Nick Runge

Teaches at Hippo Factory

Born in 1985, artist Nick Runge grew up in Colorado. Coming from a creative family of professional artists, he was always interested in drawing and imagining ideas visually. Starting in 2004, he began thinking about art as a career. After 2006, he worked as an illustrator for various comic companies such as IDW, Dark Horse, and many others. While primarily making a living as a cover artist, he began painting more seriously and started exploring the world of film art and traditionally painted projects, doing various official and private commissions. These days he has stepped away from commercial properties, focusing exclusively on fine art and personal work using oils and watercolor. 

As a portrait/figurative painter, Nick works from life as well as photography, describing his art as something close to “abstracted realism”, with an objective of expressing as much of the realistic human element of life as possible through a limited and often simplified approach to his rendering or brushwork, giving an illusion of realism while, at the same time, breaking shapes and form down enough to have a close balance with abstraction.