My art is how I make the fiery drives and forces within me come alive. I draw and paint what I feel, that I can’t quite see inside my own mind but manifests and comes alive on paper (or screen, you know, whatever.)
FINE ART
These pieces come to me as inspirational images, spiritual and mythological Gods and Beings from my spiritual path, or snippets of nature merged with the fantastic. I see an intensely, almost glowing violet flower and feel it needs to have a fairy on it. A waterfall needs its own fairy, and fascinating butterflies from around the world inspire more fairies (fairies and nature just have a thing for one another.) Images of fire need a dragon inserted into it. The moon needs her associated Goddess. Sometimes it’s just a drive of passion—elements of fire and water speaking to me of action and emotion that want to exist on paper to inspire others with their intense beauty and powerful archetypes. Sometimes it’s a song that wants to be reborn in a new form, on paper instead of in sound.
Most of my fine art is done with soft pastel (the chalky kind) on pastel paper (which has more depth and groove to hold more color.) I prefer Rembrant pastels for their bold colors and firm coverage. I can layer a blue stroke over yellow without either turning green, which seems to happen all too often with the Senneliers I’ve used. However, I am apt to throw in some iridescent Sennelier to give some sparkle to the pieces. The Rembrants, however, allow me to use my Colour Shaper tools to create fine detail, make soft transitions from dark to light, and to drive color into the grooves of the paper, allowing me to use the base paper color as an accent for certain portions of the picture while making other sections deep and solid. For instance, in my piece “Starlight Maiden,” I let the deep grooves of the pale blue paper show through in the starry areas while the Maiden’s jet black hair was solid and showed no hint of the blue beneath.
Unlike many soft pastel artists, I like to make very fine details and elaborate surroundings in my pieces. The gemstones on my Starlight Maiden’s tiara as well as her eyes are indicative of this fine detail. The surrounding foliage and mosses of “Waterfall Forest Fairy” are also signature of how elaborate I can get with details outside of the main subject. Can’t help it. I just like flashy.
I also work in my original medium of choice, graphite pencil, with its gorgeously smooth transitions, not to mention the ability to add serious detail. On occasion I also work in colored pencil, marker, and acrylic paints.
When my pieces are complete, I like to bask in its personal glow. The art comes alive on a much higher level when I’ve gotten it just right, and “just right” may take months or longer, parts done and redone and redone once more until it fits. When I’m done, the piece should stir something within me that I can’t describe but can feel to the depth of my being.
My aim is to enact that feeling in my viewers, to stir something powerful deep inside their core and inspire something magical to come alive in them.
CHARACTER ART
These pieces are almost often tied to a fiction story of mine. Though I was never a huge comic book collector, the comic book style and the superhero genre have always appealed to me, from the early days of She-ra, He-man, and the Thundercats to Transformers and X-men, Anime, and whatever else still appeals to me. In fact, whenever I watch a Marvel movie that starts out showing the flipping pages of a comic book, I never fail to grin in glee.
I like to create powerful characters, strong and passionate yet secretly (or overtly) vulnerable. Capable, fierce and beautiful women alongside sexy, tough men, with magical powers or without, be they human, robot, or other. I like the full package: story with accompanying art. Fiction alone lacks that extra layer of spice that art can give it, and comic books can’t get as far into the minds and hearts of the characters as I do in my fiction.
For character art, I work in ink, marker, and digital. I like to do the line-art in ink and then colorize digitally (because I have a tendency to change my mind on color every 10 seconds.) I typically do my characters in American comic-book style.
GRAPHICS, LOGOS, AND BOOK COVERS
While my background is generally in illustration, I also enjoy creating business materials. Graphics and even book covers are advertising pieces for your company or product. A book cover has to sell your book at first glance. A logo has to transmit an idea in a simple form. Even a label for hand cream has to sell professionalism in a product. In these works, I get to get a feel for a client’s needs and work one on one with them to develop just the right piece for their continued success.