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Chicago illustrator
Scott Gustafson creates
a limited-edition print
celebrating the 100-year
anniversary of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
When asked how he sees himself in relation to other illustrators, Scott Gustafson pauses, and says, "A throwback, I guess. In some ways, I wonder if my work and some of my contemporaries' work - illustrators such as Thomas Blackshear, James Gurney, and Dean Morrissey-is the last gasp of an old tradition or the resurgence of interest in it. We won't really know for another 20 years."
Utilizing traditional working methods, Gustafson feels a kinship to classic animation - a kinship he believes informs his work. "There's still a part of me that thinks in terms of animated cartoons, but creating a single image involves a different discipline. Certain angles and certain posilions, in relation to the characters, are more comfortable for this kind of format -you can't get too tricky You can't do an overhead shot or a really low shot," he notes. "For the things I do, that end up on somebody's wall, it's not something you want people to be fixated on."
To avoid this, the artist spends a great deal of time working up thumbnails. "I'm trying to come up with something that has a fair amount of information in it," he notes. For him, the ideal image is one that has an initial, posterized impact, but yields new information on repeated viewings. Gustafson says his goal is *to do work that's interesting and engaging for kids, but holds up over time - so that if a child grows up with my pictures, when he comes back to them as an adult, he still thinks they're cool.'
Years ago, when he was creating fairy tale collector plates for the Bradford Exchange, Gustafson planned to reuse that imagery assuming "it would take another form besides plates." An associate introduced him to the idea of limited-edition prints. It wasnt until five years later that he began to see that as a viable option when he chanced upon the Greenwich Workshop, a company specializing in fine art reproduction. Over the last seven years, Gustafson has not only seen limited-edition prints made from his Bradford work, but he's created many new images, all based on children's...