Artist Background
I was born in Portland, OR in 1976, and have lived in Oregon all my life. I studied art at Western Oregon University beginning in 1999, and graduated in 2002 with a Bachelor of Science in Art. My focus with art has always been portraiture. I am fascinated with trying to capture the likeness, emotion, and personality of each of my subjects. I am constantly experimenting with a variety of media that has included but is not limited to: markers, pencil, ball-point pen, acrylic, pastel, charcoal, colored pencil, melted crayon, fingerprinting with stamp pad ink, etc.
I have been an MMA fan for nearly as long as the sport has been around. I believe the first MMA event I saw as it happened was UFC 7. And from that point on, I was hooked. I rented the previous UFCs soon after that, and have followed the sport religiously since that point. During my final year at WOU, I did my first MMA related painting....a red, yellow, and blue acrylic of Randy "the Natural" Couture. Since then, I have continued to produce MMA artwork.
I have also always had an interest in trading cards, and they have played an important role in my work as an artist. As a young boy, I drew baseball cards of myself and friends from the neighborhood. I collected baseball, basketball, and hockey cards as a teen. From that very first Randy Couture MMA painting, I had trading cards in mind. I've done most of my work in proportion to trading cards so that it would be easy to turn them into trading cards.
Then around 2009 I began the challenge of actually drawing on trading cards. These 'sketch cards' are original drawings that are standard trading card sized, 2.5x3.5" . In the Summer of 2012 I had the pleasure of drawing sketch cards for Topps UFC Bloodlines. From there I began working almost exclusively on sketch cards for various companies. I've worked for Topps, Leaf, Cryptozoic, Rittenhouse, Upper Deck, and others working on various different sports releases as well as some non-sports such as The Walking Dead, The Hobbit, Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly and Downton Abbey.
I have been an MMA fan for nearly as long as the sport has been around. I believe the first MMA event I saw as it happened was UFC 7. And from that point on, I was hooked. I rented the previous UFCs soon after that, and have followed the sport religiously since that point. During my final year at WOU, I did my first MMA related painting....a red, yellow, and blue acrylic of Randy "the Natural" Couture. Since then, I have continued to produce MMA artwork.
I have also always had an interest in trading cards, and they have played an important role in my work as an artist. As a young boy, I drew baseball cards of myself and friends from the neighborhood. I collected baseball, basketball, and hockey cards as a teen. From that very first Randy Couture MMA painting, I had trading cards in mind. I've done most of my work in proportion to trading cards so that it would be easy to turn them into trading cards.
Then around 2009 I began the challenge of actually drawing on trading cards. These 'sketch cards' are original drawings that are standard trading card sized, 2.5x3.5" . In the Summer of 2012 I had the pleasure of drawing sketch cards for Topps UFC Bloodlines. From there I began working almost exclusively on sketch cards for various companies. I've worked for Topps, Leaf, Cryptozoic, Rittenhouse, Upper Deck, and others working on various different sports releases as well as some non-sports such as The Walking Dead, The Hobbit, Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly and Downton Abbey.
