I’m Dave, and I’ve been an illustrator since 1996. Like a lot of kids, I grew up drawing stuff. My parents always encouraged me, and I did reasonably well in art classes, but to be honest didn’t really stand out. I liked it well enough, but wasn’t super passionate about it. Looking back, I recognize now that I was more creative than anything else. In English classes I was always better at reading and creative writing than I was at diagramming sentences. Me and math haven’t been on speaking terms since 5^th grade and long division. In fact, I was never particularly adept at school, and was pretty much a straight C student. I started college with the idea of becoming an architect because I thought it would allow creativity, but not require being an artist, per se, which I didn’t think I was good enough at.

I graduated community college with a general ed AA, but got married, had kids and needed a job, so I went into construction and worked as a mason. Even there, I found that laying decorative brickwork and rockwork was something I could do reasonably well, and it too filled a creative need.

But by the end of 1995 construction ran out for me and I was looking for another job. My brother-in-law, Ken Edwards, who was a freelance illustrator, needed some help with a project (cutting frisket) so I started with him. It paid, it wasn’t heavy work, and it was … well… somewhat creative. I was happy to have it. He got another project after the first finished and so he kept me on. He hired a bunch of artists to help, but the general flakiness that can sometimes seem like an integral part of creative types afforded me an opportunity to do a little more. I told him I could draw the characters. I was then tutored by one particular artist, Greg Banker, who helped me get a better idea of how to structure characters and taught me the basic animation and illustration principles, and things took off from there.

I started out doing the Disney main characters: Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy and Pluto, and things just went from there. The initial books were for Little Golden books and included 101 Dalmations, Winnie the Pooh, Beauty and the Beast, Little Mermaid, Cinderella, and a bunch of others I can’t remember at the moment. Then in 1999, my brother-in-law moved on, and I started working on my own. I got a chance to draw the PowerPuff Girls, and that led to a few years of some of my favorite work. I started working with LeapFrog during those years. Cartoon Network connections turned into working on Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, and then working on Ni Hao, Kai-lan for Nick. At the same time, a series of family caricatures I did for friend was noticed overseas and I picked up a job doing corporate caricatures. This led to my moving away from so much children’s work, which, to be honest, I was glad to leave behind.