I’m excited to share with you that I’ve recently partnered with Ms. Jane Frank of Wow-Art agency , online gallery representative, to offer the original paintings for three of my books:

Say “SEO” and my stomach churns a bit and I feel a low grade anxiety, but I can’t place its source. It’s just a phrase that describes the rules that govern how other people search stuff online. According to web wizards like Neil Patel, how your product/ offering/ service is searched by the majority of us humans is the guide by which you should choose your keywords— and not how you would maybe categorize it or describe it yourself.

Lately, I’ve been doing a ton of research on marketing, sales, and passive income, in relation to my art career, so if you’ve also been wondering about this kind of thing for yourself too, then read on.

In a recent interview, I was asked to detail an experience in my life that shaped and empowered me. There were many that formed my early thinking but one really stood out as an “empowering” situation, and really gets at how I move about in the world— then and now, still. I was learning to…

Students, artists in particular, get frustrated with the seeming lack of speed on their journey to “success” (whatever that might mean). And I get it. I quit art school (the first time in the 80s) with one semester to go because I was offered a job “ghost” painting with a professional illustrator. I mean, the choice of go to school or make money and art….

In 1995, Franklin Watts published the Animal Skeletons book which I had immense joy in illustrating. I mean, who wouldn’t luuuurrv painting and drawing skeletons and bugs and hardshelled animals, etc?! When I started looking at the art direction and started thinking about what reference I’d need for the illustrations…

What is your wonderful art nerd superpower and gives you great joy in the doing? Do you have a lot of "shoulds" chattering away in your brain, telling you that you need to make one kind of art over another? Is it motivated by the glittery prospect of surface rewards that have nothing to do with the deeper satisfaction of actually creating the work?

Are you an artist thinking about how to price your work? Are you a potential buyer looking for art that you like but with "affordable" prices? Here are some questions for you to consider:

Writing a great artist statement can be frustrating and difficult. Being asked to synthesize a body of work into a 2-3 paragraph “statement” is hard because what we’re being asked to do is not a mission statement (ie what we’re going do to change the world) but a statement of our process and why. The point of an artist statement is…

Hmmm. What am I afraid to tell you about myself that might make some of you self-select out and say "nope, that's not for me" right from the jump? I thought about it and after a bit of mild cheek-gnawing, thought-- ok, I’ll tell you: I believe in magic ….yes, I do.

I've written on this topic before and it's still one of my favorite perennial questions. I ask myself this question a lot when I find myself feeling that little sour churn of "no, I don't want to do that [insert certain thing] in my work.

Then I get to ask myself, "why not?"

We artists beat ourselves up for not being able to make a living at our art. We get depressed when we're not making as much money as we need to live solely on our art. But I'm telling you that's okay. That you're doing *any* artistic endeavor at all is success--- the success is in the doing. And in an ever-increasingly capitalist industrial world, making art from one's own hands is a radical and subversive act.

Why do we try to measure success by looking at what we don't yet have?

Style is where our ability bumps up against our ambition, so technically, we *always* have a style. That means too, that as our abilities grow and ambitions change, our style is always evolving…

Whether you're looking at art in a gallery/ museum space or your own artwork, you want to be able to discern what the art is *doing* not just by the way a piece feels to you, but by some very objective and concrete observations that can be applied universally. Here are the components of objective critique of a work of art that I always used when I was teaching and assessing student work.

Not gonna lie to you, I too, have been a little confused about all the sculpture and pottery that I’ve churned out over the past 30 years and what it means to my trajectory as an artist. As I’ve also been a serious…

Have you thought about the way we artists use repetition? If you identify your motifs, you will have acquired more keys to unlock the “why” of the work you do.

Trying to be something I really wasn’t meant that I hadn’t been paying enough attention to what my work was always saying to me. I lost my way because I got caught up in other artists’ journeys and what was successful for them, lured away by this idea that if I…

Ever wonder how the ceramic process works? I'm fascinated by it and I think you'll be too once you know more. Ceramics, like many other art processes, is a multi-staged process. Here is my quick-and-dirty explanation:

I’d gotten to a point in my ceramic work where I was becoming curious about the chemistry and wanting to have more control over the surface appearance of my work, but even more, I wanted to cut down on the cost of my glazes. Commercial glazes are hella expensive but worth it for the reliability, and making glazes from scratch was a nightmare— so I was told….

You— yes, you, Creative-friend, you literally make something out of nothing. You are the Pie-Maker and can make endless amounts of pie. A long as you’re alive and creating, there’s no shortage of pie. There’s no need to compete with anyone other than yourself.

Several years ago, I put aside all friendly warnings and dismissed my trepidation and started mixing my own glazes…

When I was just starting out in freelancing in 1992, company, Charlesbridge, contacted me to do the children’s book Creepy Creatures: Do They Scare You? I was utterly fascinated with getting to do the research to make the art. My very first book would be a bunch of the coolest animals! Teeth! Claws! Scales! Spines! Danger and grossness! Hooray!!

The great and venerable Western Publishing CO. sadly, was bought out by St Martin’s Press in the 90s but not before I got the chance to work with them on 5 books and a few pop up covers.

Anyone interested in becoming a freelance illustrator first needs to develop a cohesive portfolio. If you’ve been making images for a while and are acquiring many that are showing a particular personal style and content, then choosing…

Since 2007, Pat and Jeannie Wilshire have organized a group of artists for IlluXCon, a collectors’ show of fantasy art, which started in Altoona PA, and is now hosted by The GoggleWorks venue in Reading PA.

I brought this recent drawing, “Death To the Dictator”, to IlluXCon 2022. Like most of my work, when I look at it, I remember where I was or what was happening at the time, perhaps down to what music I was listening to. All of my work is freighted with meaning for me, it becomes a sticky note of my space in the world…