Artist Bio

As my name implies... my name is Erica Wester. And adverse to what the appellation alludes to, I'm actually appalled by alliteration.

I love cartoons, illustration, puppetry, figurative sculpture, design, writing, and drinking Dr. Pepper. 
Animation has always fascinated me to about as far back as I can remember, and I've been drawing since I could pick up a pencil, so it seemed to be the most reasonable thing to work towards. 

I'm also very passionate about music and not unlike drawing, it's something I've been teaching myself since my first Playskool toy keyboard.  Given that both are based largely around accuracy in timing, I feel that music and animation go hand-in-hand.  Of course I might just feel this way because I grew up in the Disney revival of the 90s, which was graciously littered with showtune-esque compositions.
Naturally, I'm also a big fan of musical theatre and live performance.

In recent years I've found myself particularly interested in creature effects and puppetry (live, stop-mo, and animatronic), because it combines a very interesting and almost eclectic set of skills, craft, and talent. 

I am most comfortable in traditional mediums for animation (currently.  We'll see how that changes in the next few years), as well as sketches and illustrations.  I like to try new things, so I often find myself experimenting when I intend to render a traditional image.  Typically I'll use art markers or watercolors, but I like find different ways to apply them from image to image.  Recently I've been very into oldschool pen-and-ink.

Despite being more comfortable in traditional, I typically color and render images on the computer, usually through photoshop.  Often I'll combine the two, opting to sketch and/or ink traditionally, and color digitally, as I feel much of the life and movement in my sketches is lost if I choose digital from the get-go.  

I also love typography and playing around with fonts, but when I'm not finding something that's to my liking, I'll write it by hand.  I love designing fonts and logos.