(special thanks to Renata for suggesting a fix for the Bunny Dwarf)

The first thing I can remember wanting to do growing up was draw. I guess every kid did, we all had our box of crayons, but I was different. I didn’t have a box of 8, I had a box of 64 with a built-in sharpener. I knew all the colors: burnt sienna, raw umber, cornflower, midnight blue. I knew all of them, and constantly went through them fast. I had my own box of leftover crayons and oddly enough, I knew where each color was.

The first art book I got was “Ed Emberly’s Drawing Book of Animals” in 1970. I don’t remember why I got it, but it was given to me by my then-new next door neighbor who was, and still is one of the nicest women on the planet. It’s not a book on how to draw in the conventional term, Ed uses shapes to build animals up. It was an awesome book, surpassed only by “Ed Emberly’s Make A World” in 1972. I still own them both, and they have a spot on my bookshelf next to all the other art books I have.

My grandmother was a local NJ artist. I don’t know how well known she was, but she had shows at art galleries all around. She used to teach me about so many things, constantly sketching on notebook, napkins, whatever was around. Before she died, she bought be a hardcover copy of Stan Lee’s “How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way”, which is still in print to this day. Yes, the book is that good. The problem I had with it was I couldn’t draw people. At all. I could draw things, but not people. There was something I couldn’t wrap my brain around with drawing faces. I could draw a badass X-Wing, but not even a cartoon face.

In junior high my friend Joe and I were going to start our own comic strip. I don’t remember the details of it, but it was definitely sci-fi based, but we ran into problems like how to publish it and having no money. It was a neat idea, but never got realized except for some sketches I may still have up in the attic.

I kept up with drawing through high school. My first local exposure (if you want to even call it that) was when I sent in my art to a local TV show called “The Uncle Floyd Show“. Every day he’d put pictures up on his wall from fans that sent them in. To be fair, my stuff would be up there with crayon drawings of sailboats and flowers, but just seeing my work on TV was enough to keep me motivated. I did that for perhaps three years until I graduated from high school.

When college came, I stopped drawing. I drew some art for a student-made publication, but that was more or less it. I was far more into computers and other college activities. I took an art class which I hated because it didn’t teach my anything I didn’t already know. It was until after college that I tried art again, but in painting models. That was huge for me, it would take weeks to build, paint and in some cases put in my own homemade fiber optic system into these things. Once I built everything I wanted to, my interest in that died off. To be honest, videogames took up a lot of my time starting around 1995, and really took off when Final Fantasy VII was released in 1997.

Around 2004 I got the itch again. I don’t remember why. I started working on icons and wallpapers in Photoshop for customizing Windows, but I wanted to start drawing again. I had lost my interest in anime which was a hobby that had become frustrating and expensive ($90 for a laserdisc!), but I loved the artwork. I wanted to start learning how to do that on my own, but had nowhere to start. Anime/manga classes aren’t something that are popular in New Jersey, so I bought a few books and started from there.

It was  rough at first, and very frustrating. I hadn’t picked up a pencil in years, I couldn’t draw a circle properly, and I had to learn something completely new. I took a sketchbook with me all the time, practicing as often as I could. My first attempt was horrid. Everything was way out of proportion and just wrong. As time went on, I found that the books I bought assumed that you knew how to draw already, and some books were better than others at actually teaching you how to draw properly. Reading those books helped tremendously and I finally got better at one thing at a time. I think it was eyes first because I have pages and pages of them. I don’t know what was next, but I had a tough time with hair.

I bought Painter IX, I bought Copic markers. I took this damn seriously.

Fast forward to now and I have pages and pages of sketches. Some are good, some actually say “WTF was I thinking?” on them. Some I look at now and go “whoa, I did THAT??”. My biggest problem came when I stopped practicing for weeks at a time, and I’d have to relearn things all over again. It’s been a tough process because I’d constantly push it aside for other things and then go back to it, only to get frustrated again.

So the above is a culmination of work that runs from 1970 to today. I realize it doesn’t look like the work of someone who’s been at it for almost 40 years, and I know that. It’s not colored, it needs work, it had a lot of problems. The reason why I posted it is because I decided to publicly show my progression, if any. I still have a ton of practice with the pencil, and even more with the Wacom. I almost posted this as just a pencil sketch but decided to see how well I could handle the Wacom after putting it away for a few months. I attempted coloring it, but decided that I’ll keep it black and white for now.

So we’ll see how it goes. I wrote this so that everyone can understand the long road that took me here. Hopefully, there’s a long road ahead.