Pencil Artist of the Week: Wojtek

This week’s featured pencil artist is Wojtek, an artist who has been sharing his work on DeviantArt since 2007. Wojtek’s Deviation timeline begins with sketches from his middle school notebook and ends with drawings from his college art classes. Browsing through his galleries, you can see his transformation from a bored student sketching video game characters in his notebook into a student of the masters, making his DeviantArt profile a crash course in artistic development.

Wojtek’s early drawings are what you would expect from any artist learning his craft. His first gallery is filled with drawings that imitate the style of his teachers. His teachers just happen to be video game designers and cartoon animators.

In high school, Wojtek began to develop his own style and, with it, started designing his own creatures. His creature designs have a fantastical, mythological look that would fit perfectly in a video game or comic book. Even though these creatures do not exist outside of Wojtek’s imagination, they all have clearly defined anatomies that would allow them to conceivably exist in some alternate universe. Believability is paramount when designing creatures, and Wojtek has it down to a science.

In his college years, Wojtek took an art class that taught him perspective drawing and portrait techniques. His lines became more crisp, his shading more subtle, and his human forms took on a life that makes them as believable as his creatures. While he hasn’t posted many new creature designs since entering college, he has gained a number of skills that will be valuable should he decide to start designing creatures again.