Where do you get your ideas from?
This is a complicated question. I’ve answered it an number of different ways, I suspect; though some people have used the same words, they may be asking different questions.. Here’s one answer: I don’t know….. but it’s not that interesting. A better answer might be : Reading, looking at art, contemplation, and playing role-playing games have definitely conditioned my mind to come up with ideas. That’s not much of a problem, but where do they come from? When I can, I like to try to make reference to other pieces of art from history, so that some pieces have their genesis in existing works of art. Illustrations usually have have their roots in the literature they accompany. There are more possible answers, but these seem enough for this context.
How long have you been drawing and painting?
I can’t remember not drawing; with crayons or colored pencils or whatever. I started painting with watercolors around eleven or twelve. Oils and Acrylic came along in high school. I started using Egg Tempera just after college. It was chosen as an alternative to Oil due to an intolerance I believe I brought on myself by spending a summer in a basement . I painted in this basement and slept on the floor a few feet away from my easel. I do not recommend this, at least not when painting with Oils.
When did your involvement with DCC RPG start?
From the beginning. I had already worked on Dungeon Crawl Classics books for the 3rd and 4th editions of Dungeon and Dragons for a number of years under the banner of DCC but it wasn’t a stand-alone rule system yet. We did a play test of the first adventure, Portal under Stars in the basement of the old location of Gary Con in 2010. I was working on the first illustrations shortly after that. The first painting was the door cover and the first interior I worked on was the characters chapter start drawing the four iconic character classes. A bunch of discussions over time with Joe Goodman about the kind of games I played and what should be different in DCC RPG from the current version of Dungeons and Dragons at (4th edition, at that point) influenced the game’s design. Suffice to say neither one of us was terribly excited with the direction brand name D&D was going and we wanted to create a game we would be enthusiastic about playing ourselves.
Who are your influences?
J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, Philip K. Dick, Clark Ashton Smith, Steinbeck, Dostoevsky, Homer, Gary Gygax, Jethro Tull (the band, not the inventor) , Bad Religion, Iron Maiden, Pegboy, Gretchen Helfrich, Senor Alec Tompson, Omar Little, Pablo Picaso, Norman Rockwell, Jeff Easley, Alan Lee, Patrick Woodroffe, Arthur Rackham, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Caravaggio, Albrect Durer, Heironomus Bosch, Sargent, Turner, Bruegel, Wyeth (both), Goya, and many many more.