My career as an illustrator is ahem sketchy at best, but I enjoyed the hell out of everything I did.
The majority of my illustration work was for The Cooper Point Journal, a weekly newspaper in Olympia, WA. Here's how it worked: if I was around late on layout night, I could draw to fill any holes left in the layout. Naturally, I hung around a lot! For a couple of years, the Journal was always richly illustrated, not only by me, but by as many people as I could cajole into hanging around on layout night. The place was crappy with cartoonists looking for work. I suspect this is why the editorial staff started referring to us as "damn cartoonists". At least they didn't leave poisoned pizza out for us. That would pretty much have been the end of things.
Pieces I was particularly proud of appeared in consecutive issues of The Evergreen Natural History Journal, a quarterly publication devoted to exploring the local flora and fauna at the nether end of Puget Sound.
I got to draw my favorite spider for ENHJ: The European Cross Spider, Aranea diademedes. A truly pretty li'l bug.
A little illustration I did, just to amuse myself, really, was accepted for publication by Slightly West, a local literary (and art!) 'zine. That was fun, too, but sometimes I wonder, as I look at those lines, if I shouldn't lay off the caffeine for a while.
And then, there are all the little things I've drawn. This is one of my favorites.
