Today we’d like to introduce you to Kyle Bice.
Kyle, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I grew up in the middle of the middle of Central Illinois, a.k.a. Champaign-Urbana. I was a comic book geek, D&D nerd, photography lover and C average student. I attended community college there for two semesters, drifting between photography, drawing, and television production classes, constantly trying to figure out where to focus my growing creative energies.
I eventually decided that I need to be in a bigger city, with a longer and more robust history of the arts for me to mine so I made my way North to Chicago. I’m coming up on my twentieth anniversary here and I feel like I’ve barely opened the lid of this treasure chest that is Chicago.
For a brief moment, I attended Columbia College as an Illustration major but the school’s programs weren’t to my liking and I lost interest almost immediately. Thankfully, one of my teachers noticed me and recommended I check out a little trade school down the street called, The American Academy of Art, where some fairly famous illustrators had attended over the past 75 years.
Within minutes of entering the halls, of “The Academy” as all former students call it, I fell in love. I went through the next three years of college at breakneck speed, not taking any summers off so that I could finish as soon as possible and enter the workforce as an illustrator. I had abandoned the idea of working in photography or film but those parts of me were just waiting on the back burner.
After college, I spent the next eight years working in retail as a manager at an art store then, oddly enough, moving into security and loss prevention. It was an odd career to stumble upon but it gave me some great stories. The desire to get back into the arts and strike out as a freelancer finally took hold of me in 2008 right around the same time my wife took on a steady, corporate, day job. She gave me the freedom to jump off that ledge and try something new.
Since then I’ve been a storyboard artist, a children’s book illustrator, I’ve illustrated a national ad campaign for McDonald’s, painted a multitude of portraits for private collections, illustrated a plethora of beer labels for New Holland Brewing, been a substitute illustration teacher, drawn concept designs for large overseas corporations and on and on the list goes.
What I am most proud of is the work I’ve been doing over the past two years. The creation and realization of Beer Portraits (yes, portraits painted with beer), This Craft Nation, and now my budding photography career.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The road has been forked, full of potholes, jagged, rough, smooth. filled with gravel, and more. As with almost any freelancer you’ll talk to, one the biggest obstacles is knowing what to charge and make sure you get paid. I once had to send a fake lawyer letter to a multinational business to get them to respond to my e-mails and pay me after almost nine months of negligence.
Another ding in the armor of the self-employed that I continue to deal with to this day is an old injury from my security days. I have two herniated disc in my lower back and one in my neck from tackling a guy much bigger than me who was trying to hurt one of my co-workers. That company went out of business before I could come after them to pay for my medical bills so I’m continually battling the old aches and pains while hunched over the drawing board or crouching down on my knees at a photo shoot.
Please tell us about KAB Studio and This Craft Nation.
In the past couple of years, my business has become multifaceted. I am a portrait painter, illustrator and photographer. It’s hard to narrow these three things down to just one kind of business so I’ve gone the other way and branched out. I run my own studio in Chicago while I am also the co-creator, alongside my friend Fred Bueltmann, of a business that I am immensely proud of called This Craft Nation or TCN for short.
TCN is an online publication, podcast and soon to be book among other things. In 2017, Fred and I traversed the country via Amtrak for 35 days, interviewing makers across the country. We stopped in a different city almost daily and interviewing and photographing people making things by hand from all walks of life. We were searching for their story and their truths about the Craft Renaissance and collecting into a book with other stories from our travels.
The book will be illustrated with portraits painted in craft beer, it’s a strange thing that I do, with a few essays by me but ultimately the bulk of the writing will be from Fred.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
Back in the 8th grade, I made friends with a quiet artist kid at lunch one day. He was drawing a comic book character in his notebook at lunch and his skill level blew me away. I remember asking to see his sketches and when he handed the book over I fell in love with drawing and superhero comic books at the same time. He became one of my best friends and inspirations for years and years.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.kylebice.com
- Email: kyle@kylebice.net
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beerportraits/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ThisCraftNation/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/beerportraits
- Other: www.thiscraftnation.com
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