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You said that you like playing with Legos. Did that influence your interests in drawing mechanical subjects as a kid?

Yeah, Legos were a big influence. I was into a lot of the other eighties kid stuff like Transformers, He-Man, and Battle Beasts. But Legos were the best. If I had the time to commit to a hobby today, it would be Legos. I could spend hours playing with those things. But, alas, priorities! Legos were more influential on the creative side of things and less on the mechanical. I enjoyed them because instead of playing in a world that someone else had made up I got to make up my own characters, vehicles, and buildings. Then I could act out my own stories in that world. I always got a set for Christmas and my birthday.

Have you always worked in the art field?

My first job out of school was for 20th Century Fox's animation division in Phoenix, Arizona. I was hired on as an in-between artist back when animated films were drawn. Since then I've worked for smaller companies doing some video game stuff and commercials. I even worked for a museum doing various art tasks for a new dinosaur wing they were building.

That’s quite a variety, and it’s not everyone’s lot to work in a dinosaur wing. Could you tell us more about how this diversity of experiences has influenced your style or your working methods?

Each job I've had has taught me something new and different. And each job has fine-tuned the direction that I've wanted to go with my career. I've learned more about what I like to do and what I don't like to do. Early on it was all about making something look nice. Now I'm less concerned with that than I am with how well the image tells a story.

What equipment and supplies do you work with?

I like sketching on 8.5 x 11 sheets of laser printer paper with a col-erase blue pencil. The two work nicely together. Most of my work is cleaned up with tight pencils and then coloured in Photoshop. But occasionally I like to break out the watercolours.

Is there a reason that you like using blue pencil? I think animators use blue pencils to sketch in the basics shapes as well - is this preference carried over from when you worked in animation?

Yeah, I picked it up when I worked at Fox. The reason back then was that light blue was non-reproducible and when you drew over it in black the blue would fade out. Nowadays you can take out whatever colour you use so it doesn't matter. A guy at work turned me on to vermilion, so I've been using that now the last couple of weeks. It's a nice change.

I like the step-by-step tutorials on your site. What motivated you to put those up?

I had been getting emails about how I work. After answering the same question a few times I put those up so I could refer people to them when they asked.

You’re also into books. What kind of reading material do you enjoy? What about movies?

I really liked Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. I'm into seeing the big picture of things and with that book the picture doesn't get much bigger. As for movies, I really enjoy Hitchcock and any movie with Paul Newman. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is one of my favourites.

Which artists have influenced you?

There are four major artists who have had such an amazing impact on my work at various stages in my life. They are Bill Watterson, Masamune Shirow, Mike Mignola and Hayao Miyazaki. Watterson was my art god from seventh grade until my senior year in high school. As my tastes matured he shared the throne with Shirow. I have some interesting drawings from high school that effectively mixed the best of Watterson with the best of Shirow. I then became totally enthralled with Mignola when I picked up the first copy of Hellboy in ‘93. My whole understanding of sequential art and composition comes from him. And in the last few years I've really warmed up to Miyazaki, whose work is currently teaching me the art of storytelling.

How do you integrate very different styles, such as Mignola’s and Miyazaki's, into your own?

Well, I look to each of them for different things. Mignola has such a clear and unmistakable way of moving your eye across a page. His subtle placement of background elements and foreground characters, coupled with the deliberate use of word balloons, creates a natural flow from panel to panel. At first glance his artwork may seem simple or impulsive, but to a keen eye one can see the intricate arrangement of objects as being very intentional. It's less about how well he renders a hand and more about where that hand is placed on a page to have the most visual impact.

I’m currently studying Miyazaki’s work and am finding so many impressive things everywhere I turn. He has a bewildering power to make you feel like you are right there in the environment. There's this realism to his scenes that makes you think he was right there sketching in the woods and then it ended up in a shot in a movie. Also, his sense of fantasy and the purity of his characters is what are really appealing to me right now. I'm still in the appreciation phase and haven't really begun to break it down and get to the bottom of why these things have the effect that they do. But I've read and watched enough of it for his work to seep into what I’m doing.

Shirow has such a vast understanding of how to make science fiction seem like science reality. I’ve enjoyed following his love affair with mecha and the interaction between machines and humans. There's a technical geekiness to a lot of it that I get a kick out of. I read some of his stuff and think that if he were just ten percent less of an artist his left-brain would take over and the engineer inside him would build all the stuff he dreams up. He’s definitely affected my own work. If I design a vehicle, I'm not content with just having a cool design. I need to go under the hood and make sure there's plausibility to it.

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