About
Portfolio
Exhibitions
Contact
[Jim Studeny was born in 1961, raised and is still living in Pittsburgh, PA with his lovely wife Judy. They were high school sweethearts and were married in 1981. They have one beautiful daughter, Dana, and a precious granddaughter, Trinity. Jim is the second of eight children. His parents, Jerry and Marlene raised their family in Bloomfield with a strict Catholic upbringing. Jim attended St. Joseph’s Elementary School and Immaculate Conception Middle School in Bloomfield and Lawrenceville Catholic High School in Lawrenceville. He earned his Associates degree in Specialized Technology Architectural CADD at Pittsburgh Technical Institute in 1986. Professionally, Jim is a Designer and has worked in the Civil Engineering field for over 20 years. Early on in his career while working as a draftsman for Duncan Lagnese & Associates, Jim was presented with the opportunity to produce all of the working drawings for the Handbook of Urban Drainage and Wastewater Disposal published in 1989 by Wiley Inter-Science. He was solely responsible for manually drawing 96 figures by hand in ink on Mylar. As Jim’s experience and interests grew, he decided to branch out and work with architects for a while before returning to the engineering field with The Gateway Engineers. In this position, he produced manual ink survey drawings and CADD produced details for construction for various municipalities. In 1998 Jim became employed as a draftsman with SAI Consulting Engineers, Inc. where he is still currently employed. Jim is now a designer for the Highway Department and truly enjoys his work. This work seems to be more challenging than most work he has done in the past. The Engineers are extremely intelligent and detail oriented, which serves to heighten Jim’s abilities as a detailer. He is also a member of the American Society of Highway Engineers (ASHE). His career is driven by his passion and exceptional ability to create highly detailed drawings. Jim became interested in drawing and painting when he was ten years old. He started painting with paint by numbers but soon got bored. By age sixteen he progressed to duplicating any drawings or graphics that interested him. He started painting with acrylics and embellishing with metal finishes to make the drawings his own works of art. Although he was never encouraged in school to pursue his art, he never gave up on his one true passion. Jim’s father Jerry had served in the Korean War and spent time in Japan. His love of the Japanese arts influenced Jim as a young boy. He was quickly drawn to the Japanese wood block prints. In appreciation of the art, he embarked on a journey of learning to apply his skills in reproducing his favorite Japanese woodblock images on canvas with acrylic paints. The process can be long and arduous but the results are clearly outstanding. He has been producing his fine art works since 2006. He chooses prints from various reference materials and always chooses prints that he would be proud to display in his own home. Starting with a selected image, an enlargement would be created to a scaled proportion to fit a canvas. A rough tracing would be produced from the enlargement and transferred on to the canvas. The canvas would then be detailed and painted. This method gives him the opportunity to recreate the original image with the highest level of accuracy. In an effort to eliminate brushstrokes and create an image as flat as a pressed woodblock print, the paint is thinned to allow for finer applications. Many coats of paint may be required to achieve this finish, and depending upon the color, up to ten coats may be required to achieve this consistency. Finally, the inking process can begin. The use of waterproof, archival permanent black ink is applied to the painted canvas to achieve the look of the black print of the woodblock. Freehand drawing and every tool on his drafting table may be used. Triangles, t-squares, circle templates, adjustable curves, railroad curves, and even French curves are utilized. Because French curves lend themselves well to the curves in the original woodblocks, Jim began referring to them as Japanese curves. The tools of his drafting days are invaluable and paramount to the level of perfection he is striving to achieve. ]
J. Studeny Studios
