That is my motto. This is the self-centered mind-set of an artist. Ladies, you should all date an artist at least once… (particularly a guitar player… just saying)… but for heaven’s sake, don’t ever marry one!

The truth is, even I am getting tired of hearing me talk about myself… I know, I can’t believe it either…

So let’s get back to talking about art. OK, obviously I mean my art, but it is a step in the right direction… sort of…

This is going way back to my early days as an artist, so judge me accordingly. Every artist with work hanging in the Louvre started off drawing stuff that his mom wasn’t even sure she wanted to stick up on the refrigerator, so to speak…

Here is a comic that I started that has a tie in with the present. My brother, Jack, was a Tin Tin fan way back before the movie came to the big screen…

I notice that I signed it ‘Buzz Browne’, which is a nickname I picked up for a while when I was a teenager… never mind why…

You should check out the Tin Tin books. They are full of excitement and adventure and good family fun…

So far, this is nothing to write home about, but it is another step on the journey…

And that is as far as I got. Comics are a great way to practice your drawing, coloring, shading, and writing and story telling, all at the same time. You can also make copies, staple them together and give them to your kids or friends. Go ahead, write a storybook for your child. They will keep it forever, I bet.

We are in the home stretch of my early drawing stage. These are the last of the early works that I thought were worth keeping. These were all done on large pieces of paper, so I couldn’t scan the entire picture…

You can see the fold in the middle of that one. It would be more impressive if you could see the whole thing, but not by a lot… You can see how weak I was at shading, and the muscles are just plain lame, but the imagination is there…

Here is another alien landscape…

Again, nothing to rant about, but it interesting to note that I used a watercolor background, as well as in some of the details. The shiny towers of the alien city were done, if I remember correctly, with silver model paint. I was doing multimedia before I had ever heard the term… In fact, I don’t believe the term existed in the early 70s… I would have to Google that…

I also played with charcoal and chalk, but not for very long…

That one seemed to be all about trying out shadows and shading, as well as light reflections. There are no wrong steps on this journey…

To finish up, here is a picture that I really wish you could see all of. I called it ‘Amsterdam reflections’ and it was loosely based on a photo I saw in National Geographic magazine. The photo showed the distinctive buildings of Amsterdam reflected in the water of a canal…

Wow, that really sort of takes me back to when I visited Amsterdam when I was a little older… The buildings looked like that to me, and I am not talking about their reflections, either… But never mind…

Thank you for bearing with me, for having patience, and for trusting that we are building to bigger and better things as we go…

I plan to do this blog for a long, long time…