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GNN Spotlight

Jim Ferguson – Artist

Geek News Now would like to take the month of November to highlight one of the great Geeky artists, Jim Ferguson. His unique style and variety of content make him a fan favorite both online and during comic cons. We grabbed a few minutes of his time to talk about his life in Louisiana, drawing during COVID, and his love of artistry.


GNN: Your inspiration to be a GEEKY artist came from….?

Jim Ferguson: I have been drawing since I was a little kid. Was one of the best in my high school and majored in Art in college. But I got a career in Mass Communications and worked at NBC and Fox. Ended up working at NASA for 9 years as a video engineer. One day my son wanted to learn how to draw Pokémon. I thought to myself watch this. I’m going to draw you an awesome Pokémon. Well I hadn’t drawn in about 10 years and my Pokémon sucked. A light kinda went off in my head.

It was something I was good at and enjoyed and I felt like I threw it away. So I started drawing every day after that. A friend of my was drawing sketch cards 1 a day for 365 days. I didn’t really want to draw just people and liked backgrounds and scenery so I started to draw full movie scenes. I started to get requests and commissions and things snowballed after that.

 

GNN: “Life is like a hurricane…” so says Duck Tales. Talk about these past few months and the weather in your neck of the woods.

Jim Ferguson: This year has been a challenge for sure. Being an artist is my sole income for my family of 5. Usually I have a packed comic convention schedule and do about 22 conventions a year and most of my income comes from those. But with COVID conventions were canceled and I was only able to do 1 convention this year. Luckily I have been selling online since 2012 and just switched gears and start pushing online sales… then we got hit with a major hurricane.

Living on the gulf coast most my life I have been through many hurricanes. But nothing like this. This hurricane was a direct hit and I think its the 4th strongest to hit the gulf in recorded history. The damage was unimaginable. No running water for a week, no electricity for 4 weeks and no trash pickup for a month. My house took a good bit of damage and my yard looked liked it got Nuked from orbit. However I was lucky. My home office was fine and somehow we still had internet. So I was able to keep my online store open and ran my computer and printer on a generator.

I did have to bring my orders about an hour away to ship though because our post office was open for a few weeks. Once things started to get some what back to normal hurricane number 2 hit. Once again no power and everything was shut back down. But the good news I guess is there weren’t many trees left for about 100 miles so we got electricity back in about 2 days. Hopefully we are done with hurricanes for a while but home repairs and yard clean up will probably take about a year to complete.

 

GNN: Have you met any celebs that you’ve drawn? What was that like?
Jim Ferguson: I have meet probably around hundred celebrities that I have draw pictures of and became friends with a few of them. Sean Astin liked one of my drawings and wanted to use it for a kickstarter he was doing. The next year he offered to do the foreword for one of my art books. I became friends with Peter Mayhew and his family. The Peter Mayhew Foundation even came to help with hurricane relief for our area after the storm.
GNN: What is your absolute favorite piece that you’ve done?

Jim Ferguson: Usually my favorite piece is one I just finished. 2 that stick out to me though were ones that were really hard for me to draw but I think they came out good. One I did from Superman III and one from the Lost Boys.

GNN: If you could create a portrait of any geeky celeb, actor, actress, director, etc, living or dead, who would it be and why?
Jim Ferguson: Hmm. I can’t really think of one I would like to have drawn. But I regret not getting to meet Carrie Fisher. I got her autograph but I had to send someone to get it because when I’m at a convention I’m there for work so it’s hard to get away and meet them. Usually I see them after a convention.
Check out Jim’s Facebook page here, but also spend a little time going through the outstanding art available at his shop. See him at a future comic con? Tell him we said to “stay geeky!”
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