Boerne artist to compete for Illustrator of the Future award

Very few people know what the new year holds for them

Very few people know what the new year holds for them: Jordan Smajstrla isn’t one of them.

April will find Smajstrla, a Boerne native and graduate of Champion High School, in Hollywood as part of the 42nd annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers & Illustrators Of The Future contest.

Smajstrla, a senior at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, entered the contest on a whim and will now compete with 11 other illustrators for the L. Ron Hubbard Golden Brush Award and $5,000 cash prize.

“My mom (Dionne) is a huge cheerleader, she’s always searching for competitions for me to enter,” Smajstrla said. “I have lost track of how many contests I have been entered in.” But this time, the soon-to-be graduate in line to receive a bachelor’s degree in illustration made an impression on judges. She was one of three fourth-quarter award winners and will be in Hollywood April 25 for the awards banquet.

“I had no idea how I didn’t see their website and realize exactly what it could lead to,” she said.

That website describes the contest as “an opportunity for new science fiction and fantasy artists worldwide to have their work judged by some of the masters in the field and discovered by a wide audience.”

That’s a genre that’s right in Smajstrla’s wheelhouse.

“I had the portfolio (to enter). It was a lot of sci fi and fantasy, and I adore fantasy, that’s like my thing,” she said. “I felt like I had good pieces for it — and it turns out, I did.”

On her own artstation. com site, Smajstrla says her goal “is to find my place in gaming as a splash/marketing artist or a character/ creature concept artist.”

“I’ve been creating my whole life ... I’m driven and devoted to my craft of storytelling through detailed and eye-catching illustrations, always pushing myself to take them further and raise the bar of expectations,” she posted.

Art runs in the family. Her mother attended art school, and she has adopted her father’s perfectionist ways, key for an artist/illustrator in being able to consider every detail of a work.

“I love playing around with composition; really intense polish rendering is the love of my life,” she said. “And that comes from doing a lot of fantasy art back when I was a traditional artist back in middle school and high school, at Champion.”

In April, she will get to meet other illustrators and be paired with writers who share the same sci-fi-fantasy vision when inspired to create.

“For the contest, there were multiple stories and each person was matched to a story,” she said. Contest officials “kept it all under wraps; even the person whose story you’re working off of, doesn’t get to see it until you’re there, which I’m very excited about.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “I’m given a story or a scene, where I’ll go through and I’ll have moments during the story that stand out to me, and all of a sudden, I’ll see an image or come up with an idea of what this character looks like.”

She’ll attend workshops with some of the genre’s top names in writing and illustrating, all coming just a few months before her graduation and leap into the “working world” of illustration.