It's not so much the art as the stories that are behind them...

My audition piece for Strawberry Shortcake back in 2004 when they rebooted her with a new look. All done in Adobe Illustrator. My first real work in that software, and it was a bear.

I did this piece TWICE. One night, when I was adding the final touches to it... my computer died. I was horror struck and wasn't able to scrape the hard drive hoping it was still there. I took the drive to a couple local places but to no avail. I had to get a new computer system all set up and then I had to go back and redo the whole thing all over again from scratch!

Soon after — as we didn't have USB flash drives yet — I would buy spindles of CDs and EVERY night I would burn a new CD with that day's work on it. By the end of the month, I had a stack of CD's sitting by the computer. Once you have a horror story of losing data, you then do all you can to not have it happen again! I've been abiding to the "back up rule of three" since that time!

In hindsight, it was probably better that it happened when it did as it increased my skills and speed in Illustrator, and it was much easier doing it the second time. I'm still happy with it.

You may look at it and think it's a nice piece of art. I look at it and just think back to that dark, brooding night as I was laying in bed and looking up at the ceiling wondering what I was going to do...

It's not so much the art as the stories that are behind them...