At age six, a drawing of mine, of a blue jay on a limb was taken by my teachers to an art exhibit going on at the time in the high school.  I remember these teachers coming to talk to me during recess after lunch that day, and them asking where I learned to draw like that.  To me, it was natural.

I am not any kind of Moses in the art world, nor pied piper, but simply someone who for some reason appreciates reality.  I remember the airplanes in my reading books and drawings in other texts, and wondering, why THEY could not draw better, or I had never seen an airplane like that.  I have always been able to draw what I see, and not only as I see it, but from other perspectives, above, below, to the right, to the left.... and I have always known that straight lines in reality are rare.  But, I never even gave that much a thought to how I draw, until I started drawing professionally in November of 1975.

How I draw is simple... I draw a line around the margins of my working surface, a roughly horizontal line to give myself a horizon, and a vertical line or two to let me know what up and down is ... from there, I draw what I see.  I like detail.  To me, the whole drawing is the sum of its parts, so I draw from the small to the large.  And later, I realized that if I can verbally describe something that I am not familiar with drawing, I can still make a reasonably good rendering of what I want.   It is more like this, actually:  I have to know the thousand words about my drawing BEFORE I start to draw.  The rest is just a matter of when I want to quit.

Sometime about the time I was a junior or senior in high school, I started drawing with a Rapidograph pen.  Since then, I only use ink to make my final drawings, except for margins and the horizon, no ruled lines, and the rest is judgment.  When I am doing something major, I do sketch the whole drawing, sometimes to a great amount of detail where needed, and then ink directly over the pencil, and erase the pencil from beneath the ink on completion.  My pen and inks are usually 16 x 25 - 33 inches with 2 1/2 inch margins, but often I go much larger, my largest being 22 x 90 on 30 x 96 paper.  I price by the square footage of the image, a square foot usually taking about two days to finish with the kind of detail that I like.

I always wanted to be a good artist, proficient in watercolor or oils ... but that was not to be.  I discovered Corel Draw, and its vector curve and fill tools about four years ago, and since then I have colored my drawings using CorelDraw 8, 9, 10, and now 11.   This coloring is reasonably simple, I scan my original, assemble the scans in using Corel, then convert them to a 300 dpi bitmap and delete the white fill.  Starting with a rectangle for the sky which I color using a textured fill, then blurring, I start tracing over each bit of my original pen and ink.  When I finish a portion, I group those objects together, call up a fill, and then delete the outline.  The last step is to move the original pen and ink in front of all the vector art, the sky at the back, and convert the whole lot to an appropriate RGB or CMYK bitmap, at an appropriate resolution.  After that, I use a gaussian blur to blend all this together and export the finished product."

USS NASHVILLE (PG-7)
Authorized by Congress, 3 March,1893, built at Newport News S.B.&D.D. Co., Commissioned 19 August 1897. Ship’s compliment: 11 officers. 165 enlisted men. The Patrol Gunboat, U.S.S. NASHVILLE is credited with firing the first American shot of the Spanish-American war on 22 April, 1898, the day Congress ratified the formal declaration. NASHVILLE’s shot across the bow of a Spanish merchant steamer became the first round fired in retaliation for the sinking of the U.S.S. MAINE in Havana Harbor in February of that year. In July the USS NASHVILLE joined with the U.S.S. MARBLEHEAD in a raid to cut a cable in the Cuban city of Cienfuegos that resulted in a score of the NASHVILLE’s crew being honored with the Congressional Medal of Honor. Five years later, on 3 November, 1903, NASHVILLE was off the coast of what is now Panama with orders to support rebels who were about to secede from the Republic of Colombia. A landing party from NASHVILLE secured a railroad bridge to deny reinforcement of the Colon detachment while NASHVILLE anchored in Colon’s harbor to keep the garrison there in its barracks. A few days later a treaty was signed with representatives of the new government of Panama for the construction of the Panama Canal. The U.S.S. NASHVILLE was decommissioned in 1909, but was reactivated when the war clouds brewing in Europe put strains on American relations with Mexico. NASHVILLE served until the end of World War One, and was finally decommissioned in 1919, and sold in 1921, to the Richmond (VA.) Lumber Company where she was used as a cedar barge. She was scrapped in 1957.

USS MAINE (BB-2)
Keel Laid 1889. At 6682 Tons, the USS MAINE was America’s second steel battleship. Sunk in Havana harbor 1898. When President William McKinley was inaugurated in March of 1897, the Cuban revolution was already a concern for the American people. Cuban nationalists were in control of all but the major ports in Cuba and in the cities, American interests were in danger. In January 1898, MAINE was ordered into Havana Harbor to protect American interests. On the night of 15 February an explosion under her keep caused "the explosion of one or more of MAINE’s magazines" and resulted in the deaths of 266 of the 310 men in the ship’s company.  "Remember the MAINE"  became the nation’s battle cry as Americans demanded revenge. On 25 April, 1898, Congress ratified a declaration "...that war had existed between the United States and Spain from and including 21 April 1898."

SHILOH
The mists that hang over the pond can take one's thoughts away from today's pristine and manicured park ... to the events that led to its' being ... to the days of the battle and just before ... when Ulysses Simpson Grant in his command boat, the steamer TIGRESS, came here with his army on other steamers like the UNIVERSE, to secure PITTSBURG LANDING on the Tennessee River, in Tennessee, near the railroad town of Corinth, Mississippi.  They made camp near a little church named Shiloh, a name taken from the Hebrew word for PEACE.  The first weekend of April, 1862, was Easter, and the peach trees were in full bloom.  General Grant, flush from recent victories at forts Henry and Donelson, on the Cumberland River, and the enemy nowhere in sight, did not think of war.  Instead of "digging-in" and building fortifications, he allowed his men to drink and "merry-make," and swim.  But early Saturday morning, after a fifteen-mile night march from Corinth, the Confederate Army under General A. S. Johnston of Tennessee attacked from the darkness into the dawn twilight, into the Union campground, starting what was to become the first of the truly bloody battles of the Civil War:  SHILOH.  The two day battle saw 23,000 killed, as many as at the great battle of Waterloo.  But in the U. S. Civil war, there would be twenty more battles that would demand this price in life and limb.

USS GEORGIA (BB-15)
The USS GEORGIA was launched 11 October, 1911, at the Bath Iron Works, Maine, shipyard.  She was commissioned nearly two years later, already obsolete by virtue of the commissioning of the H.M.S. DREADNAUGHT.  Furthermore, GEORGIA's superposed turrets also made her top heavy and created a living hell for the crews in the turret below when the "upstairs" guns were fired.   GEORGIA's main armament was typical for the period - four 12-inch 40-caliber,  and eight 8.8-inch 40-caliber breech loading naval rifles - a holdover from the traditions of earlier years when battleships slugged it out at close range.   GEORGIA participated in President Theodore Roosevelt's "GREAT WHITE FLEET" in 1908 - 1909 to train the newly expanded Navy's officer cadre and crews and as such, GEORGIA was the Flagship of the "Second Division."  GEORGIA is shown in this drawing  as she appeared on return to Hampton Roads at the end of that voyage.   GEORGIA participated in WWI and was under renovation and modernization at Bemerton, Washington, when under the terms of the Washington Treaty on Naval Armaments, she was considered replaceable.  GEORGIA was decommissioned while at Mare Island, CA, and sold for scrap, to make room for modernization of the Navy under the "caps" the treaty imposed.  Her name was struck from the Navy list on December 10, 1923.