My name is Desmond. I am an artist specializing in the creation of portraits, illustrations, and genre and landscape paintings. I work mostly with watercolor, gouache, oil and acrylic paint, and ink, on paper or canvas. I started this practice over the last decade but have been drawing since I was about 4 years old.
My earliest inspirations to make art came from watching Saturday morning cartoons as a child in the early 80s. Specifically, reruns of the animated series Batman with Robin the Boy Wonder, and also the Marvel Super Heroes series, both from the late 1960s. I’ve also always been a big fan of the live action Batman series, also from the 60s.
Through drawing I sought to recreate images I had been exposed to through television and comic books, images which had left a major and lasting impression on me. However, for me as a child, drawing was just a pastime. I never learned how to draw the human form or anatomy correctly. I insisted on drawing only with ballpoint pens on lined paper in spiral notebooks, and aside from the blue or black pen ink, I didn’t use any other color in my drawings and never colored them in. I never intended to create finished works that I wanted to share with others. I suppose I was simply writing and illustrating my own short stories based on my favorite comic books, TV shows and movies for recreation.
As an adult 20 years later, I wanted to build a website and needed graphics, but wanted to create the graphics myself, so I went to school to study graphic design. This eventually led to the rekindling of my love for drawing. My girlfriend at the time (now my wife) asked if I could draw her portrait. I made several attempts but was never satisfied with the results. That was when I finally started my formal studies of drawing and realized my desire to be a lifelong student.
Over the years since I started on this journey, I have discovered a love for experimenting with different materials, techniques and styles. When drawing, I still try to recreate images and scenes which have had some kind of impact on me, but now I also experiment more often with drawing from imagination.
Also when drawing now, I am often doing so with every intention of creating a finished, captivating visual to share with the world, in the hopes of making a lasting impression on viewers, and maybe even inspiring others who have always had an interest in making art, but never really nurtured or developed that interest, to begin their own journey on the path to becoming an artist.
