Píccolo Field Trip Day 3: Gant Powell and Sam Kalda studios

Hey every­one! I sort of fell off the post­ing wag­on last week. Lisa and I were busy in New York and suf­fered inter­net issues, so my post­ing of our trip got delayed. You can always read a more detailed report on our Píc­co­lo blog, but I want­ed to share some of my expe­ri­ence and the images with you on here.

I’m back in Bal­ti­more now, and would like to thank all of the awe­some illus­tra­tors and cre­ative peo­ple that let Lisa vis­it your stu­dio and homes. We had a great time meet­ing peo­ple and can’t wait to return!

I know Gant Pow­ell from MICA, where we both received our under­grad­u­ate degrees in Illus­tra­tion. In 2009, he moved to New York to pur­sue his MFA in Illus­tra­tion as Visu­al Essay from SVA. Now, Gant is a free­lance illus­tra­tor who has his stu­dio in his home in Brooklyn.

Gant used to do a lot more work on his com­put­er, but since grad­u­ate school, his way of work­ing has changed. He likes the per­ma­nence and restric­tions that come from work­ing entire­ly ana­log. He is forced to make deci­sions, where­as in pro­grams like Pho­to­shop, you could be for­ev­er tweak­ing colors.

While he works in water­col­ors, gouache, pens, and pen­cils, he also works in series, and he’s inter­est­ed in chil­dren books, work­ing on one right now.

Some of Gan­t’s work. Check out more on his web­site!

Lat­er that day, we ven­tured to anoth­er neigh­bor­hood in Brook­lyn, where we saw the home stu­dio of Sam Kal­da. I’ve fea­tured the work of Sam on Brown Paper Bag before — he works on por­traits (great at like­ness­es) as well as edi­to­r­i­al illus­tra­tion. Even­tu­al­ly, he said that he’d like to ven­ture more into book illus­tra­tion, and plans to gear his MFA Illus­tra­tion work at FIT towards this.

Sam went to col­lege to be a painter, but switched gears after­wards to become an illus­tra­tor. His apart­ment is full of good art and small objects, some of which he high­lights in his Splen­did Object series (pic­tured below). In this series, he worked in gouache with­out the use of dig­i­tal tools. This is atyp­i­cal of how he nor­mal­ly works, which is a com­bi­na­tion of dig­i­tal work and hand ren­dered drawings.

Some of Sam’s work. Check out his web­site, too!