This took a long time but it was super, super fun. I really enjoy pushing my limits as an artist.

Todd Henry, over at Accidental Creative has come up with the 7-word bio as a way for artists to describe themselves. After much twisting of phrase, I’ve come up with the following to describe myself:

Autodidactic polymath, cultural enthusiast, and transdisciplinary artist.

What is your 7-word bio?

Here’s an illustration I’m doing on spec. I hope I actually get some work and money from it, but if not, I still get a drawing from it.

And here’s a detail of the face:

Since Parker was born, I’ve been going mad with ideas for children’s books. Here’s one of them.

I keep thinking to myself, “someone else must have thought of this first…it’s so obvious.”

But Google and Amazon turn up nothing, so I hereby claim Captain Kid as an original (cough..ahem) children’s book character.

This one may be a bit of an acquired taste. I particularly like the blue and brown together, perhaps with the red as an accent color, but perhaps not.

Wacom tablet. Autodesk Sketchbook. Photoshop. 30 minutes, maybe.

George Cotronis is a friend who currently lives in Gothenburg, Sweden. He’s an ace at dark, gothic photomanipulation, and one of the few people I’d actually consider doing art for one of my projects. He just put up a new blog here, and he’s busy filling it with art.

If you know me well, you know that I really only get vocally political when it comes to arts issues. Well, I just found out yesterday that President Obama cut back arts funding in his budget proposal for 2011. Arts education funding has been consolidated with several non-arts sources.

On the other hand, the government spends twice as much in ONE DAY on the war in Iraq as they do for the entire year on all the government sponsored arts programs combined. This says a lot about not only our government’s values and priorities, but those of our society.

I’ve had students in the past couple of years who have attended schools where the arts programs have been eradicated. I don’t like where this is heading.

Perhaps those at a high level of government don’t understand that without exposure and experience to the arts, our physicians and engineers and chemists won’t learn the creative problem-solving skills that will allow them to address the multitude of pressing issues that face our civilization now and in the near future. In other words, steel and silicon and dna are, or can be, as much an artistic medium as oil paint or ballet, but they are useless unless they are being utilized as such by those with an artistic temperament.

Meanwhile, those of us who are fighting to save our culture and civilization from rotting from within due to the corruptive nature of apathy and escapism are struggling, especially in the current economic climate. We are the infantry of culture. We who have chosen to sacrifice social and financial security to share our art with those who need it most–be they nascent artists or accountants who realize that they desperately need something real to fill that gaping hole in the spirit that we all have–we are falling into a increasingly deeper financial hole. Some of us can’t hold on much longer, and you’ll lose us to steady jobs with benefits.

Is that what you really want, Mr. President?

I’m not as happy with this one as I am with the portrait of John. I used a different process in an attempt to save time. I think I ended up paying for it. Still, not too bad.

Also, I need to work on hair. Really dissatisfied with the hair on both these guys.