 |
| Photo by Jilson Seckler Tiu |
The illustrator, who was one of the comic artists who
headlined the recent AsiaPOP Comicon, is best known for working with
Marvel, “The Walking Dead,” “Doctor Who,” “Once Upon A Time,” and “Star Wars,”
among many others.
It’s highly possible you’ve seen his works online because
they are so damn good that they’re bound to be shared on your feeds.
He has perfected his personal style, enough for you to
recognize a Jason Palmer artwork when you see one.
He maintains the visible
strokes of traditional art, and the way he draws each character is reminiscent
to how vintage portraits were done in old school studios before photography was
introduced.
 |
| Visit his portfolio and shop at jasonpalmer.net |
Like the true artist that he is, Jason Palmer is meticulous
about details.
“When you’re doing a print, what are you trying to convey?
Whatever that is, figure it out and convey it on every level. How you lay things out, how your border’s gonna be. You
convey it even in the strokes,” he says.
His latest work is on fan favorite Eleven from “Stranger
Things.” It was geeking over the Netflix series and its ‘80s references,
particularly the works of Stephen King and Stephen Spielberg, where our
interview took off and, eventually, revolved around.
He shared how he was like the character of Jonathan back in
the year 1983, when he was about the same age; how Stephen King was like a
father figure to him, teaching him what kind of person he would like to be
based on the characters he read on the novelist’s works.
“Do you get where you wanna be by luck?” he then asks me.
Suddenly, it was illustrator-slash-pop culture gem Jason
Palmer asking me the questions.
“The Stephen King characters—the assholes, they would never
ask you that way around. But I like people. I wanna find out about people, so
tell me—how’d you get this job in your 20s?”
For exactly a year, I’ve been working as an editorial
production assistant for The Philippine Daily Inquirer, a local newspaper that
I read since I decided to take Journalism (let’s be real, I didn’t care enough
to read newspapers when I was in high school).
And if there was any company criteria I had when I was
applying as a fresh grad, it was genuinely believing in a company and what it
does—I had to be one of its news consumers, its patron; I simply didn’t want to
be a hypocrite, applying in a news outfit I never even read or heard of before
I decided to submit a resume.
If you asked me who my favorite journalists were, I’d sound
as if I was reading their names straight from Inquirer’s bylines.
I particularly loved Inquirer Super, which told stories
about pop culture, overly geeky and eager fans, travel, all sorts of craziness,
and everything else under lifestyle that a millennial would love to add on
their bucketlists.
Super was one of the reasons why I kept buying the
newspaper, and now I find myself part of a section that I love, finding and
writing stories about what I love even more. In its pages I see my name on a
byline—a surreal feeling and something I still get kilig over every chance I
get published.
“Isn’t that interesting?” he tells me as I end my brief
story about landing an opportunity to work in the country’s leading newspaper.
“Sometimes you feel that you just got the luck,” he
continues, “but you find your way there and now you’re there, and it almost
feels like a natural thing, doesn’t it?”
“It’s wanting something over there and you take a look—those
are the different newspapers, and you go ‘what calls out to me?’ And you got to
find that. Then you tell yourself ‘I need to develop something in myself that
they want,’ right? And here you are,” he told me.
Now, I’d honestly like to think that Jason Palmer is not
only an artist—he’s secretly a telepath.
No comments