Name: Ian MacLean
Hometown: Pontypool, ON
Publication: Drug Facts for Young People
Born: 1979
Winning Ben Wicks Award entry:
Current:
Past:
Ian MacLean was born in 1979 (a very good year) and raised in Pontypool,
a ridiculously tiny town about an hour east of Toronto. Being without
cable television, and able to receive only two blurry channels through
the antenna, he had to amuse himself with fanciful stories of his own
imagining, which he would occasionally spew forth onto paper.
Some time later, he was exposed to the mind-rotting medium, known as comic books. Despite the insistence of many of his authority figures that ìthis was NOT artî he began to dabble in the practice, creating crudely drawn sequential stories of questionable content. His studies somehow enabled him to sneak his way into the Ontario College of Art & Design, where he must have bribed key members of the staff to allow him into the Illustration program.
While there he met several others of his ilk, and edited and co-produced the OCAD Comic Compendium, a collection of various student comic works. He managed to graduate with honours, no doubt through arcane means, and went on to work as a freelance illustrator for some time.
Craving new victims to expose to his scribblings, he moved to Calgary, Alberta in 2003, where he began working as a freelance pixel artist in the video game industry. He has somehow managed to continue to work in the industry to this date, as well as secure himself a fairly fetching bride, by the name of Carolyn.
He now lives in a small wooden hut, where he enjoys drawing macabre monstrosities, updating his website at www.nvisionillustration.com, and writing about himself in third person. He plans to use his winnings from this contest to further his career in ìthe comicsî and to try to tackle his student debt...oh, and he'd like to thank his Aunt Sharon for bringing the contest to his attention!
