This one was called: I have some good news, and I have some bad news…

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The good news is that I have now scanned all my early artwork from my drawers and boxes. You would know this if you actually read all my posts, but I am not complaining. I know how busy you are. Even though it is only two months worth of reasonably short posts, but whatever… I probably haven’t read all your stuff either, but believe me, I am going to, just as soon as I can.

The bad news is that this means I now have to start taking stuff off the walls of my garage, where my wife insists I hang all my stuff. (I try not to take this personally… I can see how none of my art matches our décor)… Then take them out of frames, scan them, and rehang them. But I do it all for you, because I care.

I have now reached an interesting point in my artistic development. This is the stage where I started putting my Xacto-knife skills, honed from cutting signs for the Tower Records art department, to some good use. I would do a sketch, cut it out, then ink and color the picture, before mounting it on a background.

I am not saying that I had achieved mastery of the drawing part yet, but I was moving forward. Oh, wait, here is a picture that I did not cut out, but liked enough to frame. It does not glamorize war, it is a simple condemnation, and another chance to practice my drawing…

I was developing a style, and slowly moving forward, and that is what the artistic journey is all about.

You can see how my love of reading, particularly sci-fi and fantasy, began to creep into my artistic vision.

I was still playing with layouts and design, working on my shading and shadows, experimenting with textures and mediums…

And then I began to take advantage of the fact that art allows you to add together combinations of semi-reality in ways that would never exist if not for your strange imagination. I realized that I could put anything together with anything else, and come up with something entirely new… You know, like at a buffet table…

I broke his cane and tail feathers off trying to get him out of the frame, that is how old and brittle some of this work is. But if you ever wondered what Scrooge McDuck would look like going to a Grateful Dead show, I have answered your question for you. And please believe me, the journey is only going to get more and more strange.