A digital landscape painting — one of several across the national-park and outdoor work.
A range of original illustration work — graphite portraiture, a national-park landscape series, digital painting, and lettering. Every piece is drawn by hand and digitized by hand. No AI anywhere in the process.
Illustration is where my work started. Over the years it has stretched across very different subjects and media — tight graphite portraits, stylized park landscapes, loose digital painting, and expressive lettering. What ties them together isn't a single style; it's a hand-built process that always begins with real drawing and ends with careful digital rendering.
The clearest test of drawing skill is the human face. These are hand-drawn graphite portraits — some finished in pencil, some carried into digital color — where the whole job is capturing a specific likeness, the fall of light, and the texture of skin, hair, and cloth.
A graphite portrait taken all the way into digital color — the tonal drawing does the heavy lifting, then color is layered on top without losing the pencil underneath.
Every finished piece traces back to graphite on paper. Here's the throughline on one portrait — from a gridded transfer, to a fully rendered pencil drawing, to the refined final. The drawing is decided by hand first; the screen only sharpens what's already there.
The same handoff in miniature: a pencil portrait scanned and colored digitally. The line work is finished on paper first — color is laid over a drawing that already holds up on its own.
An ongoing series illustrating the national parks — the same outdoor subject behind my CreativePalmer print work. Each piece reduces a park to its most recognizable forms and a considered, limited palette.
A flagship piece from the series — built to capture what makes one specific place unmistakable, in a bold, poster-like treatment.
Alongside the graphic park series, a set of softer digital paintings — landscapes and scenes built for mood and light rather than hard edges, plus the occasional illustrated piece for a specific brief.
A personal lettering study — the same two words, "Smile More," rendered again and again in different illustrative treatments. It's an exercise in holding a consistent letterform while completely changing the surface: patterned, painted, underwater, sprayed.
Samples of narrative concept work — character designs and environment scenes drawn to support a story, from a fully designed hero figure to detailed, atmospheric settings.
Not everything is drawn to fit a screen. These are full-size hand pieces built to hang — a five-by-eight-foot colored-pencil Thanksgiving banner casting our family as pilgrims, and a hand-painted anniversary surprise. The same drawing discipline, sized up to fill a room.
An original scene drawn and colored entirely by hand in colored pencil, then hung in our living room. A family of three, styled as pilgrims at a harvest table, surrounded by pumpkins, produce, and a pair of costumed cats.
Working this large means holding proportion, palette, and detail consistent across a surface far bigger than any desk — the drawing gets built in sections and has to still read as one piece from across the room.
A painted surprise for an anniversary: a sunset lake scene with two figures fishing from a boat, topped with brushed “Cheers” lettering and a leafy painted border. A change of medium from the colored-pencil work — loose, bright, and built to celebrate.
Together these show what a children's-book, greeting-card, editorial, or brand client needs to see: the ability to draw a likeness, originate a place or a character, hold a consistent treatment across a series, and carry it all from paper into a clean digital final. No stock, no tracing, no AI — just a consistent hand and a repeatable process.
I draw people, places, and characters by hand and finish them digitally — for covers, collections, cards, editorial, and place-based art.
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