Nickolas Payne is a Chicago-based artist who creates large-scale fantasy drawings. He recently had his first show and solo exhibition, “Vagrant Explorer” at the Peoria Art Guild. He works primarily in watercolor, colored pencil, marker, ink, graphite, oil pastel, and oil crayon, making colors and experimenting with combined media. Importantly, rather than simultaneously laying up a composition, he works piece-wise, element by element, beginning with light sources, then responding in order to the dimmer and obscurer parts of the work. This grants him great flexibility to course-correct while puzzling together the full picture. While sci-fi motifs derive from his fiction writing, the work is motivated by a desire to produce environments that reflect states of mind like euphoria, withdrawal, perplexity, and stillness. Fantasies reflect the process of the mind puzzling together abstractly related impressions, producing a reflection of reality divorced from the physical world but married to the laws of pain and pleasure more real than anything. In this regard, he considers his fantasy work to be self-portraiture.