barbaraburns.com

I met Dan several years ago in my quest to be a better POD (Print On Demand) Shopkeeper. He was very active in several forums helping new Shopkeepers / Artists then and still is very active helping others today.

He is an incredibly talented artist, extraordinarily nice person, wise businessman and over-the-top versatile creative person using either traditional or digital art tools.

I LOVE Dan’s art very much – his attention to tiny details others might disregard take his work to the top. The art shown here is from his TornadoRepublic.com shop, from his Impact Media shop & from his Mowry Media Portfolio. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

---

BB: Can you tell us a little about yourself?

Dan: I’m a married father of two. I am the owner of Mowry Media and have been working for myself since 2002. I’ve had a few interesting jobs over the years – I’ve been a city firefighter, worked EMS, national marketing gigs, affiliate seller, even composed music from my home recording studio (I play keyboards and drums) and there’s a fair chance you’ve heard my work.

I’ve even scrubbed toilets and cleaned floors and found that a rewarding job because it was an honest day’s work. However, music and art have always been part of my life and now the art is primarily what I do from my home studio / office. I push pixels for my own products I sell as well as being a hired gun for others.

BB: What type of art do you create?

Dan: For clients – anything they require. This last month, for example, I’ve done promotional and label material for an Australian winery, website logo design for a Llama ranch, a motorcycle club’s primary jacket patch, and several icons for independent Apple App-Store developers.

Personal work – I’m doing a digital painting of a hockey arena featuring my favorite hockey team, some hyper-real vintage sign recreations that feature a lot of neon (which I love).

Today I was clocking a few hours on some Hubble Space Telescope Legacy Archive and Space Telescope Science Institute raw data to assemble into final composite space images. I do a lot of my own, fantasy space art, too but doing the Hubble stuff is particularly good for my brain cells since it’s real data combined with artistic challenges.

BB: Do you make a living with your art?

Dan: Yup.

BB: How did you pick your creative medium?

Dan: It kind of came from getting closer and closer to what I really wanted but couldn’t achieve in other mediums. As a boy I sketched pen and pencil on paper. I then got into acrylic and oil painting on canvas. When I finally got an airbrush I was able to do more and more of the art I’d pictured in my head when combined with the traditional brushwork.

I still do all those things but there was always something “more” I was hoping for. When I finally crossed paths with the computer and good software it then reached a point where I could do everything I pictured in my mind that was slightly lacking with other mediums.

BB: What are your tools of the trade?

Dan: I use the Adobe CS5 Master Edition – mostly Photoshop and Illustrator, Wacom Intuos4 large with the extra Art Pen and Airbrush, Bryce 7, Corel Painter 12 and CP Sketch Pad, and a few odd and end plugins or other applications.

I work mostly on Mac but also have PC. The PC has rather older versions of most of the same software left off at XP Pro, when I stopped updating that side of things. The Mac is on Snow Leopard and I’m not prepared to go to Lion just yet… I’ll wait for the bugs and incompatibilities to get worked out first.

BB: What is your work space and environment?

Dan: Ah, this is a subject I am passionate about as it’s been undergoing a change lately. As I’ve mentioned I’m in a home office. It’s a spare bedroom upstairs in our house. Shortly, I’ll be moving downstairs as we have a finished basement with larger room and private bath that’ll be a combination office/den.

I’m really looking forward to that particularly as my children get older and discover the joys of stereos.

I’ll enjoy the slightly more “sequestered” work space. Sometimes I need a little quiet distance from the business of my two young children.

I’ve been scarred for life living in too many apartments so I can’t stand grey walls with grey carpet and plastic storage boxes with cheap plastic furniture. A digital home office runs a risk of being too “techie” and full of gadgets which isn’t very homey either.

To over-compensate I’ve surrounded myself with antiques – things with character and sentimental meaning from my family. My comfy desk and chair give me the room to work next to a big window so I can see the beautiful blue sky and green of trees. I have a working 1951 Philco cabinet radio behind me… something I used to listen to records and radio on at my Grandma’s. Anything with charm and as far aways as possible from what a normal office might look like with wires, cables, stacks of hard drives, etc.

I don’t even use overhead lights – everything is a table lamp or candles, really! The fewer blinking or flashing lights the better.

BB: What are your inspirations?

Dan: I’m a fairly nostalgic person so I do a lot of vintage stuff… signs, idyllic scenes of places and locations in my childhood. Sometimes I just want a piece of art that nobody else seems to create exactly the way I like so I do it myself and have it framed to put on my wall.

BB: How do you recharge when your creativity hits the wall?

Dan: Sometimes research helps creativity other times I just have to take time off completely and do whatever my gut tells me to do. When that happens I fire up the keyboards and compose music, go bang around in the garage and do completely unrelated things. It doesn’t happen often that I totally lose creativity but when it does I tend to have to walk away from it for a bit then hit it later with a fresh perspective.

BB: What was your first job?

Dan: Evening paperboy on the biggest route our city had. In the years after I quit tossing the paper that route was broken down into three, smaller routes. For a kid I was pretty proud I could stake my claim to that monster gig that made other, lesser paperboys run home to momma. I rocked that route even in the most brutal Winter weather the North could throw at a kid.

BB: What are your favorite snacks when you are creating?

Dan: I try not to snack when working. As the Stay At Home parent, plus having a home office munching is a slippery slope. I do, however, allow myself a cup of coffee in the morning and I sip on that all the way till lunch. If I must work in the evenings I do allow myself the occasional small cocktail… a Martini or Sidecar, of course.

BB: Do you teach or work with others to develop as you have?

Dan: I produce video and PDF tutorials for some of the online artist communities I’m active in. I was a contributing writer for a now-defunct photography and graphic magazine where I focused on teaching quick tips to replicate popular effects or basic training skills. I also used to teach a weekly evening course at a local community college but no longer do that. Now I tend to help people via the tutorials or individual help with things in my peer group.

BB: Do you have any print-on-demand shops of your own?

Dan: Quite a few, actually. I tend to promote them outside of being attached to me but one that people know is a favorite of mine is TornadoRepublic.com – I like the variety that’s there albeit a little neglected in terms of new designs.

I love POD but they are a little more a means-to-an-end mechanism and not my biggest creative outlet. Sometimes, producing what is popular and translates to sales isn’t necessarily artistically fulfilling. Also, the POD world, in my view, peaked a few years ago and is no longer the same scene it used to be.

BB: What is your favorite product that you have designed?

Dan: For a POD shop? Probably colored t-shirts. They were the holy grail in the POD world and I like the fact that transparency works to include the color of the shirt fabric itself in the art. Other product favorites… perhaps a piece I did for a friend years ago that they wanted for a tattoo. That has to rank up pretty high in an artist’s portfolio just on the sheer commitment alone. Obviously I worked very hard on that piece to make sure it was perfect… for permanency’s sake.

BB: Have you had any professional training as an artist?

Dan: Sure, but to varying degrees of focus. From Elementary school all the way through College I took art, design, and illustration classes but mostly because I found them to be really easy and I needed to either take it for a core curriculum or to fill up credits and I thought they’d be cushy ways of doing it.

Now, far from my College days, I’ve got independent certifications and courses through various software publishers and their respective accreditations. I’ve certainly learned a great deal in doing so – there’s no doubt about it! However, sometimes it’s valuable to have the name on the certificate just because it helps make prospective clients feel more confident in hiring me. I’m not devaluing these things but sometimes they’ve proven their worth more in terms of prestige than what I may have learned through other, work-related experience. I guess that’s typical in life, isn’t it?

BB: What has been your most exciting moment as an artist?

Dan: It wasn’t so much for me as much as seeing how much my children love art and that I was now in that position I’d always dreamt of… to encourage and influence my own kids to discover the joys of art in whichever way it takes them. To see your children spend hours upon hours with their Crayons and paper or their sense of wonder when they sit in front of one of my old Wacom tablets and put styli to tablet for the first time – that’s been exciting!

BB: How many hours per day do you spend working on your art?

Dan: It can really vary. My first priority is to my family and it’s also my first desire. So, I try to work efficiently and quickly – but expertly, for the sake of my clients as well as to get me back to my family. When the kids are in school I can fill up that entire day easily. Some days I work an hour or two, others a lot more. When I first started working for myself I worked insane hours (literally 16 hour days, seven days a week) but nothing like that any more. I try to break projects down in the schedule to keep “bankers hours” when possible.

BB: How do you balance your art career with your family responsibilities?

Dan: That’s easy – family comes first. It’s probably the logistics that are the tricky part.

When you work from home it’s sometimes hard to get others to understand that you’re actually busy working… taking casual phone calls from friends, requests to do mid-day laundry from family… it can be a challenge for me as well as them. I have to train others to understand what it really means to be working.

It doesn’t help that sitting in front of a computer looks a bit casual anyway – so I may not look like I’m really that busy even though I am.

The best way I’ve found to balance is to be flexible and remind myself how very lucky I am to have this family that comes first… everything else manages to fall into place.

BB: Who has been the strongest art influence on your art direction?

Dan: Not any one person but I can definitely name the outstanding ones!

My parents. My Mom is an artist – she paints, quilts, does pottery, you name it. She always made my interest in art and music feel perfectly at home because it’s so prominent in her life. My Dad, who doesn’t think he’s an artist, is able to do some of the most technically detailed drawings of things in his life that he just happens to know inside and out. He used to work for a major railroad company and did amazingly accurate drawings of trains. He loves fishing and can draw fish species very well – he just doesn’t count it as being an artist, which I find funny.

I had a wonderful friend, Ricky Stadick, back in grade school. That kid could draw anything but he really excelled in human-anatomy-intense art… a pair of professional boxers in the boxing ring – musculature studies that were very precise, or superhero characters that looked like they came right out of the best comic book you could buy. He was so amazing and made it seem effortless.

Sydney Sonneborn, the Father of a couple of my friends as well as College art professor.

He challenged me with the value of details and how the tiniest of things could influence the overall look and feel of a piece of art. I think I still owe him an apology for suggesting that such things weren’t really that big of a deal – now I know how right he was!

He also let me have free use of the studio and air compressor so I could come in with my paints and airbrush after classes ended to work on my own art.

He helped foster my love of space art during one of those “transition” times in my life as I explored new mediums and tools. It was a lot of fun and time of growth for me as an artist. I lucked out having him give me proper education as well as pure artistic enjoyment at the same time.

I also love Bob Ross – what a gem. Such a shame he’s gone now.

BB: What keeps you creating new art?

Dan: When you work for yourself it really helps to do something you love – because you’ve gotta’ get up each day and make it happen. However, it can be tough balancing when something you love becomes “work.” So, I guess what keeps me and my art going is that I haven’t burned out on it in terms of work and even when I’m tired of it as work – it’s still something I do for enjoyment to depressurize from the day!

BB: What are your artistic goals?

Dan: Hmm, I’m not sure that I have goals other than to be happy with what I produce. I imagine that I’ll want to stay current with new tools and techniques, software that may come out and all the wonderful new features a person just can’t live without. However, I think just getting better and expanding what I can do while becoming very good at something identifiable as “me” would make me happy. Perhaps that is as close to anything I have to an artistic goal?

---

You can contact Dan at Mowry Media or follow him on Twitter: blipfish – http://twitter.com/blipfish.

Thank you Dan for being my friend! Thank you for all your help from the very first day I met you Thank you for your awesome interview!