William Michael Brown is a sci-fi fantasy illustrator. living in Astoria Oregon, who works in both digital and traditional mediums such as acrylic, water color and oil paints.
William grew up in Longmont, Colorado inspired as a young artist by the comic books, video games, music, and movies that defined pop culture in the 1980s and 90s.
He attended the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning and Graphic arts in the late 1990s and soon after was one of the illustrators working on the Cyberpunk collectible card games, based on R. Talsorian Games' dystopian near-future role-playing games Cyberpunk 2020, released in 2003 and 2004
In 2019, Lamenting Avalon and Other Fairy Tales for Adults, by Benjamin Wachs, was published and included several of William's fantasy illustrations, and recently William completed concept art for a soon-to-be-published sci-fi Youtube space opera.
Artist's Statement
Originally, I wanted to be a comic book artist. As a kid, I dreamed of traveling through space, though I'm sure I was drawing superheroes and more earthbound characters at the time. After learning about comic book art, at the Joe Kubert school, as many young artists, I had some blocks to overcome and worked in abstract fine art for a few years. It was a huge deviation and probably a palate cleanser for me as returned to my first love shortly after that, and began working in fantasy and sci-fi illustrations again.
While I was exploring non-representational work, my style loosened up, as I was able to paint intuitively without preconceptions and was free to explore texture, color, and form, without restriction. I discovered an exciting play between depth and light that I still use in my more recent illustration work.
Currently, I am collaborating with other creators on book and online storytelling illustrations and working on my own original concepts.
Sci-fi and fantasy illustrations still have a hold on my imagination because they provide both an escape and a means of distancing the harsh realities of our current world enough that we can explore solutions that we'd otherwise be unable to see because of our natural defensiveness.
By the time I was 6 mo old I had already seen the original Star Wars movie 3 times. So I may not have had much choice in what inspires me. To this day, I'm still deeply inspired by the art of Ralph McQuarrie and it keeps me up at night thinking about how to take that inspiration and push it a little bit further.