No stranger to comic art fans as Uncannyknack on the Internet, John Gallagher is a former Director of Concept Art for BioWare from 1995-2004 during their golden age and has lived and worked in Vancouver in the film industry since 2008. Since then he has worked as a production illustrator and concept designer on a wide range of genre series and features from Once Upon A Time, Falling Skies, and Man in the High Castle to Night at the Museum 3, Percy Jackson Sea of Monsters, and Power Rangers.
John is currently winding down a couple years of personal projects, developing his first live-action and first animated streaming series, as well as recently wrapping from The BOYS season 3, The Expanse season 6, and Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. He also ran his own cover variant imprint over lockdown which he describes as, "intense firewagon fun."
He'll soon be debuting his own podcast, Uncannyknack: Living the Question where he will talk with creators of all tradecraft about the art life less chosen. During downtime, he enjoys spending time with friends and family, devouring high culture and lowbrow kitsch (with equal enthusiasm), a good debate, beautiful moments, vodka, living well, and contemplating the nature of all things in this shared substrate reality.
I first met John back in 2015, at a comic convention in Portland, Oregon. I was attending with my wife, and he had a booth in Artist Alley. I was initially blown away by his artwork, but after I struck up a conversation with him, and we got to chatting, I soon realized that there was a lot more to this guy than just some pretty pictures. I knew I had to interview him. Eight years later, John was one of the first illustrators I thought of when I decided to revamp the website and begin interviewing again, and luckily, he had a lot more to say. This man does not disappoint.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is John Gallagher.
DeviantArt: https://www.deviantart.com/uncannyknack
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/uncannyknack
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uncannyknack
Portfolio: https://www.uncannyknack.com
Art Store: https://www.johngallagherart.com
What initially sparked your interest in illustration, and how did you start your career in this field?
My origin story isn't likely all that different from any other creator. From the time I could manually operate any form of drawing device, I was doodling inappropriate things on convenient surfaces. The steady diet of high-calorie eye protein from monster movies, comic books, and Saturday morning cartoons ensured that my salty brain meat was core damaged from an early age. Along with a natural sense of curiosity and thrill of adventure, I had all the ingredients for something interesting, stupid, or dangerous to happen.
Star Wars on May 25, 1977, blew my head apart and pieced back together differently, never to be the same. Then in rapid succession, I discovered Frank Frazetta, Heavy Metal magazine, Robert E. Howard, H.P Lovecraft, and a cascade of other key influences so the die was cast. I wasn't sure what was going to happen with any of these explosions behind my eyes but something was out there just beyond the horizon...maybe...possibly. I was a dependable but distracted student, doing well enough to have plenty of post-secondary options but only one thing had gravity and resonance, and that was doing art.
When I graduated high school I went to the Alberta College of Art in Calgary and washed out after a year. It was all conceptual 'art' allegedly meaningful and important but mostly statement-driven nonsense, representational work be damned, rather than the heresy I dared to darken the college campus with: I want to work on cool things with cool people, make a bunch of money and have a blast doing it. Blasphemy! I tried to break into independent black-and-white comics around this time and did a few issues of a couple books but it's an unsustainable enterprise so I packed my bags and called it a day.
Flash forward several years later after continuing to draw, travelling, and putting wise mileage on my head and heart I graduated from broadcasting and went to work almost immediately writing and producing hard-sell car commercials during the day and doing freelance pop culture and lifestyle interviews for local cable suppliers. One of them was for BioWare when the upstart studio was still doing medical software and had begun work on their first game Shattered Steel. We hit it off well, I got them lots of TV time with a couple segments and they asked if I could do anything else. I said I could draw like a sonuvabitch. They said we've heard that before and I responded with sure maybe but not from me. I showed them my portfolio and they asked when I wanted to start. BioWare was nine years, twelve games, and 24 million copies sold, and my professional career began and went into overdrive.
I left BioWare in late 2004, took a couple years off to reassemble myself after aging in game development dog years, and was contacted in December 2007 by Steve Geaghan, the production designer of Fear Itself: Masters of Horror season two which was crewing up in Edmonton of all places. I had done storyboards for a couple Ginger Snaps movies so was listed on the union call sheet and that was when the second act of my art career began. I've been busy working as an illustrator in film since that first show and while it's not without its challenges, I've been loving the challenge with a raw beginner's passion and a village idiot's intelligence since. Never a dull moment!
Are there any specific styles or mediums that you prefer to work with? How would you describe your artistic style?
I'm exclusively digital these days for front-facing work. I do analog live media for myself on occasion - besides painting mins or models - but otherwise all computer software. I started out in stages of transition around 2000- 2001 but found the sketching, scanning, and layering up digital painting ponderous and any energy that may have started out in the piece being drained out. So I started leaning into more and more digital as my confidence grew and the software improved so now it's scratch from the start in a digital file.
In terms of a style in the vernacular, I've landed on a variant of imaginative representational realism which is really a dog's breakfast of 2D and 3D blended as the spirit moves me and the assets allow. I use a crazy quilt of programs for generating my iterations and then old-fashioned elbow grease to bring them over the finish line. No piece is ever the exact same approach. In general terms, the pipeline is the same but I often have to make adjustments for the source material.
If I'm doing a location illustration I often start with a photograph and draw right on top and apply fit and finish along the way as opposed to a superhero martini shot where I create a background, character and integrate with effects, overlays, and storytelling touches to achieve a solid result. Similar objective, similar methodology but a little slick stickhandling around to get there. The equipment is a 27" Mac desktop and Intuos tablet baby!
Can you walk us through your creative process? How do you approach a new illustration project from start to finish?
I partly covered that with my previous answer but let's circle back to the beginning. Once I identify what the objective is, whether it's a casual tone exploration or a professional brief I decide off the jump what questions I require answering. Once I get those answers it's time to focus on outcomes. One critical step in the early stage is eliminating what the solution isn't, rather than what it is. Remove countless potential explorations and narrow the focus, not by bias or preferences necessarily but simply to clear the runway of traffic and distraction.
Then it's time to target the direction and treatment, going through the roster from colour to form language to camera position to key elements and all points in between leading to the inevitable how do we best tell this story. I do this by a further process of elimination, continuously narrowing the focus. I often build a file of tone and inspiration and that becomes the raw material I start throwing around in my usually completely empty head including approaches I would never try or use.
Once most possibilities have been eliminated the remaining prospects are the field of winners. Amongst them, usually intuitively, is the final best answer. Based upon the 20,000 + terrible drawings I've done I have a natural response I trust at this point to the obvious last option standing. Through this winnowing down I begin to formulate the final treatment. Once this mental fuck around and find-out has been performed, doing the piece is almost an afterthought. I used to thumbnail back in the day but found it largely futile for myself as a mental mapping effort. I tend to knead brain clay in my mind's eye and 'see' the forming piece.
Then, with little fanfare, do the piece in a few hours. I always entertain spontaneous happy accidents and renegade brain waves during this translation from noise to final cut and generally, it renders out like I expected with a few cool things I didn't know I needed in there and always a couple little mostly for me surprises.
How do you stay inspired and motivated in your work? Are there any specific sources or practices that help fuel your creativity?
Staying inspired in the traditional sense is debatably the greatest challenge in the creative life if you choose to look at it that way. I don't think so, however. I think motivation and inspiration are a temporary dopamine hit, a juicy spike in inevitable hills and valleys. I don't have to shadowbox and psyche myself up. I prefer to stay disciplined and persistent and show up every day, hell or high water. I can comfortably sit with the discomfort of not having it firing on all cylinders on any given day. But by showing up every day and servicing the ecosystem of the work, even mundane reference gathering or archive sorting, you're being useful and providing effort in service.
There is no final or fatal, there is a continuum of choices, and showing up every day one foot in front of the other will mean everything to your future self. I don't think of creativity as a fragile construct but a volitional force of nature that when properly channeled and shown the reward of best practices can change the world. With that capacity for change and positive influence, if a toe in that raging moody blue alone isn't enough to continuously inspire and motivate I'm not sure what someone should do to feel more connected to the simulation. I find my sources are in the realm of wild ideas, dangerous conversations, music, discourse, debate, sex, colour, light, dreams, and all the joy, loss, love, and hope of this all too brief single life straddling oblivion. The only real challenge is judiciously filtering and processing it for good use.
I think it's critical for a creator to be aware of the sea changes and tidal shifts in design of all disciplines to stay current, aware, and adaptable. That and it's just fucking amazing to be a small part of. This art game isn't just about producing top-shelf work, it's about longevity, stamina, and awareness, both of where you are and what's happening around you to keep the work fresh, vital, and moving forward. Feeling connected in meaningful ways to the creative community and by extension the larger community of our common humanity is everything for this experience to have meaning and purpose. To feel like a participant, observer, and chronicler of our times helps give our lives meaning to this shared tonal and textural life experience. I find inspiration in all of it, from conversations to gorgeous artwork to sitting on my balcony watching ocean-going cargo ships arrive and depart to feeding my neighbourhood murder of crows every morning without fail...all of it and all of the rest is delicious fuel for the wetware if you let yourself be open. I don't draw to live, I live so I can draw.
Do you have any favorite illustrators or artists who have influenced your work? Are there any emerging talents in the illustration industry that you find particularly inspiring?
Comics are the reason I started drawing so my childhood inspirations were most abundant in the medium. Classic masters like Will Eisner, Wally Wood, Joe Kubert, Alex Toth, John Buscema, Jim Steranko, Neal Adams, John Romita, Bernie Wrightson, Gene Colan, Jack Kirby, newer legends like John Byrne, Dave Cockrum, Walt Simonson, George Perez, Brian Bolland, Bill Sienkiewicz, Alex Ross, Travis Charest, Art Adams, Dave Mazzuchelli, Geoff Darrow, Adam Hughes, Mike Grell, Howard Chaykin, Marshall Rogers, Dave Sim, Frank Miller, and once the genie of the Heavy Metal artists was out of the bottle Moebius, Herge, Juan Giminez, Caza, Druillet, Enki Bilal, H.R Giger, and a very long list of legendary talents all deeply infused my creative worldview with their incredible gifts.
As I entered my teens, my definition of artist had broadened significantly from my earliest recollections so by this point virtually every tradecraft that required expertise, skillsets, focus, discipline, and tradition of practice fell under my purview. It was an unprecedented electric circus of consuming whatever I could get my hands on, from dark wave import 12" EPs to 70s kung fu bootlegs to underground comix to Beksinski and Bauhaus and I drank it all in with unfiltered reckless abandon.
Lately, the bandwidth for inspiration and influence is enormous and unfiltered. I used to have to dig deep to find remarkable things. Now interesting work is a cascade event. So many unreal talents in the game. I'll narrow it down to artists for the sake of our discussion. I feast on the marks of Frank Quitely, James Stokoe, J.H Williams III, Mike Huddleston, Steve Skroce, Tomm Coker, Juanjo Guarnido, Chris Ware, Tradd Moore, Cary Nord, Joelle Jones, Lee Bermejo, Danielk Warren Johnson, Lucio Parillo, Greg Smallwood, Stjepan Sejic, Wes Craig, Puppeteer Lee, Stuart Immonen, Olivier Copiel, Brom, Alex Maleev, Steve McNiven, Eduardo Risso, Leinel Francis Yu, Marko Djurdjevic, BossLogic, Tony Moore, Jock, Raf Grassetti, Johnnie Christmas, Mitch Gerads, Hugh Rockwood, Colin Lorimer, Jeremy Simser, Chris Donaldson, Simon Roy, Katy DeCobray, DopePope, Erick Sosa, Alejandro Pereira, Daniel Bel, Franco Carlesimo, Manuel De Jorge, Andrew Martin, Dinsai Studio, Todd Masters, DJ Lord, Renee Robyn, Rick Baker, Howard Berger, Greg Nicotero...the list is endless. And every day I find amazing art - clothing designers, sculptors, digital artists, singers, makeup effects artists, dancers, cosplayers, street artists, painters, DJs, illustrators, video game artists, whatever the job description or field of endeavor, newbies to veterans, and stay with them, show support, respect, and gratitude for and with what they share.
Have you ever faced creative blocks, and if so, how do you overcome them?
Not so much creative blocks but work plateaus. I think mental blocks are easy and convenient fictions from a work standpoint - often excusing lazy or routine work - and the best way to get unstuck is to look to change something in your life that's getting in the way, not the work itself. That's almost without exception, not the culprit. Given that over a long enough timeline, the probability of leveling up decreases exponentially to the inverse of that timeline, you have to push way past normal growth cycles to keep getting better and making moves forward. Break old habits and build new bones. Lift brain weights differently. Shock your system. Disrupt routines. Take a path less chosen. Surprise yourself. In all likelihood, that's where interesting new things await.
Are there any specific projects or goals you're currently working on or hoping to pursue in the near future?
At the risk of sounding like a cliche, someone who instead of therapy got a podcast, I did. I built an excellent team for it with a deliberate purpose and it's called Uncannyknack: Living the Question. The question of course is what's this art life all about and how do we live the answer. So I talk to creators of all tradecraft about their stories. Stay tuned for that! Also, another cliche, I have a couple streaming series in development under NDA, one live-action, the other animated. I continue to work in film as an illustrator and while the WGA strike has slowed things down, I'm fortunate to be on projects that were locked prior so that moves the ball down the field in the meantime. I'm exploring Web 3.0 opportunities but like anything, vetting and due diligence yield varying mileage. On those in particular we'll see what yields filthy lucre and what's a waste of time. And I'll always love the comic con experience so I'll keep attending those as a guest artist as long as they'll have me. My overriding objective remains keeping myself engaged and compelled by what's ahead so there's likely to be a few shocks and a surprise or two along the way.
What advice would you give to aspiring illustrators who are just starting their journey in this field?
Firstly, as much as it may pain you, take business courses you'll be grateful you did. Stay ferociously curious and always be willing to fail, often spectacularly. Investigate endlessly, even if it seems to lack direct currency value.
Have agency and intention, understand how to build value in your reputation and public life, and stay open. I propose it will place a creator's sense of novelty, play, and invention in peril when they start to feel a little too comfortable with the process of creation.
Remix and re-invent your process, break old routines, and avoid ease if it gives you pedestrian solutions. Focus on storytelling and worldview building and its array of powers, the graphic finesse and visual dexterity will follow.
Avoid relying too much on software making decisions for you or its peripherals until the fundamentals are rock solid after a minimum of 10k hours of practice. If you haven't built the muscle memory and decision-making supersets for sustained long-distance high-intensity effort your work will gas out and plateau before you know it.
Stay keenly aware of new software and potential value, popular discourse, and evolving form languages and popular aesthetics to remain contemporary and relevant in your way.
Be a great ambassador of goodwill in the industry, even as a beginner. There are few things more exhausting and boring than a grumpy artist. Most clients have their pick of the litter for choices of who to work with and an unendurable attitude and unprofessional manner is not tolerated often or much in the modern space.
AI-assisted artwork is currently a genuine game changer but once regulation catches up to the framerate of the platforms it'll mogrify into something else entirely.
I've found for me building my pipeline is to break your routine all the time, shock your muscle memory, collaborate with other 2D/3D artists, do homages, audition for fictional jobs, drop the ball and shit the bed, post failures not just wins, draw attention to other creators, get excited by what other artists are doing.
Also, just make art. All the time. Even if you think it doesn't pass muster. No one gives a shit if it's not perfect. It's a joyous celebration of being alive and making a mark. While that doesn't mean you're destined to be an art career professional - few are statistically - make the hell out of it anyway.
It's difficult to predict with any veracity if or when a side hustle on Etsy could blow up for you or part-time dark art gallery work becomes extremely lucrative. Stay with it, foot on the gas, watch the road, read the room, never give up and pursue it with shameless joy.
Is there anything else you'd like to share about your work or the illustration industry as a whole?
It's never too late to be who you might have been.
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