CRUSHING IT

Artist and YouTuber Sam Lewis ’14 had a vision and went after it.

By Megan Tady

In early February, the artist Sam Lewis—known as “SLEW”—was having a busy day. He’d just finished a large-scale oil painting of an elfin queen in a fantastical world, a project that took him 100 hours to complete, and he was moving on to create a smaller painting, this one of a woman’s hand holding a shimmery sword. But first, he had some video editing to complete. The difference between Lewis and other artists: he documents the process of making his art for his YouTube channel, SLEW. He has a staggering 327,000 subscribers, an even higher monthly viewership, and dozens of paying sponsors, allowing him to monetize his art in a wholly unique way. He also has nearly 80,000 Instagram followers.

“I’m a YouTuber,” Lewis said. “The art is the content, but the real job is documenting and storytelling through a video camera. I infuse my perspective, passion, and personality with high-quality documentation of projects and high-quality work. That mixture is what drives people and how I get eyeballs [watching my videos].”

The video of Lewis painting the elfin queen runs 18 minutes long, and is titled, “This Painting Almost Killed Me.” It showcases nearly every step of the process: photographing a model dressed as the elf queen; making a Photoshop composite of the fantastical world; tediously gridding the canvas; organizing the painting into sections: foreground, background, and subject.

“It’s a flat layer,” Lewis explains in the video of the “ugly painting stage.” “It’s drab. There’s color and value mediumally in the right places. That’s fine. You know there’s way more layers, way more panache. It’s kind of like building a house. It’s such a cliche thing, but this is the first layer: structure, mass, shape. But you need the insulation, electricity, walls. So we’re going to add the second layer: Texture, highlights, darker darks. And we’re going to keep on crushing it.”

On camera, Lewis is chatty, personable, funny, and insightful. In the elfin queen video, he’s wearing elf ears, sneezing, snacking on Funyuns, and even sharing moments of self doubt. “I was paralyzed to finish and actually put in the time,” he said, before he finally added the last touches. The video has received almost 50,000 views.

As Lewis built his brand and platform over the past five years, he also attended several art schools, including the Artist Students League and Parsons. Ultimately, he found those institutionalized experiences lacking, preferring to master his techniques on his own. And he had an early vision: to share his art on YouTube.

Lewis himself says he was “raised on YouTube,” watching other artists create and share their work online, particularly graffiti and street art. But those were the nascent days of YouTube, and Lewis saw early on that he could do the same thing, only better, fully optimizing the monetization program built into the platform. “I began to see people making careers on YouTube,” he said. “I saw the blueprint, and I went for it. Honestly, I think I’m just making the videos that I wish I could have watched when I was starting out.”

Two years ago, he moved into a 2,000-square foot studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to scale up and diversify his business. The “Slewniverse,” as he calls his business ecosystem, includes a podcast of the same name, highlighting other artists; figure-drawing sessions posted online; merchandise for sale on his website; and a drawing workshop in Italy in July. “This studio is not only an art studio for myself, but it’s a production center,” he said.

Lewis credits an independent study at Berkshire for validating him as an artist. He pitched a graffiti project to Arts Department Chair Paul Banevicius and several other faculty members, half expecting Berkshire to say no to a student wanting to spray paint on campus. Instead, he got the green light.

“That independent study year was very pivotal,” he said. “It was an extreme genesis experience, and it is a big reason for where I’m at today. My teachers and advisors said, ‘Yes, that’s interesting. Why don’t you try that?’ It legitimized me.

And the entire time I was painting, I was talking to the camera and ‘vlogging,’ at that point. It propelled my love of using video cameras.”

Lewis’s love of Berkshire also runs deep. For the past two years, he’s shared an apartment in Brooklyn with three of his best friends, all fellow Bears, Class of 2014: Blake Polizzi, Peter Hoover, and Ian Rasmussen. Hoover and Lewis were roommates in Buck their senior year.

Asked for advice on carving out a life as a full-time artist, Lewis says, “You have to be a hungry shark. You have to be amped up about it. You’ve got to draw from that entrepreneurial spirit. Not that I’m some savant, but I just knew what I liked. I’ve tried really hard, and I’ve been really consistent about it. And now I have a lot of freedom to do what I want.” @slewp