Northport artist and MSU student brings imagination to life by creating comic books
Heroes and villains flow from Bryce Yzaguirre's pen and onto paper, bringing to life not only his artistic vision but also his fertile imagination.
The 20-year-old Northport man is a graduate of Tuscaloosa County High and is entering his junior year at Mississippi State University where he is studying graphic design. Yzaguirre has completed his first comic book and his second is already in production.
"Centre" was created in conjunction with Edward Wythe, the writer; Kamilla Sims, who did the color work; and Lucas Gattoni, who did the lettering. Their second book is already in production.
"Ever since I was little, I used to draw with my dad. We would do art challenges and stuff where I would ask him to draw stuff and he would draw it for me. It definitely came from my dad, and I was kind of interested in it and kept working on it," Yzaguirre said.
His father, Timothy Yzaguirre, is the owner of Izzy's Comics and got Bryce interested in comic art early in life. His father sparked his early fascination with art, but his interest in comic art didn't begin until his father opened Izzy's Comics on Lurleen Wallace Boulevard in Northport.
"I was drawing comic book characters and superheroes from TV or movies. I didn’t really associate it with comic book art until my dad got into comic stuff. That definitely got me into comics. I started doing covers for comics. Recently, I’ve started doing a lot more interior work. I think that’s a lot of fun," Yzaguirre said.
His art roots don't stop with his father. Yzaguirre's mother, Christina Dickins, loves and collects art. She has a photo of him that shows him drawing with crayons when he was 3. Yzaguirre laughs at that, noting that most 3-year-olds draw.
"I’ve been doing art for a long time, my whole life really, but I do have an actual date when I was working on something. High school was when I really got into it," Yzaguirre says.
It was in high school that his talent bloomed and he first began looking at art as a means of making a living. He had dropped his drawing for at least a year during middle school and picked it back up in high school. Yzaguirre said his doodling during classes reignited his passion for art.
"I don’t know. I just kind of picked up some pens and while the teacher was talking, I was kind of drawing in the margins of my paper, doodling away. That got me back in the mindset of drawing every day. When I finally started getting commissions, that forces you to draw. You are like, oh, I’ve got to work on this commission then you find yourself drawing all the time because you have the commissions to complete," Yzaguirre said.
Most of his money-making art is by commission, but his passion remains his comic art. Yzaguirre said he spent nearly four months inking his first comic book, which, he admits, was much longer than a professional artist would have taken. His second book went much faster, halving the time involved in producing the drawings. The young artist said that the commissions provide a nice break from the demanding schedule of producing an entire comic book.
Yzaguirre is not a big fan of artificial intelligence that uses human-produced artwork as the raw material for the work it generates, something that rubs the artist the wrong way. It also diminishes his pleasure in creating the art.
"I dabbled in it a little when it first was a thing," he said. "I would sometimes use that (AI generated art) to turn into something else, using it as a reference, but I haven’t used the AI recently because it takes the fun out of the art. You plug in a word and get a completed image. It’s not fun to do that. I like the process of creating art. I actually enjoy the process of creating."
Yzaguirre does all of his drawing using pen, ink, and pencil. When he is satisfied with his drawings, he imports them into the computer where he digitally adds color and does any cleanup work on the artwork that is required. His comic art hero is Daniel Warren Johnson who produces art for Image Comics, Marvel Comics, and DC Comics.
"I think if you see his art and you see my art you will see a lot of similarities. When the page is almost black because there is so much ink on the paper, that is what I like a lot of, but Daniel Warren Johnson is my favorite artist," Yzaguirre said.
His art influences come from gothic architecture, baroque art, tapestries and the art produced in the Medieval period with the gothic style bearing the heaviest influence on his comic art. Yzaguirre said he is very happy where he is right now in art, but he is not certain he will always be a comics artist. He has an eye on working on projects in film and video gaming in the future, but no matter what he does, it will be a reflection of his true passion.
"The biggest thing for me is I like to tell stories and there is a lot of mediums that can do that and a lot of industries that can do that," he said. "I’m into comics right now and it is fun and easy to access. Anyone can go make a comic book. It’s just paper and pencils, and ink and that’s all you really need. I don’t think I want to pigeonhole myself into just doing comics forever."
To see more of Yzaguirre's artwork, you can follow him on social media @brayz_art or check out the link below to visit his website.
More: Bryce Yzaguirre's website
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Northport artist brings imagination to life by creating comic books
