About a Boy

I’m the guy whose school notebooks contained more doodles than words, and actually did get to grow up to be a cartoonist.

I’m the dad you see with his adorable boys at the playground or the grocery store on a weekday morning. The one who is even more excited about an impending snowfall than the kids.

I’m the husband who does most of the cooking, and does it well. The one who is equally excited about perfecting his angel food cake and bruschetta recipes as he is about his beef brisket.

I’m the follower of Christ who worships his heart out in song. The one who either has a song for every occasion, or just makes one up.

I’m the geek in the t-shirt with the obscure math joke or robot on it. The one who has a scarily detailed Zombie Apocalypse Plan. Y’know, just in case.

I’m the luckiest guy in the world.

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SketchBoy Productions

Although my background was in animation, SketchBoy Productions began as my professional design consulting and freelance business, working mostly in the areas of web and graphic design. Over the years I have designed countless logos, business cards, websites and multimedia presentations. I’ve had good clients and bad clients, fun projects and boring projects.

However, the things that I really loved were the times I was able to work on something that stirred my passion for cartooning and illustration: character and mascot design, concept art, cartoony caricatures, and the like. Those were the kinds of things I wanted to do more often. More and more I turned to posting comics and cartoons online, as my personal “creative outlet” when yet another website had me tired of HTML and CSS and just wanting to draw something dadburnit. Hopefully something funny.

I was given the wonderful opportunity to work full-time for a few years with a fantastic company in Seattle, WA, who specialized in creating original Flash games for children — mostly for major children’s brands like Disney Channel, Hasbro, and Nickelodeon. The work was hard, but the joy of creating such things made me even more sure that my real inspiration came when I was working on creating things full of fun, color, and whimsy, that led to happy, smiling kids. No web design gig could ever compete.

In 2010 I self-published my first book, a toe-dip into the world of children’s picture books: The Animalphabet, a collection of big, bright, colorful cartoon animal illustrations, one for each letter of the alphabet, that I had originally created as part of the decoration of the nursery for our first born son. This was soon followed by Now I Eat My ABCs, which was of the same concept, but focusing on alphabetical anthropomorphic fruits and vegetables instead.

Emboldened, I embarked on collecting my long-running webcomic Life of Ronnie into a book, which was released just before Christmas, along with Wonder, a collaborative Christmas children’s story I did with my good friend Mike Howerton.

I guess you could say I’ve found my passion.