TATTOOS AND TATTOO WATERCOLORS

I started tattooing in 1996 and held a regular shift at shops around St. Louis until 2005. I trailed off to by appointment only and custom work here and there into 2006 but now its been a while since doing any. It seems if you are going to tattoo, that's about all your life has room for. Tattooing is full of long days and a ton of prep work in drawing that leaves little time for pursuit of other interests so I had to step out, maybe not forever but definitely for now. Plus there are so many more amazing tattooists these days! I still find myself in tattoo shops all the time, many of my closest friends tattoo, and that in itself is a wonderful thing about tattooing... it's like having an extended family all over the globe.

Click here for a small gallery of tattoos and watercolors.

PEN AND INK DRAWINGS

As an exercize in drawing, a few friends and I began drawing in pen. We had 2 rules. 1- Not to have any preconcieved ideas what you were going to draw and 2 -draw the first thing your brain tells you to draw. We all saw our drawings improving quickly. It seemed you can scare yourself into better visualizing what you were about to do. After several hours of drawing no one wants to see it wasted by poor planning. These are some examples of what came out for me under these guidelines and I have them posted here as demonstration to some of the more lucid source material that arises during these exercizes. You will see the beginnings of some of my more polished digital work here. Please excuse some of the picture's quality, many of them do not even exist anymore.

Click here to see some of these pen and ink drawings.

VILLAINS

Sometime in late 2003 I started down the path of trying to figure out how to draw with a computer. Having a little experience making shaky line mouse drawings in Microsoft Paint or early versions of Photoshop I had to know how to get these super crisp graphics. The crudest pictures at the link below would take me hours and hours to make - days. Then they started getting a bit quicker and to the point the tools were becoming familiar enough to crank a few out a day. I guess I was making a kid's book of sorts, but it stopped once deciding to throw a ton of time like in the beginning at one piece now being a bit more familiar with process. The first piece (The Letter) after this decision logged near 100 hours. The last one in that series took around 260 (Becoming of Age). Of course the work is not validated by the amount of time spent in pursuit of it, just in this case a good monitor of the learning curve. I still love these characters though and plan on coming back and developing them more one day.

Click here to visit Villainland

BAD NEWS

A couple years back I walked around the house with a clipboard for a few weeks writing down the worst things you'd ever want to be told. This idea was spawned when one day a friend and I were out for a walk and somehow the movie title "Bad News Bears" entered our conversation and suddenly we were low voiced bears delivering horrible news to eachother... I don't know, guess you had to be there... Anyways, a book came out of it. In total the book is 244 pages with 120 illustrations. I think you can still get one at this link.