Today we’d like to introduce you to Kirk Wallace.
Kirk, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
I come from a background and undergraduate degree in computer science and now I create characters for myself, other individuals (that are not me), small businesses, and large corporations all over the world. I had a lot of great luck and a lot of bad times to get where I’m at (which is nowhere, really)
My name’s Kirk Wallace and I’m an illustrator, animator, and director working under the studio moniker of BoneHaüs, alongside my imaginary skeletal creative partner, Skülly. Most of my work is playful and walks the line of childlike and absurd but always and most importantly it’s carefully made and executed as a solution to a problem.
I’ve been freelancing for about six years and two of those years are full time. Prior to that, I was a software developer for a few companies and prior to that doesn’t exist for these purposes. Such as anyone, my work is inspired by my personal influences. In my case that’s skateboarding, meditation, philosophy, graphic design, cartoons, hardcore punk music, candy, and the creative people before me.
When I graduated college, I figured I’d work a dead job forever creating software or fixing computers for a living. I don’t know how many people are really ready to decide what they want to do as a career around 18 years old. Obviously, I didn’t. For a couple years I did as I was expected. Slowly my work creeped closer and closer to things like web development, which was much more interesting than what I had been doing. With web dev I saw an immediate result of the code I’d write visually. From there it spun into web design, typography, color palettes, visual hierarchy etc. Before I knew it, I had jumped from programming to illustration and animation with a few stepping stones in graphic design.
While exploring these worlds, I was sharing my personal silly little drawings on the internet. I guess this was around 2011. I think what happened was I caught a movement. I was on a wave where people were sharing work on sites like forrst, dribbble, behance, and even deviantart. And I was a part of that. I had eyes on my work which was juvenile and also just bad, but there was something in it people enjoyed. They gave me enough praise and fed my ego enough to keep me going. That and, of course, I was having a blast making things. Truth be told that all feels like it was only a year ago. Things flew by and I rolled with the wave, starting to pick up paid gigs here and there, and was forced to get better fast by nature of keeping up with the herd.
It’s really hard to pinpoint any particular moments of success or failure as it all blurs, but I do know now that I’m happy where I’m at making a living doing the work I really enjoy and am curious when it’ll end.
I’ve just finished with my MFA in illustration and will be publishing my thesis short film soon while continuing to travel around digitally and physically to help make stories with anyone willing to help me feed my dogs.
Can you give our readers some background on your art?
As a commercial illustrator I’m constantly commissioned to help brands products come to life. I work predominantly in character design and animation, usually as a part of small temporary teams for products or agencies. A lot of commercial work is bad. It’s bad and its boring and its soul sucking. My personal task inside this industry is to make things exciting and truthful. I want to create surprising, genuine connections with the viewer. I try to work on products I believe in and see the benefit to and help bring the benefits to life through the use of storytelling.
Personally, I’m always working on the next thing in the background. For me at the moment it’s a short film that’s sort of a pilot to a cartoon featuring my imaginary creative partner, Skülly. I want to use this world I’m creating to positively but maturely and even unapologetically show people the way I see the world.
I’m told often my work is whimsical. I hadn’t ever referred to it that way until the fifth person said it. It’s heavily inspired by the mid-century / golden age era of illustration, advertising, and cartooning but very harmoniously contrasted with a concise clean design and meticulously cared for and strategically planned approach.
Artists rarely, if ever pursue art for the money. Nonetheless, we all have bills and responsibilities and many aspiring artists are discouraged from pursuing art due to financial reasons. Any advice or thoughts you’d like to share with prospective artists?
Having the privilege to work on art full time as a career is something I’m incredibly grateful for while understanding it’s volatility. It’s something I hope I can do forever but realize it could end any month.
Having done this for about 5 years, and 2.5 of them being full time I’d say perhaps the best thing to do is to ween off things. I never took a full leap into faith. I never was unsure if I’d be okay. I started with a job that wasn’t creative. That job leads me to a position that was full time as a creative director. All the while I was working the extra 8 hours at night on my freelance gigs. It wasn’t until I was pretty damn sure I would be able to supplement my income (because I was having to turn down so much freelance) that I took that “leap”.
I also was fortunate enough to learn that I love this world of illustration early around 24, when I had a very low overhead, no family of my own, etc. I saved my money and worked around the clock and got lucky a lot.
I suppose my best piece of advice would be not to be embarrassed or ashamed of an inability to make art a full-time job straight away, or even for years. I think these things take time and many of the best supplement their artwork’s income with a full-time position. In some cases that may even be better. Whatever you want to do, just plan ahead, focus and execute. It also helps to have support from the ones you love.
Contact Info:
- Website: bone.haus
- Email: kirk@bone.haus
- Instagram: bonehaus
- Twitter: bonehausinc
- Other: dribbble.com/bonehaus
Image Credit:
Kirk Wallace | BoneHaus
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