Merry Christmas Hollywood from LAPD Emerald Society Pipes and Drums

2025 - Photoshop

Every year I am commissioned by a retired member of the LAPD, who plays drums with the Los Angeles Police Emerald Society Pipes and Drums, to do a pipe band themed Chirstmas card. Each year he comes up with something fun for me to do, and my 2025 card had such a classic look, I loved how it turned out! Apparently these cards make their way to some interesting people - including the L.A. Chief of Police - each holiday season!

Daisy and HAL Look at the Stars

2024 - Photoshop

I have loved HAL 9000 since I was 12 and first saw the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984). Lately I've been spending a lot fo time with 2001, and 2010 and my inner cartoonist couldn't resist creating Daisy, a little alien who has a crush on HAL! This little cartoon was all Photoshop except for the background which is an image of Jupiter from the NASA Juno probe. It is part of a larger series, but it took on a life of its own, and by the end I had fallen in love with Daisy and fallen in love with HAL all over again!

"Home" inspired by Short Circuit

2023 - 24 x 30 acrylic with oil highlights

This painting was inspired by my reconnection with my favvorite film of all time, Short Cirucit (1986), when the new owner of the house from the movie called me to ask me about some details concerning the appearnace of the house, as he was working on restoring it to how it appeared back when Short Circuit was made. In 2021 I went out to stay in the house as Richard - the new owner - prpared to make it an Air BNB for fans to enjoy. I have visited the house several times since and finally completed this painitng of Number Five and Stephanie on the deck enjoying the "sunrise" in spring of 2023. It is meant to capture the soft light of early morning and the magical feeling I got upon first seeing Short Circuit at age 13. It also features the famous bridge which figures prominently in the plot of Short Cirucit, the lovely rhododendrons which color Astoria in the late spring, the wysteria along the back fence, and The Goonies house in the middle ground. Though that famous house is further east on the other end of town, I thoght it would be fun to salute it and another fmaous mid-80s film made in Astoria! The first thing I did upon completeling the painting was send Richard a print of it to put in the living room of the Short Circuit House! I arrived the day before my birthday for a vist in 2023 and was delighted to find the painting next to the window overlooking the Astoria Bridge!

Satellite Lily Rides the USS Batfish

2022 - pen and ink/Photoshop

This piece was my first serious digital painting (all my many years of using Photoshop to color artwork notwithstanding). I did the character drawing with pen and scanned it. The space background is an image from the James Webb space telescope. The character is my own. Her name is Lily and she is an alien who adopts retired U.S. World War II submarines and refits them for space travel. Now she has her own fleet of happy space subs! I painted the submarines after actual Balao class World War II subs. The subs in the background are the USS Balao and the USS Blueback.

Boov and Cats Steal the K2EZ Rover - QSL card

2020 - colored pencil on bristol

In the fall of 2020 one of my ham radio friends, Andrea Slack K2EZ, asked me to do a fun illustration for her QSL post card that she sends out to fellow radio operators who request a paper conformation of a contact. She said the only crieteria were that the art feature not only her antenna laden vehicle, but also cats and Boov - cute purple aliens from the Deamowrks movie Home. This was inspired by her love of her own cats and the recent exploits of my stuffed Boov which had traveled with me to several major ham radio conventions in the previous two years. The result was super fun and informed by the illustration style of Adam Rex who created the Boov for his young adult fiction novel The True Meaning of Smekday. And check out a couple more of my QSL cards below!

Even more QSL cards are available to view at Sparks QSL.

City of Fort Worth Public Art Seed Sculptures concept art

2020 - pencil

In Late 2019 my cousin Clifton Crofford, who is a gifted glass artist, came to me with an assignment to help him flesh out his proposal to the city of Fort Worth to create three large public art pieces to complete a contract he had been awarded earlier that year. I had to help him visualize an acord, a magnolia seed and a pinecone, all three to be cast in bronze and to include unique fetures made of glass. AFter a few months of meetings and discussion he was happy with what I had come up with! And yes, these are all three now actual sculptures in Near South Side Fort Worth!

Art Booveau

2016-2018 - 16 x 20 acryla-goauche/colored pencil on illustration board

I love the Boov from the Dreamworks animated movie Home. I also love Paris, which was featured in the film, as well as the Art Nouveau painting of Alphons Mucha. He liked to do series nased on the seasons, so I did this little group of four Boov in Paris paintings. They are not nearly as sophisticated or subtle as Mucha's works but they are full of fun and in a very favorite style of mine!

Sanctuary and King of Fools

2015 - 36 x 36 acrylic on canvas

This is a tribute to one of my favorite characters and a very unusual animated film. The image which it is based on is a frame directly from Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. THe character Quasimodo was supervised by James Baxter and animated by John Ripa in this scene. This is one of my largest and boldest paintings. The iamge below is also from the same era for me and is illustrative of Quasimodo's complexity as his both gentle and fierce. This might be one of the few things that made it from the original novel into the 1996 animated movie!

Honk and Beep

2004-2007

In the early 2000s I was in music school at the University of Southern Mississippi while I was working as an artist and web developer for The School of Polymer Science, and I found myself obsessed with leanring to play the bagpipes! So of course I had to write stories about bagpipes and make a cartoon character out of a bagpipe and a practice chanter, and of course they needed a friend - a little girl named Flett.

Polymer Science Learning Center

1999-2004

For several years after grad school I worked at the School of Polymers and High Performance Materials at the University of Southern Mississippi creating educational websites for the Polymer Science Learning Center. I creatued sevral sections of the larger website geared toward younger students. I also created a flagship character for these sites to help get kids interested in finding out about polymers and how many of htem are part of our everyday lives. His name is Paul Lemur! He also had some cute friends, Monmer Mouse Lemur and Lee Murrie.

Realtime Associates

1994-1995

I enjoyed the year I worked as an animator for this small video game company in the Los Angeles area. We created games for SEGA and Nintendo platforms and worked on licenses for companies like Disney. I had the pleasure of animating the characters in the SEGA Pico Pocahontas game as well as the Berenstain Bears Pico title, along with cleaning up 3D to 2D conversions of animations for Bug! - one of hte early Sega Saturn titles, which was possibly the first 3D scrolling game ever!