Christopher Troutman and Lamar University Students Digital Drawing Exhibition

I mainly grew up around Peoria, IL. I earned a BFA from Bradley University in 2003 and an MFA from California State University, Long Beach in 2008.  My biggest influences are comics, from when I was in high school and college, then 19^th century art history from university, then my mentors from grad school at Long Beach, and other figurative artists, contemporary an historical, as well as students’ interests, forcing me to learn new things.  All of those influences somehow filter through my artwork at different degrees.

This exhibition will show a sampling of over 3 years of student digital artwork and my progress through learning digital drawing software as a new medium in the drawing curriculum at Lamar University. My artwork and student artwork was exhibited overseas as a professional opportunity to help motivate students to produce quality artwork. After showing in Japan, we wanted to have the chance to present our artwork in Beaumont, TX as well.

I couldn’t leave my digital artwork as simply digital files, so I left my digital drawings and paintings in a rougher or more sketch-like state for printing. After printing, I originally used charcoal and ink on the initial monochromatic pieces that I started the Fellowship with.  The next drawings were in color over which I used ink and black paint, imitating American comics (bright flat colors, sometimes with shading, but many black lines of hatching to create light and dark). For the last series I used acrylic paint over the printed digital artwork.  All of the artwork is large scale, about 4-by-5- or 4-by-6-feet, intended for juried exhibitions in Japan. Now I can show a segment of each stage of this series’ development with students’ art, which also shows change over time.

I think the experiments with combining digital art with traditional materials is an experiment but it doesn’t get into a deeper examination of how these materials relate to each other, so there is a limit as to what the audience can take from that.  For me personally, it shows how I was trying to learn to work in a new medium and it shows my efforts to make my digital drawings touch on illustration, more thoroughly than before, yet be a continuation of my past studio research. I hope viewers can appreciate the new ways that students’ learned how put their ideas to paper and create the imagery that really interested them in greater depth using digital drawing media, which is becoming the dominant way of working in illustration; most students want to go that route career-wise anyway.  There is a real variety in what the students created and it shows the talent that they develop in our program and the opportunities we create for them to make art in their own original way.  

Christopher Troutman