Ron Lemen Bio
About Ron Lemen
Illustrator, Educator, Designer, Author, Creative
Consultant, Visionary. Whichever
creative project Ron Lemen is tackling, he will always bring a fresh twist and
perspective to it. Quality and Clarity are
the main motives. His art is a mosh up
of influences from Warner Brothers Cartoons to Peter Paul Rubems, and
everything in between. Every job is inspired
by this confluence of creative influences, melding together each new piece into
something fresh and unique.
Born into an artistic family, it wasn’t hard to guess Ron
Lemen’s future. While art was an outlet for most of his family wishing they
could do it instead of their actual jobs, Ron was determined to make it his
career. His grandmother did portraiture,
mom dabbled with everything from painting to welding (and gave him his first
skateboard which would consume a big part of his future), dad did a lot of antique
furniture restoration, crafting and building muskets, guitars, meticulous miniature
wooden ships and WW1 airplanes, and his grandfather designed and built radios
and cars from the ground up just for fun.
It wouldn’t be long before all these influences would lead Ron down his
own creative path.
Prior to art school, consisting of several years in college
classes and finishing in the Atelier system, Ron was already working with
several skateboard companies creating their logos, graphics and production
art. While in art school, he traveled
around the country as a sponsored athlete skateboarding in demos and filming skate
videos. This early exposure to the action
sports industry led him to work with clientele like Birdhouse Skateboards (Tony
Hawk), Airwalk Shoes, Ride Snowboards, and Transworld Media, just to name a
few. In the several decades since, Ron
has designed products for the action sports industry, from skate shoes to
travel bags. This led to designing some
amazing hi tech toys for children and now designing a portable studio for
traveling artists.
Just prior to finishing
art school, Ron started working in the comic industry creating content for
Image, Dark Horse and Marvel Comics. Somehow
during this time, he found his way to the exciting new world of 3D gaming and
started his career in the industry as a concept artist for Presto Studios. Since then he has immersed himself in the
video game and animation/film industry where he does concept and pre-production
art, illustrations, color keys, and matte paintings on occasion for companies
like Universal and Harmony Gold.
While studying in his first Atelier, Ron was asked to instruct
a few classes which he enjoyed so much that it led him to teaching foundation
and entertainment art with 5 different prestigious art schools as well as
co-founding his own with wife and partner, Vanessa Lemen, that started as
Studio 2nd Street and has evolved to what is now Lemenaid.com. The two are dedicated to simplifying,
clarifying, and reinventing art education, making it a useful tool for anyone
and everyone wanting to speak using the visual language.
Along with mentoring some fantastic artists, Ron is currently
finishing up a hefty figure drawing manual covering a variety of techniques and
approaches, and he is preparing a website for his future graphic novel(s),
developing a universe he hopes will inform, inspire and entertain those who are
curious and adventurous. Speaking of
adventure, he and his wife are working on a creative Vlog that will send them
both out and about, far and away, traveling and adventuring into the unknown in
search of the meaning of creativity, engaging in the imagination, and exploring
solutions with a child-like curiosity and a hunger for problem solving. In other words, it’s a how-to Vlog for the
artistically inclined, with adventure and play as a necessary tool for discovering
solutions.
