Celebrate The Difference : Sam Bosma
How do you celebrate the difference..?
I am an illustrator. I am not a fine artist. I don’t search for meaning through art, and I’m not interested in asking questions through the medium. I’m an image maker. My end goal when I pick up a pencil is to make an image that makes me happy and hopefully appeals to other people.
What is a typical day in Sam Bosma’s life?
The day usually starts fairly late, since I work late nights. I usually don’t get to the drawing table until the early afternoon, since I usually have to deal with everyday errands in the morning. Some days I’ll be working from noon until three in the morning or later, and some days I’ll be able to call it quits at a reasonable hour. My days are usually dictated by what jobs I’m working on or if I have a personal project I’m particularly passionate about. Freelance illustration (like freelance anything, I’d assume) runs on a very irregular timeline. There are lulls and there are floods, but I try to keep working on something all the time. It’s hard for me to sit still.
What is the creative process you go through while creating a piece?
I start with thumbnail sketches, which are very small and rough and used exclusively to work out a composition. The composition is the most important part of an image: it’s the skeleton on which everything else will be built. This is also where I spend the bulk of my time. Once a composition is established, I do a series of sketches to tighten things up and figure out how everything will be drawn. I work on sheets of translucent paper, since working on a lightbox for hours every day is pretty straining. I do my final line drawing on this translucent paper also, and that’s usually in pencil with a little ink as well. Everything then gets scanned and colored digitally.
One of my favorite pieces you have done is “Sunday Drive”..can you shed some light on what this piece is about and what it means to you..??
I did a series of pieces for an article about a man named Carl Fischer and his role in the changing landscape of American transportation in the early 1900s. One part of the article mentioned how hazardous early automobile trips were, and all of the items one would be wise to pack along. I had the idea to show a couple preparing for a drive, but having to deal with packing all of these items into a relatively small car. I think contrasting the apparent need for these items with the simple desire to go for a drive in one of these new machines would lead to some funny situations. I’ve never really drawn cars before — I drew dinosaurs as a kid — but some of the earliest models I was looking at for reference were really fascinating. They really were little more than carriages with engines.
Any future projects we should be looking out for?
I don’t have any long term projects on the table right now, so I’m spending my days getting better acquainted with my sketchbook, which I’ve neglected for too long. I have a piece in the annual Frog Folio calendar put out through Dellas Graphics, which should be out this summer.
For more illustrations from Sam check out his site Here.
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