One Man's Scribbles, are Another's Art...

I've been creating illustrations of various things since I was somewhere around 8 years old. The kids in my classes always wanted me to draw them "something cool," even when I actually had no talent. I guess this means they appreciated my efforts and acknowledged some skill behind my pre-adolescent scrawlings - which means to me that either they really did suck as illustrators, or maybe I might have actually had an advantage in this area.  I was heavily involved in Architectural Drafting, and was working towards a career goal of becoming an Architectural Draftsman.  Interestingly enough, as I progressed, I had even envisioned becoming a Renderist one day - using my drawing skills to actually render the floor plans, elevations, plot plans, et. al., into an "artist's perspective" of what the structures would look like.  But I made a poor career move by joining the Air Force since they had other plans for me.

Even today, people are still requesting a sketch, graphic, drawing, painting, logo, PowerPoint presentation, or some form or another of an illustration of just about anything from me. I know for a fact that my skills have improved over the years, since I decided at an early age to continue drawing, but I'm still not quite sure I have what it takes to be an artist.

See, in my opinion, I'm what the people in the business would refer to as a "Technical Illustrator." I have the means to convey the images I see onto (or into, these days) some form of media - and I've gotten pretty good at it. This means that I can pretty much draw what I see or envision as it should look - all in proportion and detail. Unfortunately, I'm almost always labled as an "Artist," which might be true if you recognize technical illustration as an art.

My only problem with the label "Artist," is that I don't feel I have the imagination or innovation necessary to really create what society defines as "Art." I used to joke around while I was in the Air Force with some friends that one day, when I got out of the military, I would obtain some good drugs, get hammered, and emerge with the warped sense of reality that would allow me to fit in to society's parameters of "Artist." That's also my "subtle" way of making notice that the term "Art" should not include some of the garbage I've seen clumped into those parameters - you would have to really know me to have gotten that the first time without explanation.

Obviously, I haven't made good my joke (which is a good thing - I couldn't have afforded it, anyway) and am still happily stuck in the mediocre world of technical illustration.

Currently, I'm able to utilize pencil, ink, chalk, charcoal, colored pencils, markers, paintbrushes (large and small), airbrush, and spray-paint on various media.  I'm also working a lot with PaintShop Pro X, Corel DRAW!, Corel PhotoPAINT!, Adobe Photoshop, PowerPoint, Visio, and even the lowly MS-Paint now and then, utilizing the mouse as well as a Summagraphics Summasketch III 12"x12" drawing tablet I bought a few years back.

Having read this far, you deserve to sample some of my work. Some of it has been scanned in from the various mediums which I use to create the illustrations - mostly paper - and some are from pictures of the finished product. Others were created using various illustration software packages over the past few years (yes, even MS-Paint).

Enjoy them if you can, and if you decide to use them for your own purposes, please mention my name. Who knows - Maybe after I'm dead they'll be worth something. By the way, all of the graphics on this site were created by me, with the exception of the commercially produced product labels, the images of real objects, and any other icons for commercially produced items. Which doesn't actually leave a whole lot done by me, but there it is.

You know the drill - click the thumbnail to view the big picture (as it were...).  Use the 'Back' button on your browser to return to this page.

	Newer Stuff
	This is the entry I came up with for the San Angelo Art Club's "Anything Goes... Almost" art contest in April 2007.  It's pencil on recycled sketch paper.  I used a few 'new' techniques I'd never tried before to make this - using cotton swabs/balls to lay down the lighter values, and using the Artgum eraser to define the 'whites.'  I've also [finally] conquered the pesky habit of outlining everything as well.  This is definitely the nicest thing I've ever done, and the first thing I've seriously done in about 11 years.  Only took me a bout 5 hours, too.  It's actually hanging in the living room.
	During the 2006 Thanksgiving Holiday weekend, my pal came up from San Antonio and asked if I could paint some flames on his truck.  Click on the picture to see how it turned out.
	In spring 2006, I busted out the airbrush and decided to learn how to paint flames using the Tru-Fire technique.  Of course, there's nothing cooler than painting actual car or motorcycle parts with flames and a friend was willing to see what I could come up with.  This is a page with some pictures and explanation on how I did it all.
	My wife's into Egyptian Mythology, so I decided one day to create a desktop wallpaper for her machine.  Here's what I came up with playing with PhotoShop 6. Sometime in August 2005.
	This one's a little out of the norm for artwork.  Again, my wife loves Egyptian mythology, and in an effort to get in there an support her, I modded her computer case.  I painted the case to look like a big piece of sandstone... which it mostly does.  (Click here to see the case on another page) This image was on a clock she bought for our bathroom, and I decided to put it on the left panel.  Magic markers and a China pencil (the white areas) over Fleckstone Sandstone paint on a computer case.
	Here's one of the other side of the her computer mod.  This one was put together using separate images of Horus and Anubis found on the internet.  The hieroglyphs were pulled from a translator site and actually spell out a message.  The scarab is taken from the 'Journey - Greatest Hits' CD (her favorite band), and the Unreal Tournament logo was included, since it's one of her favorite computer games.  Magic markers and a China pencil (the white areas) over Fleckstone Sandstone paint on a computer case.
	A computer altered graphic that I had fun with through PaintShop Pro 4... Way back in 1999.
	The same picture, except hand-sketched one night at work - when I had a boring lull - and a crappy drawing too. Originally drawn in 4h pencil and ball-point pen on bond paper in 1999.
	I read a book called "Mutineer's Moon" a few years back and was inspired to draw this one. I used some clips of the moon and earth and used Caligari's TrueSpace3 to render the engine pod. Then used PaintShop Pro 5 to blend it all in. Because the moon clip was so small, it made the overall drawing very short in height. I'm planning to revisit this one someday as well. I made this sometime in 1999.
	An MS-Paint sketch of "the Boys." Man, was I bored at work that day... Circa 1994.
	Another MS-Paint sketch, this time of my Jeep - got bored at work again one day...this one was actually pretty fun. Sometime in 1998.  Liberal use of the 'Airbrush' function is what you see here.
	A Corel Draw 5 graphic of my old squadron's emblem I helped design - and later painted on damn near everything. I'm responsible for the gauntlet grasping the arrows.  I originally drew it with a big ol' lightning bolt, but someone wanted arrows instead.  They shoulda gone with the lightning bolt, but oh well.  I think it was sometime around 1994.
	A friend of mine at work wanted to see if I could draw. He asked me to draw a vampire bat - comic book-style. Here's what I came up with. This is another of my drawings on my Elfwood Gallery. Originally drawn in 1993 with 4H and H pencil on art paper.
	A hand-drawn image, scanned in and etched on glass for an award given by my old squadron for Mentorship. Originally hand-drawn in 1995 on bond paper and scanned.  This is a negative image to better depict the etching.

A long time ago I became a member of the Elfwood Online Fantasy/Sci-Fi Art Gallery. Check out what I've put up there and what some of the other folks have said about my work.

You can find my stuff in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Art gallery Room 69

There's more on the way now that I've rediscovered how much fun it is to draw and render on the computer...check back now and then for more of my work. But as you can see - it's fairly well detailed, but painfully unimaginative. Oh well, that's basically me anyway.