At the highest level I’m after those 3 seconds of OOOHHH. 

All of the work we do as artists- all the years and the study and the stress and the self doubt- all essentially boil down to an image (or one at a time) that gets looked at for about 3 seconds. My real goal as an artist is to create something that makes a difference to someone in those 3 seconds. The “ooohh” I get from a viewer means that something in my big messy wiring connected to something in theirs and that brief connection is worth all the work it took to get there. 

I get there by using my adult visual understanding to put a professional skin on my nostalgia and affection for concepts and characters from childhood (dinosaurs, robots, monsters, comics, all things ugly, pretty, funny, kinetic, monstrous, or any combination of the above). I put my personal warped, generally cartoonish lens over the true spirit of the subject to put my personal stamp on things I’ve always loved. 

I use form and shape to methodically search out the appeal in any given character or image, to find that ideal line between realism and exaggeration, and temper the (hopefully) ideal result with enough realism (color, lighting, weight, balance, believable anatomy) to ground it and make characters that don’t exist look like they could.. and that I actually caught them at a moment in the middle of their lives. 

I honestly believe there’s potential genius in about anything- my goal is to find that, and characters are where I can.