Jason Williams’ drawings for this year’s Best of Northern Nevada issue portray a changing Reno while highlighting the many ways in which locals seek out fun—ubiquitous blue scooters and all. Williams has contracted with clients like Microsoft, Patagonia and the U.S. Air Force, and now works full-time designing and illustrating online games for Crazy Tooth Studio. He also draws caricatures. If you want a funny, quickly drawn cartoon version of you and yours, you can occasionally find him set up at the Riverside Farmers Market on a Sunday, or at other local events. To learn more, visit www.jasonillustrations.com and @artof_jasonwilliams on Instagram.
What kinds of imagery were you looking at and enjoying when you were growing up?
My favorite artist always has been, since I was a kid, Norman Rockwell. I grew up near Boston. He was in Massachusetts. And cartoons—Hanna-Barbera and Looney Tunes are my favorites. I always wanted to be a comic strip artist in the newspaper, and then that kind of evolved into comic books, which I’ve done—and realized that’s a horrible industry to be part of.
Why?
Because it’s so much work and so little pay.
So the process of getting into illustration was maybe a process of elimination? You knew you liked the field, but not every part of it.
It has narrowed itself down over the years, but I’ve always been good at drawing, and I always got, luckily, a lot of support. I wasn’t great at school, so my parents really supported my art. My grandfather was a phenomenal painter—never did anything with it, died very early—and then my dad was a wonderful illustrator, and again, never did anything with it. My grandmother always told me if I loved it, I should just try to make it my life, and it has been.
Tell me about a milestone you’ve reached in your career.
I got to draw official Star Wars art about a decade ago for Topps trading cards, and posters and storyboards for Nickelodeon—and quickly realized that “making it” was not what I had pictured. You do it for a few minutes, and then you move on. The industry has changed so much. Everybody’s being laid off, and you just work on one episode and then get your season, and you get laid off. So changing my expectation for what success was—I think that was my “a ha!” moment, like, “Oh, I am doing my art for a living; I have a studio at home, and that is really good enough. I’m happy.”
When you were conceiving the Best of Northern Nevada illustrations, did you go out and do any firsthand research?
I did. I did a lot of walking downtown, and I saw a lot of new art that I hadn’t seen before. A few pieces made it in. I’ve lived right downtown … and I’ve lived in Midtown, so I love walking. I’ve just been walking around and doing caricatures and character design for the last 20 years. I recognize things and write them down, so there were actually a lot of sketchbooks that I went back to.
In your drawing for the “Food and Drink” section, the name of your imaginary restaurant, “La Gentrifique,” sums up a lot about the zeitgeist. What is your process of distilling something as complex as a rapidly changing Reno down into a word or a gesture like that?
It really isn’t even a thought process anymore. It’s that gut feeling. … This is all stemming from caricature work, where I have to recognize somebody in all their features, in under a few seconds. Seeing a certain car go by, or the way somebody’s dressed, or a restaurant—everything has a vibe, and it’s just something that I’ve, over 30 years of being a professional artist, honed in on. … Those moments and the environment around me and politics and all of that—the more I’ve let that in, the more it’s become part of my art.
If somebody who had never set foot in Reno were to ask you to describe Reno culture, what would you say?
Eclectic. What I enjoy about Reno is it doesn’t have a singular vibe. If you go to Boston, which I just spent time in, it has a vibe that you can feel immediately. Portland, Seattle—all of it has a very distinct feeling about it, and I don’t get that. Every 25 feet down the block is a different feeling to me in Reno. It’s very ragamuffin, and I love that about it. The architecture, the people—everything comes from somewhere else, for the most part. So, “eclectic” is definitely the word I would use.