huw.design

Art

 

Art

A Day in the Life of Huw Williams
× A Day in the Life of Huw Williams

A Day in the Life of Huw Williams

I'd just started kindergarten when I drew this account of my daily routine, with captions written in by my mother. My legs as I run to the bus are a blur!

Since before I can even remember I've loved to draw, paint, and create other pieces of art, and I've always looked for ways to incorporate these things into my daily activities at home, school, and work. Below are samples of some pieces I enjoyed making — and I hope you enjoy them too!

 

Electronic art

Electronic art is a wonderfully forgiving medium. For pieces where I want to experiment and fine-tune, or do a lot of adjustment to colors and effects, I like to start with Affinity Designer 2 using an iPad and pencil, then do post-processing in Adobe Photoshop.

The pieces at left are some I made during Botober 2021, a fun event run by Janelle Shane that encouraged participants to follow a set of neural-net-generated, animal-themed art prompts.

Opossumsaurus
× Opossumsaurus

Opossumsaurus

This was the day-one Botober art prompt: a common North American possum with the size and stance of a predatory, two-legged dinosaur. Rawr!

Roar of Roosters
× Roar of Roosters

Roar of Roosters

To make sense of this prompt, I imagined that crowing might turn into roaring if the roosters were sufficiently large and kaiju-esque. This three-headed specimen is perched atop Tokyo Tower at dawn.

4D stegosaurus
× 4D stegosaurus

4D Stegosaurus

Just as a 3D object passing through a plane would look to a 2D observer like varyingly-sized slices, I imagined that a 4D stegosaurus (a hyperstegosaurus?) would manifest to a 3D observer as a series of ever-changing, dino-like pieces & parts: lots of different bits glimpsed at different times, but never the whole at once. What I drew are a few of the 4D beast's 3D protrusions.

Sluggalope
× Sluggalope

Sluggalope

(David Attenborough voice: "Majestic, mucusy forager of the savannah...")
This chimera shares features of a slug and an antelope. While looking up reference pics I learned that slugs have a single breathing hole called a pneumostome, always on their right side. Slugs are weird and cool.

Sketches and comics

Ahh, this is my favorite medium: a couple of not-too-sharp graphite pencils, an eraser stick, some Pigma Micron pens, and a box of colored pencils... Bliss. More often than not I prefer to draw on just plain old white printer paper, but I will plunk for Bristol board if I'm doing inked comics.

My only published strip is ''Academia Nuts'' (ugh, that title!) which ran in the Purdue Exponent in 1997; I tried to flog a more polished follow-up called ''Life of Riley'' to the syndicates the following year but it never got any traction.

These days I make sketches and comics just for my own enjoyment or for family and friends — and occasionally to add a bit of life to an otherwise bland presentation.

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Community

I sketched this little piece some years ago as part of a promotion for a community fund-raising project.

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Hammock

A quick pencil sketch from my book of daily art prompts.

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Sandwich

Another sketch from my book of daily art prompts.

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Life of Riley dailies

A few black-and-white daily strips from Life of Riley, my second comic strip (after Academia Nuts in the Purdue Exponent) and one I shopped around to some syndicates. Nobody picked it up, but it was still lots of fun to make and I retain an affectionate nostalgia for the characters.

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Life of Riley portrait

A portrait of Kate and Riley, the main characters of my comic strip Life of Riley.

Whiteboard art

I wrote before that pencil-and-paper is my favorite medium, but whiteboard-and-marker is giving it a run for its money. It reminds me a lot of chalk art: inherently impermanent and easily changed or erased, which makes working with it very freeing. Making something beautiful using just a bunch of blunt and imprecise dry-erase markers somehow feels more satisfying than doing the same with proper artistic tools.

It's also a great medium for workplace guerrilla art.

Indiana wildflowers
× Indiana wildflowers

Indiana wildflowers

Portraits of Indiana flowers: Peony, Queen Anne's Lace, Blue Vervain, White Clover, Goldenrod, and Chicory.

B.B. King
× B.B. King

B.B. King

The late blues singer and musician B.B. King, with his guitar "Lucille".

DTN fireplace
× DTN fireplace

DTN fireplace

One whole wall of the DTN (earlier Spensa) offices was coated in whiteboard material for us to draw on, so one winter I added a fireplace and mantel to make things feel a little more homey. We'd sometimes plug the electric space-heater into the outlet and relax around its warmth.

Starry Night
× Starry Night

Starry Night

Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night, remade entirely with dry erase markers on a whiteboard in the Spensa office over a few lunch periods.

Grumpy Cat
× Grumpy Cat

Grumpy Cat

An evolving memorial to Internet celebrity Grumpy Cat on the occasion of her death in 2019.