I primarily use Adobe Photoshop for painting illustrations. These full paintings take anywhere from two to twelve hours, depending on the complexity. While some of these were traced from my sketchbook before being colored, others were drawn from scratch on Photoshop.

I do not use AI generated artwork in any way, shape, or form, not even as inspiration. This is all human made.

If you would like to see some of my personal art, go here.

Illustrations

When I’m not teaching, I take art commissions that interest me. Space Wizard Science Fantasy often fills my spare time and I have been one of their main freelance illustrators since 2021.

I have painted the interior illustrations for the following books:

• Distant Gardens, an science-fantasy anthology
• Farther Reefs, a companion anthology to Distant Gardens
• Lofty Mountains, a companion anthology to Distant Gardens
• Fiery Deeps, a companion anthology to Distant Gardens
• The World of JUNO, a science-fantasy anthology that I wrote a story for as well as illustrated
• Ardulum: First Don, a science-fiction novel by J.S. Fields
• Ardulum: Second Don, the sequel to First Don
• Ardulum: Third Don, the final book of the Ardulum trilogy
• Ardulum: Tales from Ardulum, a collection of short stories starring the beloved characters of the Ardulum trilogy

Covers

I have also painted the cover for the following books:

• Junk Junction, a middle grade horror by Sara Codair
• The Rosewood Penny, a fantasy romance by J.S. Fields
• Foxfire in the Snow, a coming-of-age fantasy by J.S. Fields (coming soon)
• Ocean of Fireflies, the sequel to Foxfire in the Snow (coming soon)

World of Juno

Space Wizard Science Fantasy asked me to not only illustrate The World of JUNO, a science-fantasy anthology, but also to write a short story for it. I wrote Ashfall on Jade, the tale of a small family attempting to escape when a volcano’s eruption threatens to destroy their underground city home.

Badges

During the summer of 2020, I was hired by Curiosity Untamed to create a reflection to go over each of their badge images. Curiosity Untamed wanted a 2D Photoshop solution, as rendering a 3D version of 27,000 badges was possible, but an expensive and time-consuming task. The challenge was to create a layered painting where each badge could be imported automatically underneath my painted reflection to create a 3D look.

Using a reference photo and Photoshop, I painted the reflection and shadow by hand on a computer-created flat grey circle. You can see the completed reflections all over Curiosity Untamed’s website.

Social Media

During the summer of 2019, I was in charge of creating media via Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Spark for Curiosity Untamed’s social media accounts. I then regularly posted these images through Hootsuite. When Curiosity Untamed decided to modernize and broaden its curriculum, I taught my social media successor before switching to writing said new curriculum.

All of these images were created using Curiosity Untamed’s flat badge images and commercial-use, royalty-free images from sites such as Pexels and Pixabay. I used photomanipulation and painting to combine these images. On average, it would take me roughly fifteen to twenty minutes to create one social media image, depending on the complexity.