Superintendent’s Artist of the Week: Wyatt Tomaselli

Warwick Valley High School senior Wyatt Tomaselli said he has been drawing for most of his life. When he started using a computer instead of pencil and paper, however, the characters Wyatt created leveled up.

“I wanted to try to advance from traditional art to digital because it just seemed so much cleaner and had more accessible things like brushes and textures and colors,” said Wyatt, whose first characters were those he saw in video games.

Wyatt started off using a free digital painting program called AlpacaFire on his mom’s laptop when he was a freshman. Now he creates with Clip Studio Paint on his own computer and draws using a pen and tablet. 

“Since freshman year, Wyatt has been exploring character design,” WVHS art teacher Kristen Spano said. “He shared his passion for video game characters with me and developed his own style. Wyatt uses bold colors and heavy lines to define his character’s shape and features.” 

In his work, Wyatt is concentrating on character design and character interactions with backgrounds. His favorite project this year, which he is holding in the photograph, is based on the character of a string bean in a forest. 

“I like making big projects with a lot of characters in them because it gives you a lot to look at,” Wyatt said. “The idea was kind of like a video game character concept with the string bean going through the forest and fighting a fungus that infected the entire forest, and it was his job to save it.” 

Wyatt begins by drawing the characters and then works on the background, with different parts of the scene done on different layers. The string bean project has between 10 and 20 layers. 

“Through the countless art classes Wyatt has taken, his illustrations have developed a life of their own, a sense of personality that lifts them off the page to create a dynamic and memorable character,” Ms. Spano said. 

Wyatt is currently taking the WVHS Portfolio class and looking at colleges with animation programs. His grandfather, Rudolph Tomaselli, was an animator whose projects included Beavis and Butt-Head. 

“I used to see video game characters and think that I want to make that on paper and like now I can make it to the point where it looks just like it,” Wyatt said. “I really like the fact that you can make whatever you want as long as you think of it and put the time and effort into it.”

View a slideshow of Wyatt’s work below: