Someone always asks "How'd you get started?" ...I always reply that I was in a role playing relationship with a beautiful blond "Barbie doll", and her friends.

My "Barbie" was Kim. Starting in 1978, she was the main force behind the role playing scenes for the six years we were together. Fast forward to 1990... I have now married a beautiful red head who is not into role playing, sometimes let's me tie her up for sex, and I'm trying to adjust...because...I love her (still do,to this day).
I'm working hard trying to provide for my new family, and I get hurt at work. Injure my back big time. Unable to work for about six months, I'm bored. I can move around, sit and walk, but I have like a 5 pound lifting limit, so I'm home... I'm a second shifter, and so I'm up all night.. No cable in my town yet, over the air TV went off at about 1 am back then, so all I had was radio.

I started to sort out all the boxes of junk I brought with me from my single life, and I found one of the last remnants of my role play life, my photographer's notes from pics I had shot back then... The notebook contained all the "tech stuff" for shots I made ( camera lens setting, lighting , etc) but also had a sketch of the scene I was shooting, and in some cases I pasted a contact frame of the completed pic. ( I made a contact sheet of the developed film, selected the "best" shot, and cut it off the page and pasted it in the book. I made 8 x 10's or better of the best shots, but for reasons explained elsewhere, they did not survive into the 90's.

I started "doodling" back in the 80's, and did some before I was married, but finding this notebook....it gave me a reason to start drawing, to restore some of the scenes that only ran in my mind.

The wife? at first she thought I should be drawing trains, planes, and automobiles... thinking that I was drawing old girlfriends, but after she watched me draw one night, she saw the attention I was trying to put into the details,and not dwelling just on the subject, and she decided it was Ok.

The stuff I drew back in 1990-1991 is almost non existent now, dis- satisfaction, and water damage a couple of years ago have caused me to trash a lot of stuff from back then. A lot of the scenes survive, as I redrew most of the ones that I trashed, but there is still a whole bunch that are gone forever.

In 1992, 1993, and 1994 I worked for companies that had seasonal layoffs, and I drew a lot while laid off, as I knew I'd be going back to work in 2 months, and Unemployment said I didn't have to look for work.

1995 to 1998 I worked for a company supplying parts to the auto industry. There were strikes, and "model year changeover" in addition to vacations which gave me time to draw, but there weren't as many drawings then...the Internet and a new Mac computer came into my den. I started taking requests and commissions
( imagine that, someone paid me for drawings! )

With the new Century, I had started ( and lost) yahoo clubs and groups, MSN groups, E groups, one list clubs, smart groups, lycos clubs and the first xratedgroups group.
At one time I had over 5,000 members in a yahoo group, and 1,500 in the xratedgroup ( before that place imploded)
Then along came deviantart, where I started and stopped twice now, but have been there since 2006....and space offered to me by Templar and others. I tried Googlegroups when they first opened, but no one but me was posting, so why waste the effort.