Joined CartoonVegas: 2012

Art Heroes: My favorite artist is Alphonse Mucha. I LOVE HIS STUFF! It’s so clean and pretty with the art nouveau, comic book line work and flair. It’s just gorgeous. I’ve also been a fan of impressionism since forever. They pixelated the world way before pixels existed 🙂

What do you love about caricatures?  Top three:

1.  Meeting all kinds of people. People are awesome.
2. The concept of ‘ugliness’ is rapidly disappearing from my consciousness. Carefully studying and learning to bring to life the differences in people has created an appreciation for diversity that is stronger than it’s ever been for me. Which is saying something.
3. Drawing smiles. I do this thing when I’m drawing smiles where I unconsciously make all kind of weird, smiley expressions myself as I draw them. It must be part of my struggle to really capture the smile or something, but it’s funny 🙂

For Struggling Artists:  “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple of years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase; they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know that it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you finish one piece. It’s only by going through a volume of work that you will close the gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just gotta fight your way through.”
~Ira Glass

Mike has a good attitude.  If he needs to spend another day drawing the same thing over and over again to get it right, he will.  And he’ll smile the whole time.  He’s diligent to improve.  Mike will keep working until it looks good.