Even when I was working as a reporter, salesman or cook, I was always an artist. I remember when the Herald was going to publish my first illustration -- I was very nervous. I had worked as a reporter for about three years and had already had many, many front page stories in the paper and they never made me this nervous. My significant other said "it's because you were an artist working as a reporter. Now you're an artist working as an artist. There is more of you in that illustration than you are use to seeing in the paper."

He was right. I think no matter what form it takes, my artwork has a small portion of me in it. If you want to gain an insight into what makes me tick, just look around my web site, almost all of the artwork is original. Also check out the links below. I've seperated my work into four categories:

Annimation	Annimation These animations prove that even with two jobs, I still have too much time on my hands.
Illustration	Illustrations It's the part of my job that I enjoy most. Reading stories ideas and then creating an illustration that give the reader an immediate tone and focus for a story.
Icons	Really, really small illustrations Icons are the small but important images that newspaper use to key people into what a story is about or to let them know that this is part of a ongoing series of stories.
Info graphics	Informational graphics Informational graphics are visual story telling. "A picture being worth a thousand words," informational graphics can often tell a story better than a long story. It's also a better way to give people an impression of what numbers and statistics mean.

What I use to create my work

I use several programs to create my artwork. My favorite program right now is Fractal Painter 4. It's a little complex and can be overwhelming, but if you can push your way through the technical aspects of Painter, the program won't let you down. You can use bezier curves to create areas of blending and then stack them on top of each other and Painter will blend and reblend the two shapes together so they look seamless.

I was fortunate, a wonderful illustrator at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Kirk Lyttle, taught me how to use Painter. I'm not sure I could have tackled it on my own.

I'm also bi-platformal

No, this is not another diversity issue, it means that I work on both macs and PCs. I own a PC (Pentium 100, 32 megs of ram) and use a Quad 800 at work. My favorite mac program is Illustrator. There is a PC version but, unless I'm using the wrong one, it's awlful. Painter, Quark and Photoshop are virtually identical on either platform. I also use CorelDRAW on the PC. It's a good program. I've been using it since version 1, but I would drop it in a minute if I could get Illustrator on my PC.

I enjoy most forms of natural media, but oil painting and water colors are my favorites.