorial videos on his Facebook page.

I never expected to meet these guys in person, let alone be attending comic book shows as an artist myself next to them and trading art prints with them. I still get starstruck sometimes. I’m a fan first. I recently had Mark Kistler from “Imagination Station” approach my table and ask to trade artwork with me. He said he was hoping he’d find me there. I was so struck, I could barely get the words out enough to say hi and shake his hand.

Q: What kind of art training do you have? Is this something you were always interested in?

A: I’ve always been interested in creating art. When I was growing up I would watch my grandmother, Jill Longstreet, for hours as she was creating her masterpieces. She was a real inspiration for me to improve my skills. In 2003, I went to school for graphic design, and they taught me how to use Photoshop and Illustrator.

I used this to my advantage and took my skills as a graphic artist and put them to use as a digital painter. Having a traditional art background with the tools of Photoshop really helps keep me grounded as an artist. I’m still traditional, but have endless colors and tools at my disposal working digitally. I still try to learn something new every day, whether it’s watching tutorials from my art mentors online or experimenting in Photoshop myself. I am always growing as an artist. If I’m not, I’m probably bored and need to challenge myself somehow. My painting “Senua” is a great example of this. She has face paint, leatherwork and fur in her costume, three elements I struggle with. The challenge keeps me interested, and I benefit from those learning experiences more often than anything else.

Q: The “about” tab on your website doesn’t have anything on it. Is that kind of thing hard for you to write?

A: It is. I never know what to write. It’s something required as an artist or graphic artist. You have to sell yourself. Most of a freelance artist’s career is spent marketing his or her own work, and being in the advertising and marketing business for over 20 years has not helped me in that matter very much, unfortunately. Sometimes, I even recruit my artist friends to write that stuff for me.

Q: You paint a lot of portraits of women. What do you find interesting or appealing about the subject?

A: A couple of years ago, I vowed to myself to strictly paint women. I wasn’t seeing women represented as often as I had seen men as strong leads. At least, they weren’t as popular. They were around, but not represented in mainstream media. I’ve always been attracted to the idea of a female hero lead in a story. I see this more and more today than I have in the past, but we still have a very long way to go. I get requests all the time to paint a male lead, and I consider it, but I feel like all of my hard work would be lost if I deviated from painting women.

Q: Have you ever provided an “artist statement” for your work?

A: In the past I used to provide statements for each piece I created, but I soon realized everyone is going to form their own opinion of my artwork anyway, whether it’s negative or positive, and what I had to say didn’t really matter. I even often find myself changing my opinion of a piece after it’s completed. These days, I put her out there and allow everyone else to make up their own mind on how they feel about it.

Q. You call yourself a “character concept artist.” Explain that title to me. A. Most of the requests I get from people involve well-known characters, and I could easily go online and search that character, take the first image I see, recreate it, and they would be perfectly content with that. However, I prefer to put my own concept on it and give them something unique. This is usually done by diving into my reference resources and finding something that will represent the character’s features and transforming that boring stock reference into something that resembles that character. To me, it’s seeing them in a new light, with a new concept. For example, I was recently approached by Photoshop Creative Magazine to do a Tomb Raider painting for the new Warner Bros. film releasing this year. Lara Croft is a very recognizable character. It makes it easy for me, but at the same time very difficult to stand out as something different. I spent hours searching for references and wasn’t finding what I wanted. So I decided to search for candid shots of the actress who is portraying Lara Croft in the new film and add the recognizable Lara features to her to give me something completely different than what you would find searching Google for something generic. This can also be seen in my Ciri from the Witcher 3 and the female concept of the Frankenstein painting I did for Crypticon last year.

Q: Tell me about the trade shows you’ve been to. Do you have fans?

A: When I was in the 4th grade, I drew a couple of pictures. I think one of them was a shark and the other a spaceship. I set up a table in the yard and put up flyers down the street that I was selling my artwork and to come to my yard to buy it. I remember a bunch of people telling me I was crazy and people won’t want to buy it.

I ended up selling the shark for a quarter. Today, I’m basically doing the same thing only on a much larger scale.

Yet, there was a large period of time in my life in between then and now where I wasn’t creating art. I was focused on family and my children. I thought I should settle for the maintenance job I had at the time, and I would work construction jobs and cashier on the weekends at a gas station. I was OK with that at the time. I never expected to attend a comic book convention as a fan at that point in my life. I realized later that it wasn’t a selfish decision to pursue my own dream; it was required of me to show my children they could do it, too.