Featured AOI Artist: N8 Van Dyke

About the Artist:

Nate (N8) Van Dyke is a prolific artist and illustrator who began drawing at the age of two and has yet to stop. N8's medium of choice ranges from: pencil, ink, marker, watercolor, gauche, acrylic and oils. Regardless of what medium N8 picks up, his signature style can be seen in the contrast of his thin and thick lines in his pen and ink work and the high sheen contrast in his mixed media pieces.

N8's heavily detailed illustrations feature his heavy metal humans and his well-known future primitive apes with dark menacing personalities.

Roadside Service

N8 recently took a job as a senior concept artist at NCsoft working on City of Heroes. Just prior, he finished creating concept art and storyboards for the Sega video game, Iron Man. His work has also been featured in several magazines such as JUXTAPOZ, XBox, PlayStation and Heavy Metal. Over the years N8 has attracted clients such as Converse, Levi Strauss, Scion, EMI Records, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Burton Snowboards, Slayer and Wired. N8’s work has been commissioned and showcased internationally. He will be having a solo gallery show this November in London followed by another solo show the following month in Portland.

His color work features studies of animals (apes, elephants, giraffes) against lustrous backdrops.

Thigh High

Into the Light

In His Words:

I was excited about this project the moment I was asked to do it. When speaking with Roland he told me of this idea he had of my chimp character basically building a bike in his shop. The bike that he wanted me to base it off of was his well known bike, The Glory Stomper, which helped him win the Biker Build-Off. He followed up by sending me a ton of reference shots of the bike and various shop pictures. After talking with Roland and getting all of the photos the mural pretty much painted itself. I wanted it to be an image of the chimp (shop monkey) going to town on what is going to be his greatest bike ever. In the background you see some menacing tools of the trade and some concept drawings done by the chimp himself. The end result is a peek as to what Roland and his crew put into a bike.

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