Introduction

I can't remember a time in my life when fantasy art wasn't a passion. I grew up in the 80's and 90's and finding fantasy art wasn't as easy as logging onto Deviant Art or Reddit. I was born to biker tattoo artists, so from my earliest days there was always crazy art around. My parent's shop and even our home was covered in those old black and white Spaulding & Roger's tattoo flash pages that were mostly hand colored by my parents.

A page of flash sheets from the Spaulding & Roger's catalog

Dragons, vikings, naked women, swords, panthers filled my peripheral vision at all times leading my imaginary world to be filled with these same visions. My mother and father would even sit and draw with us children. Art for me was always a rewarding endeavor.

Earliest art of mine that I have. I was about 10 when I drew this. 

As a small child my entertainment consumption was dominated by the little blue mushroom people called the Smurfs. They were plagued by the nefarious black wizard Gargamel. This led me to the world of  Eternia which was pitched in a war of good and evil between the hero HE-MAN and his arch nemesis Skellitor. He-Man and Skellitor were images direct from the tattoo flash put into motion. The violence and bulging muscles and bursting bodices of this slightly more more adult cartoon entranced me and expanded the worlds of my own imagination.

Upon learning to read, I soon found comic books to be another avenue of escapism that led me to ponder the moral dilemmas posed by the books. But it also introduced me to the names of the artists in a way that cartoons never did. Knowing an artist and their work made the work itself much more intimate and resounding. Those people made that artwork for me personally. I was their target demographic. Jim Lee, Barry Windsor-Smith, Dale Keown, Larry Stroman, Ron Lim fed my hunger for comic art.

Mainstream comics soon led me to the fringes of the medium. Heavy Metal magazine became a central hub for finding great art and artists. I soon found Dungeons & Dragons and fantasy novels. The artwork on those books led me to artist like Brom, Larry Elmore, Clyde Caldwell and Luis Royo and many others.

My life has been filled with amazing adventures not only through imaginative fantasy, but that is the area this blog will focus on. More art to come soon.