We recently connected with Steve Gervais and have shared our conversation below.

Steve, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

Transformers the 1986 Animated Movie, I was a kid at the time, but I can remember clearly to this day, My mom had gotten me a ticket to that movie and, for the first time, she let me go by myself. So there I was in the movie theater, with a big bag of popcorn and a large rootbeer, ready to watch my favorite cartoon on the big screen, and I was blown away right from the first scene. Right then and there I was hooked. I mean I loved art before, what kid didn’t love drawing and cartoons, but man I was hooked. I came out of that movie and met my mother at the entrance of the theater in one of the biggest malls at the time Calgary had to offer. I looked at her with true excitement.
She asked, “How was the movie?”
I told her it looked completely different than the show and I am pretty sure I filled her head with every scene. I mentioned how I noticed that the animation and art style were a little different than the show on TV. Then I said to her “I know what I want to do with my life.”
She humored me and asked, ” what?”
“Art, animation, cartoons. I want to draw better,” I replied. I wanted to be able to make cool art just like I saw on the big screen that day.
Many Saturday mornings, I would get up with my sketchbook (Well blank paper and lined paper that was to be used for my school work ) and pencil, watch the great lineup of cartoons, and draw what I saw on TV. These were the first steps of my journey into art.
Fast forward to 1999, when I went to ACAD and did two years in college to start my pursuit of animation and I discovered the class was unfortunately removed from the school, so I looked into other colleges in my city. In 2001, I graduated from a local college in Calgary AMTC and received my diploma in animation. After I graduated, I started my true adult journey into art.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I believe the start really began when I became a Kyron and graphics artist for A-Channel a local TV station. I got the hardcore speed training of my Photoshop skills, creating the news boards behind the anchors and applying graphics for the live news, but I wanted to do more so I got together with some of my old college friends and we started our own small comic label called Vicious Ambitious comics, or VA for short.
We created 6 to 8 different anthologies and short stories. Since we were the writers, artists, and editors, and had published so many books, we technically qualified as a self-published group and signed up to attend the San Diego ComicCon. It was an honor to have that title on our badges.
Eventually, the group disbanded and some of us moved on, got married, moved to different cities, and had kids, but I still wanted to do more art. I started trying to do zombie portraits as commissions at shows, then dabbled in t-shirt design, then eventually started making art prints. When I wasn’t at conventions, I was training online with great artists including Stephen Silver and Bobby Chui. I attended many different cons in our city and surrounding area.
Then one trip changed my art style yet again. It was a trip to Las Vegas for my 10-year wedding anniversary. I enjoyed all the sights and sounds of Las Vegas, but it was watching the spray paint artists on either end of Fremont Street that changed me. I watched them for a very long time, analyzing their techniques. I must have bugged every artist on the strip with my barrage of questions – they probably thought I was inquiring about a position to do what they do. LOL.
My wife looked at me and said ” Oh, crap. You’re gonna try this when we get home, aren’t you?”
Yup, that is exactly what I did. I went online and found every video I could find on spray painting. Then I bought one can of black and one can of white from the local hardware store and, I gave it a try. That was it I was hooked. I have had the pleasure of some of my greatest stories and adventures from making that one decision to pick up a can and try.
During the Pandemic I finally got my real taste of animation, I worked on three pilot shows with my former instructor, an ex-Pixar and Disney-trained artist, Steve Rabatich. I got to use TV paint. This was the first time I’ve used this European animation software and I had to train myself because all the training online was either Russian, German, or French. The second and third pilots we worked on were made in Adobe animate. I was a big fan of Adobe Animate because it was the upgraded version of flash which is what I used at all my eLearning companies I worked at. I used to use Flash to ink a lot of my art before I learned how to use the rest of the Adobe Suite, like illustrator. I’ve worked as a freelance artist in a variety of different genres. I created eLearning for a variety of different companies by myself. I designed logos, I have created tattoos. I’ve done a lot of different styles of art and each time I’ve worked and completed the project, I learned something new about myself and this business.
With the success of my spraypaint art and attending different shows, I’ve had the honor of being able to teach at a school art day for the last 6 years. I’ve got to teach up to 80 kids in four 1-hour sessions for the whole day. I get to teach how to spraypaint and create a piece of art they could take home and show Mom and Dad and that’s just amazing. I love watching these kids paint and give it a try without all the hangups of structure and technique. It reminds me of when I first started spray painting.
One of my biggest achievements was when I got to create an animated book about John Ware, the first black rancher here in Alberta. I worked alongside my friend and fellow artist, Hugh Rookwood who did the the art for the award-winning book. I got to animate his art but I also had to emulate it because this was a book and I needed it to be in a wide-screen format. It was an eye-opening project. It really tested my knowledge and skills, taking a remarkable amount of time and effort. This was a crowning achievement for me.
I’ve also had the great fortune of being able to go to different schools and teach about character design and animation 101. I always love doing that because I feel like I’m helping to create the next generation of artists and animators.
Recently, I’ve been told I am in my Renaissance era for my art. I have been training under the wing of my new mentor, Evan Burse of the cartoon block group, and I have been drawing and making my work much stronger, faster, and better than it ever has been. Overall, I think it is my best work so far. I make a point of taking on different types of media such as watercolor and gouache. I still love spray painting, but after being diagnosed with cancer and having it removed 5 years ago, and the scare of it coming back into my lungs, I try not to spray as much but I still love to do it. Doing this has honestly made me fall in love with gouache and watercolor paintings. I create classic G1-style Transformers art and watercolor superhero portraits. I’m going to keep pushing myself to learn and train until I can’t, that’s the only way to grow as an artist.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I would say the most rewarding aspect of being an artist is that I am able to influence and help assist the next generation of artists, people like my son. He’s very creative and I want him to stay creative – to always play and always have fun creating, and making art. I find that now that I’m reeducating myself I feel like I’m playing rather than formally learning, I’m having a lot of fun and it doesn’t feel like day-to-day job with no reward at the end. Every day, I come away with something learned.
Having the opportunity to go to schools and teach, and go to shows, and give advice to these budding new artists, refuels me. It’s great to be able to offer advice, tips, and tricks, and be the mentor I wish I had been looking for from the beginning of my journey as an artist.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

A lesson that I had to unlearn was to get out of my own head, to get out of a very structured way of thinking – it’s not creative. I would have to make sure that that line was perfectly straight or I would have to make sure that a line was just right and I found that I was starting to dwell on the technical and structural part of the art instead of just having fun creating. Spray paint art was one of those freeing moments for me. I would paint spray, and lift the paint using plastic or paper, I would try something new every time. I would try using some different materials and techniques to create new and unique effects. I would try different types of materials to create texture. Once you put that paint down it’s down, it’s committed. So you need to either rethink what you’re doing or dwell on the technical side of it, but I never did. I would just have fun with it. Look at it.
I think in all my years of spray painting I may have destroyed three pieces of art that I started and couldn’t finish. Usually, I’d be able to come back to it and add more or find a way to play around with it to make it work. I had to free myself up and just see what came to me.
I really forced me to unlearn that rigidity, that structure I was forcing on myself, and to just have fun with it. Nearly every time, I loved the outcome.
Now I feel like my art is just fun again rather than feeling like I’m working on a production house. I’m creating art that I love and want to share with the world.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sgervais.wixsite.com/sgervaisillustration
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oldboy76/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sgervaisillustration