I was a kid that drew & never stopped. Drawing, like fiction is really hard work. Both are in the service of storytelling. When I do either, I do a lot of it. I see improvement. When I write a scene or approach a client’s project that isn’t working, I open a sketchbook & draw it out. This solves the problem, but I hadn’t translated the skill into digital art.

Once, I needed a scalable logo for a job, so I learned Illustrator, embraced the pen tool & redrew. I had created an asset that could be scaled vector perfect on a billboard or as small as the favicon file in a browser tab. Marketing teams & print shops found this useful. Gigs came in. I would learn to animate those vectors for video, make games, websites & cartoons. More gigs came. Animation is not drawing. You borrow from brand libraries or character sheets. Sometimes it’s making icons dance or make products explode & show why it was better than a competitors but the art was crude.

Then I saw what the designer, Brandon Ragnar was doing in Illustrator, and had to get some formal training.

I started going to life drawing sessions every week & taking courses on Linkedin Learning. I practiced getting things to scale & perspective. I made my own digital brushes & photographed textures. I made a lot of messes, cleaned them up & started to show them.

A project manager was getting ready to do an expensive photoshoot for a service offered & asked if I could show this process with an illustration. I asked him what were the points I had to hit. He gave me four. I produced the Pro-Deploy illustration & he said you just saved me $6K. I did not get a piece of that savings, but kept trying to improve. Your gig isn’t always the place to explore a new skill, so I looked for a project. Enter: Factpile

My friend Paul Bliss asked me for help on his Factpile project. He was growing an audience who asked for copyrighted material to battle other copyrighted material.

I started drawing representations as fan art & animating it in After Effects.

Factpile started getting 300k views.

My real epiphany of digital illustration was during a break at a life drawing session in San Diego. The town was so expensive, I found myself always asking everyone where they lived & their square footage.

I asked the model. She said she slept in her car. I had been homeless as a teenager & asked if there was anything she needed. She shook her head and said, “Better to sleep in a car in San Diego, than a marriage in Wyoming!”

The timer went off, the break was over, people returned to their easels, and she dropped her robe.

I had been presented a story. The question was how do I represent that in an image? HLM was born.

I worked on the fine art first to understand the subject better: