Hi, I’m Curtis ⍨

I’m a Character & Creature Artist / Illustrator

I have lived the majority of my life on the east coast of the US and currently call Durham, North Carolina home. Younger me really wanted to either an ecologist or biologist. I ended up pursuing a career in Interactive Design and Game Development which is a complex way of saying I wanted to create Character & Creatures for games. My minor somewhat unsurprisingly was in Scientific Illustration.

The common thread through all of this is that I have always been really obsessed with anything organic whether it was plants, corals, insects or anatomy. It even bleeds outside of my career as I spend the vast majority of my free time backpacking, rock climbing, or dragging my friends through swamps to look at obscure plants. I also own like 200 houseplants… so yea I am a little neurotic.

It is always easiest to tell people who are not familiar with game development that I am a sculptor primarily. Even though my work with studios like Electronic Arts, Hasbro, and Lost Boys Interactive is much more complex than that.

In my illustration I think it is really evident that I am a sculptor as I am much more interested in capturing shapes and forms than I am about capturing color. In botanical illustration for instance the focus is typically on the vibrant colors of blooms or inflorescences. In my work I find myself drawn to the unique shapes and patterns and tend to prefer more muted stains to highlight their form above all else.

I do all of my illustrations traditionally in ink, pencil, coffee, wine, ground up flower or plant pigment. Yes, I drink way too much coffee + I like the way a coffee stain looks.