About

Living near Portland Oregon, after many years in Southern California, I find the lack of sun keeps me indoors more often. No wonder I’m keeping this blog.

As the title of this blog makes evident, I do illustration. Which I do a lot more of now that it’s raining out most of the time. But what else have I done when I’m not doing what I do?

Growing up near St. Paul, Minnesota I didn’t have to travel far to recieve my BFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison where I studied Comparative Literature and Art. I was the Art Director for Sony Online overseeing the development of dozens of online games based on Sony properties and licensed titles including the first web based interactive versions of JEOPARDY!, Wheel of Fortune, The Dating Game and Trivial Pursuit. I worked in a number of graphic design and art direction positions. Overseeing websites, creating marketing material, creating international multimedia projects for various companies including, Apple Inc., Adobe, Blockbuster, Transamerica, Honda, Toyota and many more. I was a Creative Director for Pearson Televison New Media where I developed Family Feud Online for multiple countries and worked with the television production department to bring supporting websites live for new TV shows. My work was twice included in The Best Editorial Cartoons of the year by Pelican Publishing, back when I did occasional editorial cartoons.

The Thing with No Head is one of the animated shorts I created. It’s had the widest exposure – seen on Nickelodeon Nicktoons. Other shorts have appeared on G4 TV in the USA and on a variety of channels in the UK. I also developed and sold an online animated show called Hollywood Backlot working with Mondo Media. (see my animation section for samples on YouTube)

I attended the first year of the MFA in Animation program at UCLA, but left to work at Walt Disney Television Animation as a current production manager. I also wrote an essay for The Comics Journal about the future of online animation which later became recommended reading for MIT’s The Future of Broadcasting course.

I created a comic book called Cenozoic and my work has appeared in the anthology series Periphery. I have done visual development for animated TV series and feature films.

I took a children’s book  illustration class at Art Center in Pasadena taught by Marla Frazee. That class made me realize how much I loved writing and drawing books. It was like being a kid again and picking up a clean piece of paper. I was hooked. From then on a large part of my work has been geared towards that market.

But what do I REALLY do? Creative work across mediums, including animation, illustration and some graphic design. But I am most strongly motivated by opportunities to tell stories using drawings, design and words. My art is strongly narrative and I enjoy developing ideas and deciding which medium they belong; a book, a comic, a graphic novel, animation or a short story. Ideas are funky things and it’s not always clear why one idea works so much better in one medium than another. That’s the fun and dynamic part and is very intriguing to me. I love drawing and writing picture books. The Book That Eats People was a finalist in the 2010 Children’s Choice Book Awards and art work from the book was selected for the Illustration West 47 show in 2009.

The Three Little Aliens and the Big Bad Robot is being released on Sept. 27th, 2011 and the art from that book has been selected to show in the Society Of Illustrators, New York, ‘O’ Show of 2011.

The graphic novel I wrote and drew called Earthling! will be released in 2012 by Chronicle Books.

I am represented by The Sheldon Fogelman Agency.

I enjoy telling stories, no matter the medium, and this blog is a place to informally share my work in progress and post on topics that intrigue the writer/artist in me.

You can contact me at: markfearing (at) gmail dot com.