I love sketching different facial expressions and body language until that magic moment happens where the face I’m doodling almost seems to stare back at me. Transferring my life from my head out through my hand as fast as possible is bound to happen if someone places a blank piece of paper in front of me. While I love quickly filling up a page with vigorous mark making and gesture, slowing down my hand and in turn my brain makes for a creative process that is much more time consuming and painstaking, but more rewarding. I strive to createstories and characters that are both immediately understandable and recognizable, yet unpredictable and original. Like a puzzle, I repeatedly try out different contexts for these characters until I find one that not only frames what was there before but adds to it. In having a definitive beginning, middle and end for my cast of characters, their actions become just as much a part of who they are as what they look like. I find myself hiding the motives just as much as revealing them within my stories, so that the time I spent working backward from sketch to a fully realized character pays off in full to the audience: A cartoon rat can slowly reveal itself as a conniving crime boss, the thousand little lines coming together as living breath thing.