After nearly a decade of painting contemporary soldiers and military imagery, I was ready for new subjects and greater variety in my professional work. That opportunity arrived in Las Vegas, where I joined a start-up slot machine game studio in 2013.

The company has since grown into the world’s largest and most successful production studio for slot machine games, where I continue to work as a Senior Concept Artist creating large-scale key art and visual experiences for games enjoyed around the world!

As a child, I went to the library and devoured every collection of Peanuts, Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, and The Far Side I could find. I also studied the political cartoons in the back of our local newspaper. I rarely understood the issues, but I was fascinated by the exaggerated faces, visual metaphors, and the ability of a single drawing to make a point.

That early fascination eventually found its way into my own caricatures, humorous illustrations, and wonderfully goofy slot-machine characters. What makes a picture funny? For me, it begins with recognizing a familiar emotion or personality trait and exaggerating it wildly out of proportion. Sometimes it is simply a character trapped in a painful situation—close enough to our own experience that we recognize it, but far enough removed that we feel comfortable laughing.

I love life, and I love people. Drawing funny pictures is one of the ways I empathize with the frustrations, weaknesses, and absurdities we all share. I have always felt that “crazy” is just two seats away—and under the right circumstances, any one of us might slide over.