I teach foundations digital art classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art. I am the coordinator for the digital foundations curriculum there. For the last two years, I’ve had the honor of working with artist Kevin Czapiewski on a daily basis as the TA (teaching assistant) for the digital curriculum. Kevin has recently left us for a great opportunity with a design firm, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to draw attention to his work.

Besides his very accomplished design work, Kevin is an avid and productive comic book artist and he recently taught a continuing studies class, The Art of Comics, at the Cleveland Institute of Art. You can learn more about the artist and his work on his website, www.kevinczap.com.

One of his more intriguing projects is a web comic called “Spoilers”. It is a scrolling comic that is essentially a single page that goes on forever. It’s an ongoing project and when Kevin completes some new work on the project he simply connects it to the point where the story left off previously and readers can scroll a little further and see what happens next. This work is another example of innovation inspired by the new possibilities of digital technology. View “Spoliers at www.kevinczap.com/spoilers/.

Kevin has a couple connections to “Digital Art Revolution, Creating Fine Art with Photoshop”. He posed for the “body snatchers” compositing exercise in Chapter Four:

By strange coincidence, before I had moved to Cleveland and met Kevin, his brother Matt Czapiewski was a student in my digital class at the University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg Virginia. Matt created two visually related works for my class, and these were used as student examples in “Digital Art Revolution, Creating Fine Art with Photoshop”. These comic book influenced pieces were portraits of Matt and my future friend, Kevin!

In another happy coincidence, our new teaching assistant is also a very accomplished comic book artist, working for a major publisher. We’ll provide more info on the very next blog entry.