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NEWS
New Products 2/26/08 - The Pewter Dragons and Ceramic Tiles by Add An Accent should be arriving any day now. Take a look and see what's coming! |
Appearances and signings 3/15/08 - Ben Franklin Arts and Crafts - Monroe Washington 3/20-3/23/08 - Norwescon - SeaTac, Washington 3/29/2008 2008 Spring Fairy Festival - Tacoma, Washington 8/08-8/10/2008 - Dragonflight - Bellevue Washington 8/29-9/01/08 - DragonCon - Atlanta, GA |
About Rob
Over three decades ago (I'm not telling how much over - anyway, it changes daily), my parents had this precocious kid on their hands. By the age of two, if there were crayons within my reach (and there were always crayons within my reach), I'd be writing and drawing on anything I could find. I wasn't writing novels or chaos theory equations, but I seem to remember various superhero names and their likenesses appearing on my bedroom walls during that year, and a few afterwards. I was particularly drawn to Spiderman, Batman, and just about anyone else who had a cartoon or campy TV series at the time. I watched Sesame Street like a fiend, but somehow those characters never found their way to my walls. The more realistic looking characters always appealed to me more.
Throughout school, I never really put the crayons down. Sure, I traded up for more interesting media - from pencils to oil paints, but the intent was still the same. I took as many art classes during high school as I could fit into my schedule, and played as much Dungeons and Dragons as I could talk my friends into, which gave me more inspiration for my artwork. Unfortunately, I was surrounded by a system that insisted that artists can't make money, and I should become a scientist or an engineer. Well, I believed them, and enrolled in RIT's mechanical engineering program. That didn't last long at all, and instead of leaving RIT for a school that could give me what I was looking for, I took a less well-thought out route and transferred to their Fine art/Illustration program. RIT is a fine technical school, but 80 percent of the instructors I had in the art program were people I just couldn't relate to. So after about two years of getting A's for no apparent reason (funny, the teacher I respected most was the one I could only get C's from), I left thinking there wasn't really much I could learn there that I couldn't learn on my own in the world. I was off to the sunny state of Florida to try my hand at Disney's animation department.
On retrospect, while writing this, I've come to realize that most of that period of my life was spent pursuing goals that I never really wanted to achieve in the first place. Disney was certainly among those things. I never was accepted into the Animation department, and now I realize what a blessing that was! I love Disney movies, but the process of creating them has dulled the senses of so many talented artists. Instead, I found my way to a local printing company, and became their graphic artist for quite a few years. It was there that I really learned the ins and outs of digital art, and how it can be used to compliment traditional work in ways that no other medium can match. Still, I don't ever rely on the computer for what I do. Most of what you see in these pages began as pencil lines in a sketchbook, and many pieces end right there, complete on their own.
Well, after the printer went belly-up, I found myself wondering what I was going to do. I had recently met the woman who would become my wife, and the printing industry in Orlando was either drying up or very stagnant. There was just no-one looking for a graphic artist at their company. Fate, it seems, looked at my situation and decided to toss me a bone. I got a commission to do some card illustration artwork for the "Wheel of Time" CCG, which panned out to two expansion sets as well. A relatively new RPG publisher named Eilfin Publications also found me. They were working on a new fantasy role-playing game called "Undiscovered: The Quest For Adventure", and wanted artists who could do realistic black and white illustrations for their initial game manual. That became an enormous job, and almost 100 pictures later I had somehow illustrated the entire book. I must admit, though, I'd do it again for them in a heartbeat. They are by far the best company to work for that I've ever experienced, and the game they put out is simply brilliant. And this is from someone who played the TSR and WOTC Dungeons and Dragons game for almost twenty years! They also created a lot of supplemental work for the game which found its way to their website, and a quarterly E-zine that they publish. So they managed to keep me busy from time to time.
Recently, I've started working with a company called "Add An Accent" which has been turning my artwork into a number of very exciting products. The first of these are a set of six pewter dragons based on my artwork, and nine ceramic tiles printed with my dragon art. I hope these are the first of a long line of products I create with them - their quality is amazing!
Meanwhile, I fill my available time doing custom requests for people, most of whom find me through this website. If you are among the people I have illustrated a character for, then know that I greatly appreciate every word you've written over the years, inspiring my artwork. I have been lucky enough to meet some very talented and imaginative people through this magical web thing, and if my luck hold out the stories and descriptions will keep on coming! Easily, about half of the pictures on this site were inspired by someone else's words, and I think those are often the best ones. Collaboration always creates something stronger than isolation!
And that brings us to the end of me writing about me - something that I never feel quite right doing. Sorry if it seemed to ramble on a bit. Go on. Look at pictures now!
Rob
