I don't have much formal art background. I was quite artsy as far back as high school (prior to scrolls for the SCA, the only acrylic painting I ever did was a huge mural for the school as a senior year project. Looking at it now, I shudder at how bad it is). Truth be told, I’ve always been much more at home in media other than paint: pastel and pencil, mostly.

My undergrad college didn't offer any studio art classes; if they had, I probably would have been a dual major. I occupied some free time during college by doing pictures in Berol Prismacolors of athletes from photographs. Two of them—one of a nameless diver and one of Tonya Harding before the infamous knee-capping—you can see here.

Later, I participated in some informal figure drawing sessions in both London and Syracuse (on the second floor of the local firehouse, where everybody chipped in $5 to cover the model's fee and the most artsy guy there did the lighting). Figure drawing is both fun and challenging—after the first 30 seconds, you are so intent on your drawing that you totally forget that there is a naked person in front of you. Really, I swear. That spell is only broken if the model retains some fragment of clothing. I remember drawing a young woman who insisted on wearing knee socks because the room was cold, and those socks were a continual remind of her nudity.

For two summers during college, I was a "portrait artist" (not to be confused with "caricature artist") at a local theme park, where I had 10 minutes to do a pastel profile portrait of each person. It was great fun, although hardly fine art. The only formal fine art class I ever took, from a professional artist, was a much more traditional pastel portraiture class in Buffalo. This picture turned out the best of all those. I’ve also thrown in a picture of a pastel still life done a few years later. That class taught me wonderful things about use of color, all of which I’ve pretty much forgotten by now.

After grad school and prior to my SCAdian conversion, my artsy/craftsy urges were spent hand-quilting several quilts. There’s probably at least a decade prior to the SCA where I didn’t pick up a paintbrush and barely held a sketching pencil.