Walden WONG An Interview with Lon Levin
When did you first think about art as something you wanted to do? Were you encouraged or discouraged by family, friends, teachers, mentors?
What kind of kid were you? Where did you grow up? What were your influences?
I didn't start seriously thinking about what I wanted to do as an adult until I started attending San Francisco State University. I've always wanted to be some kind of an artist, but not sure what. So I've entered the school thinking I can go into Business Marketing and Engineering then Business Marketing where I can do package designs. Both those fields had something to do with drawing and that was what I enjoyed doing as a child. It wasn't until I graduated and started seeing work in those fields that I wanted something that was closer to what I love, which was comic books and creating them. Growing up as a child and wanting to be an artist, I was always discouraged. Comments such as "it's hard to become a professional artist" and "You want to be a starving artist?" would always be spoken to me. But I loved drawing and I still decided to give it a try.
Borned, raised and still residing in San Francisco, I was always the quiet kid that would be sitting in the back of the classroom drawing. Just keeping to myself and I would just draw almost every day. When into my college years, I was still doodling and drawing in the margins of my notebook. I would constantly get into trouble for not paying attention and constantly drawing. As a kid, I learned about classic artists such as Van Gogh, Monet, Pacasso, Rembrandt and Dali. It wasn't until I started wanting to become a professional comic book artist that I would study some of the current comic book artists a couple of years before the Image Comics boom. That's when I was studying the process of how comic art was created, how lines were drawn and the dynamics of comic book art.
