Meet Rick Lucey

We were lucky to catch up with Rick Lucey recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Rick , appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

I believe my resilience from various places my upbringing and just being stubborn and wanting to move forward in life and yes at times I do have moments of doubt or lack of confidence which may cause me to stop and want not move on with things in life, yet many in life inspire me to keep it going strong and I like to see what is around the corner!

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

Where I am now and from where I started seems to have been a solid narrative if you will with at a few moments of thinking of other paths. I am someone that at the moment creates in various media and make my living from it. As a kid I loved to draw and it stuck with me and my parents seem to see this as they had my take private art lessons beyond school lessons. When I got at the end of high school I for a bit thought about wanting to get into aviation, yet felt I would struggle with it due to my weak math skills among other things. But I did love art and everything around it and that would be my focus in college and during the summers I would manage to get work with an illustrator which helped push my skills. All this time I also had a strong interest in cartoons and comics so I started to create my own. I did think about trying to get into comics full time but that was not to be. Moving from Texas to California by the early 90s I started to gain digital skills to go with my traditional art skills.

At this time after a few years of learning digital graphics creation I became a 3D/animator/concept artist working in video games on first VR Game, the first 3D PACMAN GAME, etc. Sadly many of those projects in video games got cancelled and then I was out of that industry. During the late 90s and into the 2000s I went through of time of doing freelance artwork, doing various personal projects. I would work with writers like Peter Alexander and Will Viharo doing covers for some of their books, etc. A former teacher Rafael Olivas would connect me with TechTV where I would do storyboards and even work there for a while doing Photoshop work for some of their shows before it became G4. Like anything in my life taking on something new like storyboards lead to many other jobs in this area like working for Gyro an ad agency doing many more storyboards for ads. Filmmaker/Comedian and former co worker Antonio Scarpitta had me storyboard a short film of his and that lead to doing at least 4 others a few along with his have been fully produced. So as my father always told me network will help you push into many areas of your career. People like Ben Collison and Leef Smith got me going into the area of art shows which I do to this day. Comic artist Uri Fink and animator/comic artist Michael V Bennett two very creative gents I met in the 90s into mid 2000s helped me at times get my interest in creating comics going again!

People are an important element in my life in growing a continuing my art career such as Katy, Connie, Desiree, Stephanie, Nate, Bob, Britt, Don, Matt, Griffin, Peter, Lord Blood Rah, Mr. Lobo, Scott, Maureen, Derrick, Brian, Baron Jarred, Chris, Michael, Talmage and many others! Of course my parents and brothers also were big supporters of my art career and even helped in many ways! I am sure there are many names I missed but they are in my creative heart! Friends, family and those that have hired me have really helped in my creative journey!

In the last few years I have met people like Michael T McCreery that had me doing various art related projects for him that have brought me a little bit into the toy world which I hope to do more in as time moves on. I also have had some interesting projects like a playing card/poster I created for NBC Sports/SF Giants. With this project I also was live TV interviewed at the game where they handed out the poster I created and I signed a few. So my career always has a few little surprise jobs like that one. In the last 10 years I worked with Nate Ricketts Design doing home decor art objects and at present I work at The Parade Guys run by Stephanie Mufson a very cool boss and very creative talent herself. My present job is float building, prop building and various other jobs like even creating fun monsters. It is one of those jobs that is full of surprises and fun adventures like driving a float for the first time in the recent SF Pride Parade!

As for my own projects they have been going forever one could say since I started this whole creative journey. I am slowly working on my Dr. Death Von Tiki Series. For close to ten years I have posted an original Monster drawing or sculpt at times every Monday on my various social media platforms! I also hope to do a few MONDAY MONSTER SHOWS over the next year or so to celebrate 10 years of creating these monster images! As I tell many people type my name Rick Lucey in google, etc. under images and you should easily find my creations. So for the near future I hope to continue to do my various art projects for clients, myself and just try to live my best creative life!

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I think one of the best qualities which I slowly developed in my artistic journey is an openness to learn the basics of whatever skill you are learning about and push yourself. Don’t be afraid to make many mistakes and really ask questions of others in the field you want to pursue. My three core things which cover qualities, skills and knowledge at least when it comes to my art journey was observe, listen and execute! In other words if you are starting out as an artist really draw from real life, learn from other artists be in in classes or online. The wonderful thing about the Internet something I did not have in my formative years is you have so much material to learn from free online tutorials, seeing other art and artists create! My biggest advice usually to new and beginning artists is to get any kind of sketch book and just draw everyday which is something I do now! Draw family, friends, pets, etc. Push yourself! Find your main area of interests in the field you want to get into and focus on them, learn about them seek out others that are doing those things. I was lucky enough as a your person to have someone help me with this type of thing!

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

I don’t think there was really one book that played a role in my creative development probably various comic books I had as a kid, I also recall various children’s books my parents gave my brothers and I that were from the 30s or 40s I believe. The illustrations they had really fascinated my little kid mind and probably have inspired my later art at times. So you would think there would be one book but to me it was many books, comics and magazines that surrounded my life. I was big into history so my parents inherited interesting books going back to the early 20th century from my grandparents, and possibly other relatives which gave me insights into this world and the visual elements of it.

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Image Credits

All images uploaded were of my creation.

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