q&a

what is the average amount of time spent on a b/w piece shown here?
about an hour.

what is the average amount of time spent on a color piece shown here?
about an two to three hours.

why do you mainly draw the same two people over and over?
they are the main characters in my story (which i've been working on for about 10 years now). i feel very close to them, like they were my own children, so that's why i am most comfortable drawing them in a variety of styles and poses. that allows me to increase my artistic experiments while still being in a safe realm so to speak.

how long have you been drawing?
my whole life, baby!

how often do you draw?
i've been drawing pretty much daily since i hit 10 years old. since most of what i've posted here online is only my "better" stuff, you can imagine the majority of what i sketch is pure crap. that's okay though, you have to practice a LOT to make any improvement, so i've got myriad folders and books full of shitty sketches, but i've had tons of fun filling those pages.

why don't you paint?
because i'm pretty bad at it. graphite/pen/colored pencils are, yes, considered to be the easy media of the art world because you have a lot of control over your strokes. as much as i love to paint, painting requires a lot of setup/clean up time, good space, good lighting, a lot of equipment, and a lot of time to really plan what you're doing. (oh, and talent, heh.) i'm a student living in a tiny room and my area of study is not art, so i have to keep things very compact. all these drawings you see here are basically stress-relievers i sketched out between homework assignments and such. painting is wonderful but you really need to devote yourself to it to do it decently, and at the moment i don't have the resources to do that.

have you ever taken art lessons?
haha, well, it should be pretty obvious that i haven't because the quality of 99% of these drawings is pretty crappy. i took the required 1 semester art class in high school -- where you basically do busy work for 45 minutes until the period is over. i don't really consider that as an art class as i learned nothing and just did work on my own during that time. in the summer of 2003 i enrolled at the musem of fine arts in boston's intensive drawing/painting class and really had a blast. i learned a great deal about my own style and painting techniques while becoming more comfortable with my drawing and sketching abilities. unfortunately that course was only 8 classes so while i learned as much as i could in that time, it was not groundbreakingly influential on me. i've been self taught my whole life--i learn from drawing mostly from my imagination while referring to still life sketches i've done or photos i've taken.

what are your influences?
i've moved this to its own page -- see the "infl" page for more on this.

will you draw something for me?
see the request page for details on that.

can i use one of these images for my website/project/etc?
see the usage page for details on that issue.

how did you make a specific piece?
i don't usually go into detail about that on the web as that stuff is pretty boring to most people. if you're really curious about a specific piece you can go to the contact section and ask me directly.