In 2003 I was contacted by the Belgian prog-metal band Solipsist.  Evidently they were taken with “Becoming“, a piece I had posted on Deviantart and wanted to use the artwork for their debut album.   I dug the sound and gave them permission.  What was really neat about their sendup is that the band members all took photos in the same pose as the figure above (actually me with some photomanipulation), superimposed them on the original art and posted those as their band photos.  Nice guys, too.  It appeared as the cover of their debut album “Guideline to Insanity in Five Easy Steps”.

I checked up on them recently and it seems the band has since disbanded and its members headed for other groups, but you can find their remnant site here.

I’ve been involved with a number of web communities over the last several years, but hands down the best time I ever spent was with the group at Deviantart.

I found the site in the late 90s searching for wallpaper and joined up just as it was getting good and established. In a lot of ways it was the Myspace for people who liked to dink around with graphics, skins and desktop mods. I made a lot of great friends there and killed endless hours instant messaging and mailing back and forth. I also met a lot of people who helped me raise the level of art I was producing and offered great suggestions for improvement. I even have a couple of originals sent to me by individual artists themselves before the Prints business got up and around. It was more than a little addictive – you’d crank out a new work and the next day several friends and strangers were giving you compliments, criticism and suggestion. Long and hard I have burned for a music community that was so supportive, but I’ve yet to find one since the startup days of Mp3.com.

Eventually I left DA because I wanted to move on to other things besides cranking out pictures every night. No small part of that equation was the fact that DA had just gotten so big it was difficult to keep up with everyone anymore and the interest groups were splintering into smaller and smaller factions. Today it’s still a great community, but a little large to really get into.

I still have a pretty extensive gallery there. The header on the blog is actually a clip from one of the pieces there, Slow to Speak.

A couple of years ago I got an Email from a guy named Todd Brashear about putting together an album cover for his group. I used to get approached like this regularly and rarely saw anything come out of it, so I didn’t get my hopes up. But, I hadn’t done CD covers very often and thought this would be good practice, so why not?

Anyway, things didn’t work out and they ended up changing the album name and going with another artist. I checked up on them recently and apparently they’re getting some media and play and respect. You can check out Kryoburn here and the original cover I did for them here.

This past Christmas I did a number of Santas in polymer clay for friends and family. I have some snapshots of them on my Flickr stream. Not pictured is a nativity scene I started and never got past the first three figures. You’ll just have to browse the stream – I don’t have them categorized or anything. I looked briefly into producing some of these for sale as I had a number of people express interest in buying one. But in the end there was just way too much time invested per piece.

It’s still a lot of fun, though. Something to keep my hands busy.