Initially, I was a fisherman and one day I fell out of my boat while fishing. I was rescued by a cruise ship full of illustrators and the rest is history. Umm… no, actually, I graduated from The Maryland Institute College of Art in 1995 as an Illustration major and have been working as a freelance illustrator for nearly 16 years now.

It's pretty much a solid marriage of painting and collage. My illustrations for magazines in the last few years have been primarily painting work but I'm starting to add back a lot more collage work lately.

Illustration work for magazines starts with sketches which is where I work out all of the compositional elements of the piece. My personal collage work starts with big blocks of colour and the larger collage pieces being incorporated into an individual work. I then add smaller collage elements and then painting work, more collage, more painting, etc., etc… until the work is complete. This entire design process takes a long time and a lot of labour.

I use: pencils, pens, tracing paper, x-acto knives, paint, paintbrushes, kneaded erasers, coloured pencils, wood, forks, spoons, easels, palettes, paper, books, magazines, dogs, cats, bananas, spaghetti, rocks, sticks, sandpaper, broccoli, ninja throwing stars, paint ball guns, ping pong paddles, q-tips, candles, dinosaurs, etc...

Yes. When I get blocked for ideas on a project I often read through a dictionary and look up words from the text pertaining to the article that I'm being asked to illustrate by a client. This often helps to free up my thought process and allows me to make new connections between different words and concepts.

To retire from working for clients and to just be able to support myself doing my own personal artwork.

I don't have a particular favorite style of music. I listen to literally everything. I have over 3000 cds. I also listen to a great deal of podcasts and books on CD while I work.

Just to make sure that you love what you do and then work hard at it everyday. Also, promote yourself as an artist in some way every week once you begin working professionally. That's the best advice I can give.