I've been really pushing myself to do more art lately. I used to draw a LOT when I was kid. Mostly in my high school notebooks—I've done the occasional mural or big art piece, but I haven't done anything like that in a long time.

I avoided art in college because it wasn't something that I thought I could make a living doing. Also, if you major in something like English or Political Science, then fine art or illustration electives aren't very practical, because it's hard to figure those classes into a degree. I was very much all about min-maxing so I could take the fewest classes possible, have no student loan debt, and pay for it all out of pocket or using what little grant money I was eligible for.

This is a story that I've told quite a few times over the years. While I was still a senior in high school I was accepted to the Academy of Art College in San Francisco (now the Academy of Art University). But I had a serious decision to make, because my parents didn't have the money to pay for college, so it was assured that I was going to have to take out loans and continue to work to get through the schooling. I was already working before I graduated high school, and had been in the workforce all through high school even. Whether it was in the mail room of a newspaper stuffing advertisements and bundling packages by zip code to go out for the Sunday edition, or shampooing carpets in the summer to help my Dad out. I even did an internship program one year, and that's the business that ended up hiring me when I graduated high school.

On top of that I had never been to San Francisco before, so I would be leaving home to an unfamiliar city, without any real guarantee that I would actually be able to make something of myself. Or be able to make a living doing art.

Looking back at my behavior in my late teens and earlier 20s, it's probably for the best that I didn't dive head first into art school and take out a bunch of loans. There's always the possibility that I could have come out the other side as a brilliant and accomplished illustrator, but I also could have just as easily come out the other side as a degenerate drunkard with a bunch of non-dischargable loan debt.

Business and art are two separate things. Surely the two can co-exist, but there's no guarantee that you can actually make any money at art, or maybe the best ways to monetize your art aren't necessarily the things in business that you're good at. So, unfortunately abject poverty is a real possibility, and when I calculated the risk for myself at that time (around sixteen or seventeen years old), it didn't make sense for me to pursue.

It was either the summer before or right after my senior year in high school, I got a job working crowd control at the Wizard World Comic Convention in Long Beach, California.

While I was there I had an opportunity to talk to Cam De Leon. He's an amazing illustrator, and I would say he's probably best known among people my age as the guy who did the Salival album cover for the band TOOL. In any case, he sat and talked with me for a good thirty minutes to an hour. I didn't buy anything from his booth, he just gave me advice on the art world, and shared stories about what it was like to make a living as an artist. I appreciated his time and took a lot of what he had to say to heart. Plus, it made more sense for me to continue living and working in Long Beach and do night and weekend classes at the LBCC.

After I moved out to Vegas, I did end up taking a work trip to San Francisco and spent one night at a bar not too far from Union Square. A cook from one of the restaurants in the Tenderloin and I, we ran the pool table all night and played a bunch of art kids for free beers until last call. So, in a way I still got to experience a taste of what it would have been like to be an art student there myself... But that's a story for another time.

I've always been interested in art and I've been fortunate to have worked with a bunch of mediums as a child and adolescent; clay and sculpture, wood carving, painting with oils and acrylics, modern illustration (traditional and digital), water colors, plaster casting, and on and on. Comics and illustration are really my passion though. So that's been the focus of my renewed interest in drawing and sharing my art with the world.

Fast forward twenty years, and I'm finally in the a place where I feel that I have the life experiences to truly layer some meaning and emotion into my work, or sew the imagery with some true passion. And when I look back, that's always what I wanted to be able to do. Sure, being a comic artist for Marvel or DC or doing my own book at Image would be fantastic, but I'm still working on steady output; voluminous and quality output is another realm entirely.

So, for the last year I've been drawing weekly. For the past four months I've been drawing at least every other day. Then, just this last month I was on a daily streak, and I'm mostly keeping to that schedule, even if it's just a random character sketch.

Comic artists are the most prolific artists out there, and it's incredibly impressive to watch some of these guys in action. A page a day is generally the expected. To get to that point is really to kind of be on another level. Not saying that it's necessarily hard to reach flowstate, but every artist that I've listened to has always complained about days where they just force themselves to do it because they know they have to, not because they have any deep affinity for the work at that moment in time. That's a hard barrier to cross for a lot of artists.

Since I am still out there just working a regular 9-to-5 job, and I'm married, a lot my free time goes into spending it with my wife. Carving out an hour (sometimes more) per day to draw hasn't been that difficult, but it does have to be a conscious decision that I make. Then there is the deliberation in my mind on what kind of art I should be working on.

If you've read through my last post you'll see the mini comics that I made... Those didn't really garner any attention. So I've pivoted a bit to do more fine art illustration; think Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist. However, I do plan to do more mini comics in the future, I'm just focusing on building an audience on Instagram now. As much as I didn't care to use that site/app, I had an account on there that I had made just to preserve my moniker, then I'm watching an interview with Todd McFarlane and he comes out and says:

“I look at all the art websites. I look at, you know, Instagram and Facebook and, like, any place where anybody’s posting stuff. I’m always phoning sort of, you know, either complete unknowns or somewhat unknowns…”

Listen to the interview HERE.

So, I figured fuck it, let's just start posting on Instagram. Most of the people I went to high school with are on there and they're starting to catch on to me posting every day as well. Most everyone that follows me knows me in real life. Specifically the people I went to high school with, they were sort of my original fans anyway. Plus, Todd Beats called me out in a comment I made on one of his posts.

Nothing to loose, everything to gain.

So far, that's what art after 40 has been like. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. If you're still interested in following my art journey, feel free to follow me on Instagram and continue to watch this blog for more updates.