ONCE UPON A TIME ...
I wanted to be a comic-book artist.
My parents never had to worry about me. If they ever wondered what I was up to, all they had to do was follow the quiet. They would find me reading a book, building spaceships out of LEGOs, or drawing, drawing, drawing amid scattered sheets of paper and mounds of eraser shaving. For a while, I considered making a career of it, but when writing and photography became competing interests, I chose journalism instead. Years later, I switched gears again, this time going into visual effects and eventually into my current job as art director. Along the way, I started teaching myself music, and discovered a new passion. Forever curious, I do not like having to fit in one easily defined box. And while that makes for a varied website, it does make the job search more challenging.
DIGITAL
Pencils scanned in Photoshop. Illustrator sometimes joins the party.
The bulk of my work here was born on a sketch pad, then scanned into Photoshop for inking and coloring. Although I have gone full digital, I find the disconnect between the Wacom Intuos tablet and the computer monitor uncomfortable. One of these days, I'll get my hands on a Cintiq the size of my house, and that won't be an issue any more.
TRADITIONAL
Pencils, ink, water colors, and more
Pencils were my first love. Later, when I ventured into comic-book territory, Rotring ink pens expanded my tool kit. I never really took to watercolors or oils. The reason? They require more room than I have, need constant cleanup, and are a pain to pack when moving out of state or internationally.
A.I. EXPERIMENTS
Exhilarating and depressing
Happy accidents and nightmarish visions are all on the menu when you fire up an A.I. engine. It's an interesting tool to generate ideas and explore artistic directions I might not have considered otherwise. Still, I'd rather not let it do all the work, so I always add my own flair to the piece: Expanded canvas, details, color tweaks, etc. ... I can achieve in days what would take me weeks, if not months. Sigh.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Capturing the mundane made extraordinary by its brevity.
I learned photography the old-fashioned way, with 35-mm film, an SLR camera, and hours in a dark room. I've shot sports, everyday news and more for newspapers. A few years ago, I traded my camera for the convenience of digital portability. I miss it.
