My name is David. I'm an artist.
I've been working for almost ten years drawing, painting, animating, storyboarding, and working on video games. It's been a lot of fun! Before you and I set out on our very long adventure in storytelling together, I thought it would be worthwhile to take some time to tell you a bit about who I am.
Scenes from Fragile (2003)
I grew up in Buffalo, NY with a big family. I had a wonderful childhood that led me to spend most of my time daydreaming and doodling. Enthralled with animation and visual storytelling, I found myself pursuing an education in Media Arts and Animation at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. In school, I met people who liked the same sort of things I did and they became wonderful friends. I created a little movie called Fragile which was a finalist in both the 2004 Student Academy Awards as well as the 2005 Amazon Theater/Tribeca Film Festival. I even had a special mention in Animation Magazine, which was the first time something I made was mentioned in print. That was exciting!
Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh
In college, I volunteered in the Child Life Department of Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. It gave me the chance to spend some time getting to know children who were ill. It was very upsetting to watch them deal with so much pain and fear. Some of them were just stuck inside that big building all day and night. I decided to make my next project a story especially for them. I called it Dreamside. At the time, I would have been surprised to learn it would be more than ten years before I'd find the right release format(s) for it!
I knew if I wanted to make Dreamside as wonderful as I knew it could be, I'd need to spend a lot of time practicing and improving my art skills. I moved to Los Angeles which was and continues to be a mecca of talented artists. An amazing company called Insomniac Games trusted my abilities enough to give me a job. There, I worked on lots of exciting games and learned from many highly skilled artists, engineers, etc.
I even got to live in a house just a few doors down from the Walt Disney Studios! I spent 7 wonderful years there. I worked hard to train myself to be good enough to make Dreamside into a book series of which I'd be proud.
Recently, I moved back to Western New York where I spend most of my time working on Dreamside and the occasional art job here and there. Currently, I'm working with Insomniac on another game. It's called Slow Down, Bull and is the studios first venture into live dev-streaming. If you're interested in learning more, the stream runs every Friday at 2:00 PM PST at the Insomniac Twitch Channel.
Now that you know more about me, I want to know about you. Please feel free to send me a message and tell me more about yourself and your dreams for the future. Also, please follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.
Click here for more info about Dreamside.