These grew naturally out of my black-and-white creature work. At some point, I wanted to take everything I had learned from years of drawing and painting and bring color into these worlds.
I use professional alcohol markers, acrylic paint, paint markers and ink, although most of the pieces are some combination of paint and ink.
The process became interesting because I had to combine two very different ways of working. With ink, I usually work from the foreground toward the background. With acrylics, I’ve always done the opposite – I start with the background and build forward. Suddenly I was using both, so there was a lot more strategy involved in deciding how I would approach each piece.
Over time, I began throwing just about every technique I had learned into them and applying it to subject matter I’ve always loved – science fiction, survival, strange worlds, monsters and, yes, horror.
Although I don’t really like calling these “horror art.”
So I just call them Creatures.
A lot of these have also been created while traveling. Vacations, business trips, hotel rooms – wherever I can find enough space to spread out some paper, markers and paint. I like that they can travel with me. Wherever I am, I can disappear into one of these worlds for a while.