From humble beginnings...

Hi Everyone,
That is, if more than just one or two people read this, I guess that it is okay to say 'Hi' to "Everyone"! For this blog, I wanted to give you a little bit of background about me, but not so much that I bore you to tears. And, I suppose that I want to let you know that do have a slight idea what I'm talking about when it comes to sculpting and creating toys.

Boy, that's starting to sound dreadfully boring already, Chris...I hope that the next few paragraphs go in a better direction than that! Okay, okay, I'll see if I can do a little better...and get down to some actual 'cool' stuff.

First of all, I'd like to say that it is possible to take good 'foundation' Art classes without going to expensive schools. It isn't really how much money you are spending, it more about what you are putting into it. I went back to school (Sussex County Community College) right here in good old, rural, Northern New Jersey at the age of 25. Now, I'm not going to say that all local colleges have great programs, but the one at SCCC gave me a great grounding in both drawing and design.

My instructors wanted me to continue on in Studio Art as a major and were pushing to try to get me to go to Cooper Union. But I figured that I might want to actually get some sort of job so, the next place I went was the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning in Dover, NJ. And it was there that I learned all about deadlines! And, even though I didn't really go after a job in Comics, it was while I was at the Kubert School that I first did some work on computer...this I liked.

After I decided NOT to go back and give Joe any more of my money, I found a school in North Carolina that looked like it had what I wanted. It was called the School of Communication Arts and they were in Raleigh, NC. They offered a 6-month course in all of the main graphics programs and they also offered classes in Computer animation. Again, I feel that I was very lucky to have had the instructors that I had, and I really put a lot into pulling my portfolio together.

After school I worked dor the RH Donnelly Company in N.C. for about 4 years creating ads for the yellow pages...this was graphic artist hell! If you've ever taken a look at an ad in the yellow pages, you'll see that they aren't so much ads as the are 'cramming as much information into as small a space as possible'. This was not fun.

So, I started looking around a bit for something else and I actually found out that 'Felix the Cat' was building a studio about 10 minutes from my Mom and Dad's house. Now, as much as I didn't want to come back home and be a burden, I soon found myself back in my old bedroom and commuting all of 10 minutes to work! And I was doing some pretty cool stuff...while I was at Felix, I did a lot of work helping them re-create a lot of old original art in Illustrator and helping them create an all new Style Guide for felix the Cat.

Now, as much as I enjoyed my work there, I knew that it would not last because they were still using a pay scale from about 1960! But, I was very, VERY lucky that one of the women that worked in licensing for Felix happened to know one of the guys that worked at McFarlane Toys...and she able to put me in contact with them. I had been doing a little sculpting on my own and really liked it. And, it just so happened that they were looking for sculptors...but nothing could have prepared me for the work that I would soon be doing!

Well, there you go, I hope that wasn't TOO boring...and it brings me up to a point where I can start talking about some of the actual work that I have done over the years. And then, I can talk about some of the stuff that I hope to be doing in the future!

P.S. The dragon picture at the top of the Blog is the Ice Dragon that I did for series 7 at McFarlanes