“Peace begins with a smile.” – Mother Theresa
About the Artist Joey Welsh
01
I'm an Indiana boy
I was born and raised in Michigan City, IN. I grew up there cartooning instead of paying attention in school. I loved to swim & body surf in Lake Michigan. It was a lovely place to grow up.
02
I’m a mountain biker
I am an avid mountain biker. I took up the sport about 8 years ago and do my best not to crash. I get out and ride a couple times each week. Living in Arizona provides access to many great trails.
03
I'm a reluctant chef
My wife does not like to cook, so I learned to cook because I wanted to eat well. I mostly enjoy cooking, but it can be darn tiring coming up with new & exciting meals every week.
I have been painting digitally since 2005. In the early days, I would scan my pencil sketches and then paint on top of them digitally. Nowadays, the process is easier where I can sketch up my work on an iPad then transfer it over to my Wacom Cintiq to render the final art as seen above.
I began my career as a color pencil artist. However, the time-consuming process of that medium limited me to producing only a few works each year. With a background in graphic design, I began exploring digital art as a solution. It provided the same ability for detail as the pencils did, but the work could be completed in about a third of the time.
I use Procreate on my iPad and Photoshop on my Cintiq to create my art. Both provide a tactile experience since you are using a pencil/stylus and drawing right on the screen. Even though the work is digital, it can still be a slow process of building up value and color since it is all done one stroke at a time. Each illustration can take anywhere from 20-50 hours to complete, depending on the amount of detail, but some have taken me as long as 100 hours.
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MY ART PROCESS
My goal is to create illustrations that make you smile. Growing up I loved to draw cartoons. I spent my time filling my imagination with the works of Richard Scarry, Charles Schulz and Gary Larson. I was fascinated by their ability to pack so much humor into a single panel of art. Their work still puts a smile on my face to this day and I try to carry that inspiration over into my own work.
In addition, my mother was an oil painter. She painted a lot of still life, like flowers and bowls of fruit. I would look at her work and say to myself, “It would be really funny if there was a group of lizards in that painting trying to steal the fruit from the bowl.” Thus my sense of humor found its home. I was also drawn in by richness of color that painting offered and I knew that I wanted to make it a part of my own work, so I began rendering out my sketches with color pencils.
If I had to describe my style of art, I would say my illustrations are simply fine art cartoons. I love juxtaposing the silly, the absurd, next to vibrant colors and rich details.