1981 - present

above: a sketch from my high school years. I did this on a small Lake Michigan beach in Door County, Wisconsin. My whole family was there, and so was our young friend, Andrew Kora. We got chased by a particularly persistant wasp on the bike ride there if I remember right.

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Today I wrote something new for the bio page on my portfolio website. It will probably take me a long time to get my web designer friend to post this up on my site, so figured I'd put it here first...

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My brother is a year and a half younger than I am, and some of my first memories in life are of him kicking over my creations with one foot while lying on his back in a little reclining plastic baby seat. Toppling my wooden building block towers. It made me furious. I worked really hard on them. They were my little epics. He would later grow into a mischievous little kid, and I suspect even back then he did this on purpose.

Upon graduating high school, I found myself drawing in notebooks while not paying attention in classes at Purdue Calumet in Northwest Indiana. Kind of reminded me of my high school years, minus the antics of my Spanish teacher, “Jeremias!!!!” she would yell while launching my pencil across the room. One day while doodling during a break between classes, it hit me, what on earth am I doing here?

Soon I was on a tour of Columbia College’s very humble animation department. It was on the same day that the Chicago Bulls were celebrating their final championship down below in Grant Park. I could see it from the windows. When the students working the animation cage informed my mom and I that traditional animation is drawn at 24 frames per second, as in 24 drawings per second, my jaw dropped. Standing next to a giant Oxberry animation camera that looked decades older than me, the department head frankly told me, “Ya know, this really isn’t the best animation school…” and he went on to list a few better programs in other cities. “But, as far as here in Chicago, this is about your best option.”

I really appreciated his candid remarks, in stark contrast to the shady recruiters I’d encountered at other art schools in town. Seemed like they’d say anything to get you to sign up…for hopeless debt.

At Columbia’s orientation, I sat across the table from a little Puerto Rican kid from Chicago’s south side. He seriously looked like a kid there amongst all us 18 and 19 year olds; he looked maybe 15 at most. He spoke softly, with a bit of an accent, while we munched on the brown bagged peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that they’d given us all for lunch. “So, what are you majoring in?” I asked.

“Animation. I’m going to be an animator,” he replied, sort of in question form. Yeah, sure you are, kid, I thought to myself. Good luck with that.

A year later at age 20, I landed my first interview as an artist. It was for a rather new educational game studio in town called JRL. Started and run by a crew from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was packed to the brim with an unruly bunch of guys and gals all about my age, drawing at homemade light tables and painting with Photoshop. There was a cute small Filipino gal nearly bouncing off the walls and letting out high pitched squeals. There was a bigger Korean gal with fake birds in her pink and black hair painting away at a computer. Everyone around her seemed ok with her really loud music. I saw Javier there, who I knew from Columbia and who told me about this place, drawing away. Javier and I had been in the same drawing class first semester at Columbia, taught by a woman who, no joke, did not have a clue about perspective, “…ya know, how if you look at something, and then look at it from a little different angle, and it…looks, uh, different? Yeah, that’s kind of perspective…though, I don’t really like to get into the technical side of…”

I saw stacks of really nicely hand inked drawings of characters. And I said,” Wow, how do you guys do this?” Keith, who hired me, I think was 21 at the time. When he told me they were going to pay me 10 bucks an hour to draw, which was 4 bucks an hour more than what I made stocking shelves at Osco, I felt my heart thump against my sweater. 10 bucks an hour?!?!?! I tried to play it calmly. “Sounds good.” I said with a smile. Driving away with the windows down and radio blaring in my 84’ Monte Carlo, I tilted my head back and let out a really big happy yell.

Over the past ten years, I’ve worked as an artist, traditional animator, and wrist for hire. Work includes storyboards, conceptual art, character design, environment design, background layout and painting, and traditional character animation. Some of the places I have worked for recently are Calabash Animation, Teamworks Media, Protokulture, and Digital Kitchen.

About the kid I met that first day at Columbia College. Dan is his name. We ended up working at a few of the same places in Chicago. The core group of artists I still hang out with or keep in touch with are mostly friends from those early days at Columbia. Dan is so passionate about animation it’s almost strange. He married a lovely gal he met in the animation department at Columbia. Of course, she had to have an animation name, Jasmin. And he’s now a cg character animator working on feature films out in L.A. Guess I should have believed the kid.

I continue to work as a freelance artist, and am also traveling around the world some and shooting my own independent Super 16mm surf film. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you enjoy taking a look at some of my work. -Jeremy

above: an ink and brush sketch from a recent surf trip in Indonesia.