GREG SARABIA

My name is Greg Sarabia and I've been an artist all of my life. The process of envisioning something in my mind and going through the sometimes arduous process to bring that vision to fruition is a part of me. In the case of my work the end result is a drawing, a painting, or a sculpture, but the process has always remained the same. "How can I make this idea into a reality?" is something that's always on my mind.

Although harnessing my creativity and making things was something I've always enjoyed, it took me a while to get my footing. After highschool I attended The Community College of Southern Nevada and it wasn't until midway through that I decided to focus on art. I then transferred to The University of Nevada, Las Vegas and pursued a Bachelor's of Art with an emphasis on traditional arts focusing on sculpture. My academic career and those projects and ideas I was working through in the classroom setting were not challenging enough for me however and I began to research and pursue my own work on my own time.

School was always my job and main point of focus but throughout the years I supported myself as a freelance artist working on commission. Aside from making money, I was constantly presented with new and interesting requests from clients and this in turn led me to research more interesting techniques, materials, and methods that I couldn't in the academic arena. I became a self-taught artist in this respect.
 

This creative fervor would eventually combine with a another point of interest, my love for collectibles. Never having grown out of playing with and collecting toys, I began to approach this area of my life with the same passion and stumbled upon action figure customizing, which is what I have kept busy with for almost a decade. Being approached by a client with nothing more that a bad screenshot, a rough sketch, or merely an idea and knowing that it was in my hands to make their idea into a reality, a physical thing, satisfied all of my creative urges. I had found my passion, or something I could pour myself into at the very least. 

Explaining to people what it is that I do exactly can be tricky, visual aides help and that's why I decided to make tutorial videos and film reviews of finished pieces in order to provide some transparency to this extremely niche community. The process however, always remains the same. "How can I bring this idea into physical from?" Many times, I will be given reference for a character by a client. These characters may only exist on a comic page or digitally in a videogame so the process of physically creating a two-dimensional design is challenging, but it is the end result that I always envision. 

 

School was the place to take different classes, to work with new media, to experiment with different techinques. Any tool I picked up, any surface I worked on felt natural to me and I could always create what I saw in my head. There were just too many areas to focus on only one. I changed my major at least once. With the work I was doing on my own time, I was able to make use of so many of these techniques that I enjoyed. Fabrication, sculpting, portraiture, painting, weathering, and even scale fabric mixed media work are all present in my work. I enventually graduated after focusing on sculpture but it was my own personal work where I was making progress. Where I grew the most. My goal now is to find a creative work environment where I can use as much of my skill set as possible and create 'cool stuff'.