By Matt Snyder
When Charles Urbach goes to work, he sits down and draws a dragon. Or sometimes a mummy, a spaceship, a stormtrooper or an oriental fortress.
The Grove City man is a professional fantasy/science-fiction illustrator whose works appear in trading card games like “Legends of the Five Rings” and online strategy games like “Star Wars Galaxies” and “Legends of Norrath,” both based on video games.
It’s a job like any other, Urbach said. The industry is challenging and thick with competition. While there’s more interest in science-fiction and fantasy these days, he said that interest has brought even more people into the fold who want to illustrate commercially.
“If you talk to folks who have been doing it for 30 years, they’ll say that ‘we don’t know if we could even break in today,’” he said.
Urbach said he gets steady work now, and his art has begun to get more attention in certain circles. Even now, he said the work isn’t what many young artists expect. It’s most comparable to running a small business – accounting, taxes, marketing, speaking with clients and managing deadlines.
Only about half the job of independent illustration is the creative work, Urbach said. The rest is the nuts and bolts of business.
He said one of the greatest shortcomings of up-and-coming artists is their failure to get a good business background. Two things that few college fine arts courses touch on are contracts and taxes.
“I was completely unprepared for the realities of the field I specifically wanted to go into,” Urbach said.
He added that because of his home life, he was grounded early in the day-to-day demands of a creative profession. His mother was a successful singer and songwriter. His love for fantasy and science fiction developed from his home life, where both his parents enjoyed the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and sci-fi movies like “Star Wars.”
“When creative expression is part of your ongoing life, it’s different than when you grow up in an environment and your parents are telling you, you need to learn ‘real skills’ or play sports,” Urbach said.
Urbach, like many professional illustrators, works with mixed media. He uses pen-and-ink and colored pencil, and adjusts color saturation and composition using Adobe Photoshop.
“In the field I work in, colored pencil is kind of uncommon and usually raises an eyebrow from an art director,” he said.
While Urbach said he’s been working seriously in the industry for about 10 years, he began to get noticed two years ago when Alderac Entertainment Group commissioned him to do a series of “stronghold” pieces for its “Legend of the Five Rings” trading card game.
One fear he had after his work for Alderac was that he might get “pigeonholed” as an architectural artist,. Many art directors like to categorize artists, which can limit the range of work they end up doing.
Urbach said his highest-profile work so far is for Sony Online Entertainment.
“I’ve been doing art professionally since 1991, but until I put up a piece showing a stormtrooper, that’s when people recognized that I’m doing this for real. It’s a real job. Because it’s something that people really relate to,” he said.
Urbach said that young and aspiring artists who want to go the commercial route should also get a very broad base of art skills, learn a variety of media techniques and get a good understanding of human anatomy, overall composition and color.
He said it’s never good for an artist to lose work because he can’t do the piece.
Skills are best honed with formal training, he said, but added, “That process doesn’t end when you graduate from high school or college.”
His last words of caution for aspiring artists were to be aware the field is packed with stiff competition. One of the most devestating mindsets artists get into is that they’ll be the next overnight success, he said.
“It sets them up for unrealistic expectations,” Urbach said. Regardless of how well artists did in school, “the new environment of the professional world takes an enormous amount of time and commitment to achieve any level of success.”
Most artists won’t become famous, he said, and just like an employee at a factory they have to punch the clock every day and do their time in the trenches before they move up the ladder.
“It is something that I very much love doing, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it is a job and there are deadlines to make,” Urbach said.
Those interested in contacting Urbach can do so through his Web site, at www.charlesurbach.com
