The Very Picture of Self Promotion

      This website is mainly an exercise in shameless self promotion. But if a picture is worth a thousand words then this site is wordier than many, only without all the tedious reading.

      For the most part, a personal website is a sisypheon effort, or perhaps quixotic might be the apt description. My efforts will be to entertain at best, or mildly amuse at least. Not that it will be all sweetness and light, but it will be family friendly. Adult content is restricted to double entendre and euphemism.

      If you enjoy viewing this only half as much as I enjoy putting it together, then I'll enjoy it twice as much as you.

Tools & Techniques

      I am sometimes asked to divulge my methods for creating illustrations. Here is how I perform the magic in all its simple majesty:

Part One: Sketches with pencil and marker on tracing paper.
Step Two: Finished drawings in marker on layout paper.
Action C: Line art scanned into Photoshop at 300dpi. Scans cleaned up where needed, more for print, less for web since at 72dpi rough edges really don't show.
Stage IV: Tiffs converted to vector art using Streamline.
Chapter E: Images assembled, edited and colored in Illustrator. Any type is added. (Print work is final at this point.)
Section 5.0: For web work, Illustrator files converted to gifs or jpegs in Photoshop or in Illustrator depending on which looks better.

      It's easy as one, two, three, even though it's actually five or six steps in case you hadn't noticed. In any event I'm always mindful of Wally Wood's excellent advice, "Never draw what you can copy. Never copy what you can trace. And never trace what you can cut out and paste down." As my artist father used to say, "If it looks right, it is right."

      Other folks ask where my ideas come from or how I make drawing look so easy.

      Not so easy to answer. The ideas just sort-of pop into my head. They don't actually make a popping sound and a light bulb doesn't appear over my head. Sometimes the idea just oozes in by osmosis, if that makes any sense. If all else fails, I just "borrow" someone else's idea, give it a little twist and claim it for my own.

      The answer to the second part is practice. I've been drawing since I was a boy in short pants, though I usually wore long pants in the winter. I actually have a question for everyone else, why can't you? I mean, it isn't rocket surgery. It's just a knack I have. I can't really take any special credit for it. It would be like bragging about being tall. That is if I were tall, but you get the point.

About the Artist

      Sorry, all information about me personally is classified and available only on a need to know basis, such as if you want to buy some illustrations. Beyond that I'm a closed book. As they say, there is a story inside all of us. But in most cases that's where it should remain.