I started drawing furry stuff in the summer of 1995, following an obsession with contemporaneous Disney movies and other animated features. I'm not sure what made me start, but I know what kept me going: some very supportive friends, many of whom I've lost track of in the intervening years, but whose influence during those first few formative years always made me feel like some kind of superstar. I know now that it was encouragement far out of proportion to my abilities, but as much as it gave me an inflated sense of what I was capable of, at least I always recognized that there was a long way to go before I could compete with the pros. So I drew for hours every day, often to the exclusion (and detriment) of my academic work.

And yet I don't regret a bit of what's happened. It's all been humbling and perspective-filled, and now I can look back on these first drawings with fondness as well as with derisive rueful laughter. But if you'd like to skip the "fondness" part and move right on to the laughter, well, go right ahead—that's what all this is here for. And who knows... maybe you'll find it edifying.

	Nevada.webp	06/01/1996	93 KB
	Okay then. This would be my first attempt at visualizing a personal character, back in late 1995 in my sophomore year at college. I remember drawing this in the computer lab instead of doing my programming assignment. I also remember barely passing the class. ...I didn't say those two things were related. Oh yeah: he's supposed to be a fox.
	Cadel.webp	09/02/2004	121 KB
	Mid-1995 character portrait of someone you probably know. Too bad it's so awful. I redid it later, though.
	MuckMeet.webp	02/10/2000	95 KB
	I'm not even going to try to explain what's going on here; just stare and point and laugh, and I'll be over here until you're done. This is just in here to (hopefully) provide a bookend to the rest of this whole retrospective-type-thing; it's where I stood in the summer of 1995. And I was so pleased with myself, too...
	Clearwater.webp	06/01/1996	81 KB
	A character for a friend of mine. This is the danger inherent in drawing a musclebound character when you know nothing whatsoever about musculature.
	Embrace.webp	06/01/1996	96 KB
	Aww, how romaaaantic. This would be from my younger and more innocent days. I can still remember if I try real hard. I don't try very often.
	NevadaInspired.webp	06/01/1996	91 KB
	I remember drawing this while attending ConFurence—I forget which one, but it must have taken place in late 1995 or early 1996. Even at that early stage I was discovering how drawing could at the very least keep me amused in a corner.
	WhatDoYouThink.webp	06/03/1996	125 KB
	More horrors of musculature. Wouldn't it be something if people actually had pecs like this? He looks like a Transformer. Meanwhile this shows how groundbreakingly creative I was even back then: sitting in a swivel chair with a sketch pad, I chose to draw myself sitting in a swivel chair with a sketch pad. For my next trick, I'll write an essay about the process of essay-writing, followed by something equally self-referential and tiresome, like writing descriptions for pictures I drew eight years ago.
	Cheetah.webp	06/01/1996	106 KB
	Someone had told me that there was no shame in copying from reference, if in the process I learned from it. This came out of a big-cat photo book. His feet don't line up. I guess I learned that feet should generally line up.
	Fox.webp	06/01/1996	97 KB
	Maybe I should have spent a little more time studying what foxes actually look like, before giddily trying to do one in what I laughably thought was "animation style".
	HyouNevada.webp	06/01/1996	127 KB
	Okay, this is a little more promising. I'd not yet learned how to build a character up from basic shapes the way the animators do it, so I was faking it as best I could; and I had come up with a few tricks that let me pull off the illusion okay. Plus I think I got lucky with a few of these faces and postures, if not with things like balance and anatomy. But whatever the story, this picture and the next few pumped up my ego enough to keep me feeling pretentious and ambitious, so I kept going. I guess that's the secret: trick yourself into persevering. Huh? Huh?
	ClearwaterNevada.webp	06/01/1996	116 KB
	By this point I was dabbling with inking, as well as with pencil shading; the results were encouraging, though the quality of the paper I was using at the time was not. I had yet to discover why you ink on Bristol board and not on sketch pad paper. I still didn't know the first thing about musculature, or how to draw a hand that wasn't just a row of sausage-y things stuck to a trapezoid. But the shading made it look like I knew something other people didn't.
	HyouClearwater.webp	06/01/1996	68 KB
	Hey, check out that beefy Trogdor-esque right arm. I think this is about acting and directing. Things that occupied my mind about four hundred years ago.
	NevadaI.webp	06/01/1996	97 KB
	Oh, this should get a few giggles. This is what I considered "indecent" back then, hence the I in the filename. And check out that sultry stare. I may have been repressed, but it was never destined to last...
	Graduation.webp	09/02/2004	135 KB
	At the time, this was the impossible dream. I suppose it's just as well that I had to take a (forced) semester off from school and attend my hometown community college to rebuild my distraction-shattered GPA; if I hadn't, I'd never have been in the area to collide with Lance and start whipping up the ideas for ASB. Life is funny.
	Elevator.webp	06/01/1996	95 KB
	Horrible, dead eyes, nonexistent balance, and grotesque proportions that could have come out of Escher on brown acid. Other than those things, though, this picture sucks.
	Space.webp	06/01/1996	205 KB
	This is a bit better, mostly because I didn't have to worry about faces. I think this was supposed to be for a con book at some sci-fi convention that I knew nothing about.
	Vixen.webp	09/02/2004	103 KB
	I don't remember who this is; only that I'd apparently decided that Balto was going to be my model for drawing canine faces. And that I had a long way to go in learning how hair and clothes work. (I never did figure out hair.)
	Leash.webp	06/01/1996	116 KB
	Um, yeah. Like I said, hair was never a strong suit of mine. Nor was hiding my stylistic inspirations.
	Cadel2.webp	09/02/2004	151 KB
	Cadel gets redrawn. Boy, was I proud of the contrast between this and the earlier version, after about nine months of practice. The balance may still be off, but at least now he looks like he has actual anatomy instead of just an outline.
	Ralkor.webp	09/02/2004	138 KB
	Now this one I'm still proud of, in its way. In fact, I've never been able to quite replicate that face. This is one of those mysteries of nature, akin to the one where Gary Larson discovered that once you've drawn Rocky the Flying Squirrel successfully once, it's physically impossible to do so ever again.
	Agora1.webp	06/01/1996	99 KB
	Okay, here's where I start to strike out on my own; those previous characters are never heard from again, due to one thing and another (some of which would lead directly and inexorably to my no longer being in college for that semester); and I've come up with a new "character" (I use this term loosely, because it's not like it was ever anything more than a drawing that I tried to pretend represented "me"), one that's actually got some body definition and no clothes on to hide it. I kinda liked this drawing, but the face needs help. (Not as bad as some of the later ones, though.)
	Agora.webp	06/01/1996	99 KB
	This body posture gives me the heebie-jeebies. So do those atmospheric elements, and the face, and the hands. You know what? Skip this one. It's here for the completist in me.
	MorningStretch.webp	09/27/2002	124 KB
	For the longest time I convinced myself that if anybody ever stumbled across my sketchbook, all they'd find would be a bunch of unobjectionable cute fuzzy animal drawings. I had a completely separate book, however, in which my hand started drawing naughty nasty horny stuff, no matter how much I told it to stop. This, I believe, is the first full frontal male nudity I ever drew. June '96. The date from which all time would thenceforth be reckoned! To look at this one, though, you'd think I'd never seen a penis before.
	LyingDown.webp	09/27/2002	89 KB
	Must have just been an excuse to draw naughty bits... although these aren't exactly pretty as such things go. I kinda like the pose, but that head needs to be snipped off and replaced with, oh, I don't know, Trey Parker's or something.
	AgoraJerk.webp	09/27/2002	70 KB
	Wow, once the dam was breached, eh? I guess I figured that at this point there was no soul left to save, so I may as well go for the gusto. Spooge!
	RalkorStanding.webp	09/27/2002	126 KB
	Memo to self: balls hang down. Everybody sing! Do your balls hang low? By the look of this guy, no! See? I told you I never could replicate that face.
	WolfStanding.webp	09/27/2002	93 KB
	I kinda like this guy, even today. I think it's because of that shy little hand (which actually looks like a hand for once). Partially obscured naughty bits are sexy, as I was beginning to discover. Oh, and the musculature is starting to look a little more like it's of this Earth.
	SelfPortrait.webp	02/10/2000	69 KB
	As 1996 wore on, and discussions with Lance (online and otherwise during weekend visits) started to lead toward some kind of comic-type project, I found my self-image starting to look more like this guy. Yes, I think this design came about after I started doodling Daniels.
	Sleek.webp	09/27/2002	99 KB
	I always rather liked this one. I was starting to dabble in things like comic shading, which meant crosshatching and edge lighting; meanwhile, the musculature was starting to fall into place, and most importantly I was starting to come up with some actual balanced figures once in a while. Oh, and that's foreshortening on the cock. Honest!
	Blowjob.webp	02/10/2000	76 KB
	By this stage (late '96) I was starting to get multiple figures into sticky situations together. I was having problems with making the postures look natural, but that's soooo not what's important when it's 11:00 PM and you're feeling fidgety.
	Dance.webp	02/10/2000	104 KB
	Awwww again. This would be cute if the characters didn't look so dorky.
	Rif.webp	02/10/2000	68 KB
	I believe this was intended to be Rif from the game Inherit the Earth. I think he looked better when he was twenty pixels tall.
	Xmas.webp	02/10/2000	83 KB
	Christmas 1996—I was heading back to college and feeling full of the goodwill of the season, so I thought I'd try inking something that I could send out to friends who liked naked lion butts. Check out these eyes. They last through about mid-1997, at which point it dawns on me that they don't work and I should draw them differently.
	WhiteWolf.webp	02/10/2000	93 KB
	This isn't any particular couple of characters from any particular movie. No, really. ...Okay, I guess that joke would only work if they looked more on-model to start with, but I'm not holding a royal flush here...
	HuskyOrgy.webp	02/10/2000	51 KB
	Here's what happens when the sled dogs get unhitched for the night. (Hey, when you have to stare at an uplifted tail inches in front of your face all day long...) This is a theme that I seem to revisit once in a while.
	BensChars.webp	02/10/2000	127 KB
	Character designs for a friend's story. These are more fossils from a project that I never heard of again, but they're educational in a way—if only as a cautionary example of how not to draw faces, or something...
	ToonyWuff.webp	02/10/2000	78 KB
	It's probably safe to say that mid-1997 marks the end of the "Ancient History" section of this little archaeological dig. This little guy was partially an attempt to mimic another artist's style, by the way—I couldn't possibly remember who. But it did give me a few ideas for how to wean myself off of the Balto design cues for canines. Huh huh huh. I said "wean".