A guitarist serenades a clueless herd of rabbits — and one happenin' bunny flicks his Bic Lynyrd Skynyrd style.

Black Crowes lead singer Chris Robinson wields an ax and tears into an issue of Maxim with his teeth. (The magazine ran a nasty review of the Crowes' latest album without listening to the whole CD.)

Edgy director David Lynch, of “Blue Velvet” fame, puffs on a cigarette — and emits a smoke trail that looks like film.

These images were spawned by Kyle Webster '99, an illustrator whose work has graced magazines and newspapers across the country, including The L.A. Times and The New Yorker. Kyle, who lives in Winston-Salem, left a career in graphic design to make a name for himself as a freelance artist.

“It's always a guessing game trying to get new clients,” he says. “You have to cover the world with your stuff.”

Kyle, and many artists in his field, regard The New Yorker as the crème de la crème, something to aspire to. His depiction of a faceless figure stalking Liv Tyler in the horror flick “The Strangers” appeared in the June 2 issue.

“I badgered them for a little over two years. There was this one art director there who said, ‘I like the way you work with line. I don't like the way you work with color.’ So every time I did a piece with flat color, I emailed it to him. I did that for a year.”

One day the phone rang, and the art director was on the line. “This is it. This is the kind of thing I want in the magazine. Do you have time to do a piece for the next issue?”

Kyle, a wiry, unassuming thirty-something with a penchant for blue jeans, shakes his clean-shaven head. “Of course I said, ‘Uh … yeah!’”

Wild start
His first “paid” art assignment came when the graduating class at his high school asked him to design a T-shirt. For money.

“It was the first time I realized, oh, someday down the road I could actually make money with art,” he says.

Then some friends of his were recording their band, Lycanthrope. So Kyle did the cover art — depicting the band members as werewolves.

Kyle, who now works solely with a digital pen, entered UNCG as a fine arts major and enrolled in several drawing classes. His professors “completely deconstructed everything I thought I knew,” he says.

The most important point he learned? Draw what you see. Work from live subjects in addition to photographs. “Nobody puts much emphasis on drawing from life, especially in high school art classes,“ he says. “Sculpture, working in three dimensions with clay, can make you a much better two-dimensional artist. When you start to see things in three dimensions from feeling it, you also start to do that in drawing.”

For four years after graduation, Kyle designed web sites. He was miserable. But he spent his spare time going to sessions of a figure-drawing group in Greensboro. The artists would hire live models and draw in a studio once a week. “That's where I was exposed to living, working illustrators.”

Then he was laid off from his web design job. Which, he says, was a good thing.

Shapiro Walker Design of Winston-Salem hired him almost immediately. “As soon as I made that transition from web to print I started seeing so much more illustration. At the time web design was this new hot thing, but the technology wasn't really there and the graphics weren't really there. There was nothing interesting going on visually speaking. They weren’t incorporating any kind of illustration into the web work.”