Jason Chan for The Liar’s Key by Mark Lawrence (Harper/Voyager)
“My name is Jason Chan and I like to draw 🙂
“I was born and raised in Stockton, California in 1983. After high school I moved out to San Francisco to study 3D animation at the Academy of Art University, but promptly changed my major to illustration and graduated in the Spring of ‘06. I am now working at Massive Black.
“As I said, I love to draw. Ever since I was a kid I’ve always been drawing characters for make-believe video games, cartoons and comics. I also loved drawing my favourite X-Men characters, Warcraft heroes, and video game sprites.
I drew a million Mega Man and Mario drawings. As I grew up, that love for video games and fantasy never left me. I grew to love fantasy novels and that inspired my work. Many of my favourite video games were Japanese made so as I drew the characters from those games, I began to fall for the anime style. Of course, that lead me to watch anime – an addiction I still haven’t been able to shake. After a couple of yearsof horrible attempts at manga style art, I began school in San Francisco and actually got some decent life drawing and anatomy practice. I began to be exposed to some of the western masters such as Sargent, Leyendecker, Rockwell and Frazetta. I embraced the aesthetics of western art and tried to improve myself in that direction. Now I am trying to marry my western art education with my eastern art interest and see what happens.
“I’m still trying. We’ll see what happens.”
Jason won the Ravenheart Award in 2014, and was shortlisted in 2015.