School Days (1974-1986)

In 1975, this book was published. I would spend hours upon hours tracing the characters on the inside flap spread. This is my actual copy and you can see how much love it was given. The rest of the book was great, too!

I was also lucky to have these in the house, from when my mother signed up for the course years earlier: the legendary Famous Artists School lessons, a mail-order art program created by iconic illustrators like Norman Rockwell and Albert Dorne that taught generations of artists the fundamentals of drawing, composition, and visual storytelling. I poured over these pages, not always doing the lessons, but soaking in the visuals. They made a huge impression on me.

As I got older and my art skills grew, I spent countless hours practicing realistic drawing and experimenting with different mediums. My early competitive art career began with a crushing Second Place finish in a 5th grade drawing contest, followed a few years later by a Regional Gold Key from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in 10th grade. I was also voted Most Artistic in my senior year of high school and had a page dedicated to my art in the school newspaper.

At the time, I was copying a lot from photographs (and I was obsessed with Paul Calle’s book The Pencil) but also beginning to wander into more imaginative territory... like images of babies with martinis.

Then, after graduation in 1986, I took a “gap year”, which to me, meant moving to Florida with a buddy and not quite knowing what to do with myself. But I did have college on my mind and the only thing I wanted to do was draw, so I applied to Ringling College (School) of Art & Design in Sarasota, Florida and was accepted into the illustration program.