Guest of Honor: Tom Bacon

Tom is a digital artist from Illinois, living in Chicago, but grew up in the suburbs an hour away. He lived a simple life in a regular town, nothing special about it, but it had the necessities; bike trails, video rental stores, lifelong friendships, pretty dang good pizza.

He always loved to draw, some of his earliest work was his knock off superheroes he made inspired by Superman and the X-Men. He would draw comics in notebooks and then staple them together, giving them that 90’s comics era look of "1st Spectacular issue" insignia in the top corner. He partnered with friends to draw various comics about superheroes, henchmen and vigilantes.

In the beginning of 2018, something clicked, or crashed? Tom hit a wall, as he was trying to make new fan art for the upcoming convention season, and he realized he was uninspired, and once again just making "art" just to make it, not for the love of art. He randomly had watched a pixel art tutorial and really was attracted to the use of fewer colors and the focus on values, instead of line work.

He opened a new document in photoshop and just started messing around with pixel art in black and white…and then it clicked for real. Something sparked inside, the drive was back, the world was turning. He went with the flow in the piece and created a simple crevice, a crack in the ground, spinning a mystery into thin air about why the crack was there and where it led. What was down there? From there he would create strange foreign worlds below the surface of the earth in a limited color palette, all in pixel art, evoking classic games he’d grown up with.

Today Tom is continuing the exploration of his "Below Earth" and "Synth City" art series, and is focusing on combining them into a narrative art book called "Below Earth: A Pixel Expedition."