Vibrant colors-royal blue, tangerine orange and cherry red illuminate a painting of a Japanese landscape in the 18th century.

Tony Waybright, art major, has always been surrounded and influenced by art, being the 4th generation painter on his father’s side. Though never pushed to pursue art by his family, Waybright came to love art as much as his family does and decided to pursue it as a career, he said.

Accepted to California State University, Long Beach’s arts program for spring, Waybright would like to do illustration work, book covers as well as comic books in the near future, he said.

“I’ve been drawing all my life, it’s what I like to do,” Waybright said. “All through school, instead of taking notes, I drew pictures of what the teacher was talking about.”

Waybright said he created his first painting at the age of 10, but didn’t really get into painting until he was 18 years old.

Waybright has been influenced by comic books because he grew up on them, but after taking a few art history classes, Waybright said classical artists like Michelangelo also inspired him because “those guys were the best.”

Waybright said his paintings a have a more “realistic approach-somewhere between classical and modern.” Waybright said that he likes to put a different twist to his paintings to make them his own and not a duplicate of another image.

“Most of my images when, I do my own things, are just straight out of my head, I really don’t like copying things, this makes school kind of hard sometimes because instructors give you assignments on specific things they want done, like still life,” Waybright said.

To Waybright, each painting is personal to him because each painting describes what he felt when he did that painting, he said.

“It’s kind of like a diary to me; it’s like I could look at a picture and know exactly what was going on in my life at that time,” Waybright said.

Waybright likes to use different techniques in his paintings to help portray different images in each of his paintings.

“You can use lines to draw sharper details, while painting adds more depth and color to get it to look more mysterious,” Waybright said.

Waybright describes how painting different subjects can give off a different feel to a painting.

When he paints nude figures, he said his paintings are very sensual, while the mood when doing a landscape painting is very different from figures, it’s “calmer” Waybright said.

Waybright said he likes to combine different mood sets to his paintings, be it landscape or action landscape.

“I like to mix them both, a nice, calm landscape, with action put into it to liven it up,” Waybright said.

Waybright said a painting is almost never complete, that it can always be fixed.

“It’s never finished; ninety percent of the time there’s always something little you can repaint, like a fingernail if it’s a person, or add another glaze of color to a landscape,” Waybright said.

Being in the painting class for three semesters has helped him grow as an artist, he said.

“I was stuck in one thing, doing my own thing and school makes you do different styles that helps a lot,” Waybright said.

Waybright said that most of all, he paints to have fun and to learn and to grow as an artist.

“I want to get as good as I can get, basically it’s all practice right now,” Waybright said. “I work hard, but I try to make fun of it.”