A self-taught digital artist and illustrator from the mountain town of Mabinay in Negros Oriental is preparing to make it big in the world stage.
Asher Ben Lamatao Alpay, 27, won the Illustrators of the Future Contest, one of the most prestigious world competitions judged by some of the premier names in speculative fiction, now running on its 28th year. He is the first in South East Asia to have won the quarterly contests.
Asher’s winning illustrations have earned him a cash prize, a trip to Hollywood in March 2017 for a week-long intensive workshop, and a space for his artworks in the annual bestseller publication, L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Vol. 33.
The Illustrators of the Future Contest followed the huge success of L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future writing contest in 1983, which was meant to provide a venue for aspiring writers of speculative fiction to get that much-needed break.
In California, Asher will attend a gala awards ceremony that is participated by over a thousand art enthusiasts, and get a shot at winning the Golden Brush Award with a $5,000 cash prize.
Coming up with the concept for the artwork does not come easy. “I had to read the story 10 times before I began to sketch,” he narrated his preparation for his original artwork for a 25-page story.
Asher grew up watching his father Jesse sketch portraits of the Beatles in ink or charcoal and do other acrylic paintings. In no time, he found himself taking his monggol pencil and crayons, and try his hand at rendering trucks and big bikes.
Then he made a name for himself as an artist at the Mabinay Central School. His talent led him to winning the editorial cartoon category in the Schools Press Conferences in the provincial and regional level. When he was nine, he represented Central Visayas in the national level of the DepEd contest.
For some reason in college, he just lost steam with art, and went on to take up a course different from his passion. “That time, I wasn’t even aware about Fine Arts being offered in college, and that it could be a career,” Asher said.
He was also under the impression that when one is an artist lang, there are no opportunities for sustainable income. After all, he grew up watching his father work on his sketches only as a hobby, in his spare time. So for the next six years, sketching and producing artworks took a backseat.
One day he was helping his girlfriend crop her photo on Photoshop. “I did it well, and it made me realize what else I could do on computers,” Asher recalled. So he taught himself how to draw directly on the computer with a stylus. Then, he was unstoppable.
He went active on social media, read art blogs and websites like DeviantArt and ArtStation to look at artists’ profiles and portfolios, turned to chat forums for tips and advice, followed YouTube tutorials, enrolled in online how-to courses, and subscribed to online digital art magazines, pushing his craft and imagination a step further and more creative each time.
Reading the voluminous materials on digital art online was not at all challenging since Asher loved to read all the Grolier encyclopedias he could get his hands on, as a kid.
“I get inspired with ideas from anything, from nature, from objects like a stapler,” Asher said. “I can vision a mere stapler to be some kind of a spaceship…everything can be a source of inspiration.” Of course, he also always considers the theme of the project, the brief from the client, and begin from there.
With 25 other homegrown artists, Asher joined the Dagit Arts Fest, a contemporary cultural creativity exhibit initiated by the Department of Trade & Industry in celebration of National Arts Month in February. It was Asher’s first public exhibit where he displayed more than 20 pop culture paintings, and sold more than 100 original comic prints and movie-inspired artworks. A number of the comic prints were commissioned works by Pross Comics in the US. “I guess a lot of people, regardless of age, were able to relate to pop culture drawings,” Asher noted.
Now that he’s gone this far, Asher reminisces all the good times and bad he went through. He fondly remembers his father Jesse and his innate talent, some of whose paintings are in a museum in Escalante in Negros Occidental; just as memories of growing pains continue to haunt him when some people belittled his artistic efforts in the past.
Asher said he would be happy if he could conceptualize and develop improved digital art for online games or films. He said he also hopes to help revitalize the small Dumaguete Digital Arts Community, set up by ICT Dumaguete about two years ago, and get people interested in what they could produce.
While his artworks roam the world, Asher said he wants to encourage kids in Dumaguete to learn computer graphics. “We’re a very small group — there are only about 10 of us now in Dumaguete,” he said.
Asher is now a full time remote digital artist for a UK-based design and production company, branding and marketing designs for popular companies like Swarovski and Amazon.com.
On weekends, he works on his personal intellectual property, and illustrations for mobile and games for PC.
“I sometimes get to sign my name Art of Asher in my artworks, but for many other things that I make, I don’t “exist”,” he said, adding that he doesn’t mind. (Irma Faith Pal; With reports from Carmen Bartolo/Hollywood, California)
