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      Well, I guess it should really be called, "pastels and charcoal".
      Believe it or not, I think it was about my third year of art school, I was at a loss about where I stood with my artwork. I had just switched majors from cartooning to illustration, and was finally taking some really good worthwhile courses. Only thing, I sucked. Every so often I'd do o.k. with life drawing, my paintings were horrible and I just couldn't do anything in any medium. Then I started looking at pastels. They seemed fun and messy and pretty primitive and expressive. I kind of like the feel of it and I remember the assignment that literally screamed out that hey, it could work. Unfortunately the theme was "reactions to the Gulf War". Ugh, how tired I grew of that, and maybe that's where I came up with this drawing.
      Whatever buzz it was I was running on, it lasted a small while and was pretty limited. There are plenty of pastel drawings that were just awful or didn't have anything that called attention to them. Only a mere few stuck out from that year, like these two drawings done for an assignment on Anne Rice's "Interview with a Vampire". I'm actually quite proud of them.





winter break



      I was tired of all these kids who were really good at painting and showed an immense amount of detail in their work. They would do a theme for a story and draw every little eyelash on the character. It was really annoying. Some of it looked good, some of it was dead, flat, plain and very "stiff" looking.
My stuff completely sucked at that point and I really needed to get some practice during the break. I decided to get some charcoal and do some "studies". I don't know, my own themes, didn't necessarily had to make any sense. But what I wanted to concentrate on was composition, tones, emotions, I guess. It wasn't important to work on detail, but just get the point across of what the drawing was about. So with that idea, I did some drawings during the winter break. Sure, they were pretty simple and sometimes kind of bland, but hey, it was only the beginning.
                       


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