Hello, I'm Mark.

Ever since I was a child, I've dabbled with art. I would draw in the car on trips, randomly sketch things I saw, and draw during downtime at school. In middle school, I took an art class that walked us through several different mediums I had not tried before. The main one that stuck out to me was pen and ink. We had to use a crow quill pen and bottle of ink to draw using several different techniques (hatching, cross-hatching, stippling, etc.). For some reason, this medium really clicked with me, despite the difficulty of carrying around a dip pen and bottle of ink. The resulting artwork worked out well in my opinion, but I didn't really try pen and ink with any seriousness again for several years. I did occasionally produce some new pen and ink artwork, including some gifts for family. I produced a drawing of our Rhodesian Ridgeback, Rook (now available as a fine art print!), that was the first pen and ink drawing where I felt like I'd turned the corner into doing serious work.

I finally decided to get serious about art and worked through the Evolve Artist program for a while (details in this blog post), learning charcoal and grayscale oil painting. After a lot of work in that program, I left, bought my own paints and brushes and started learning to work in color. The initial few color paintings were truly bad. I heard learned how to handle a brush from Evolve Artist, but my color mixing skills were dreadful. Then I found Mark Carder's channel on YouTube and everything changed. I rapidly got much better at color (although, like most things in art, it is always a work in progress) and started painting a variety of subjects, both from photo reference and from life.

This website is my attempt to be serious at art - to produce quality work that has value to me and others, even if the artwork itself is not always so serious. I am always on the lookout for good reference photos of animals being ridiculous!