If you’d like to download the actual picture itself without all the framing work/text, you can find it right here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwij_bciHrwtRk5zOHBzOVJQVk0/view?usp=sharing Alternatively, I suppose you could just crop it out with photoshop. Whatever you please.

I normally do one, but I doubt I'd call this a Christmas pic or a new years pic. It kinda fell somewhere in the middle this year. Now, this is not the very first thing I ever drew, period. I could show you pen and paper work that probably predate this by a good while. But in terms of going back as far as I can digitally, this is it. I tell you this was a nice treat to find lurking on an old disk earlier this year.

I couldn’t give you the exact date, but it would have to be sometime around 1995-6 I’d say this was drawn. My dad was working in some tech support shop at the time and just learning computers himself. It took me a while to see it first hand, but the way he was describing pc’s instantly captivated me, and I couldn’t wait in particular to see this thing called a mouse, that he could apparently draw all sorts of crap with!

I could tell you a whole other story about what the expectations in my head were like, but when I actually got to sit down at one, and see mspaint for the first time (isn’t it funny to look back on a thing like that now, eh) it did not disappoint. There were plenty of afternoons I went mad with it after getting back from school. In my head I was making Da-vinci’s, and it definitely paved the groundwork for where I find myself now.
A lot of the stuff I made in those days is gone forever now, either due to hard drive problems or due to disks like that one being so unbelievably prone to failure (Seriously it was one of six survivors out of about fifty that were corrupt beyond salvation) Nonetheless, in immortalizing this I want to give all of you a very heartfelt piece of advice: No matter how small you start, you can and will improve if you give it your all. Here’s perhaps the best proof I will ever be able to give to that.

So, obviously enough, this pic is dedicated with love to my late dad and buddy, Allan James Buckby. He’s one of a handful of people in my life that have actually believed in my work and stories, and without him, I may never have come as far with this stuff as I have.

On the other hand, dedicated with prejudice to my grade 7 teacher, Ms Joy Lindenmeyer (not sure if I’m spelling that right, don’t really care). A woman who thought the classroom was where imagination came to die, and to her, me achieving this level of skill was probably a pipe dream. If you’re still among us, thanks for nothing you old bat.

And dedicated with thanks to every person, writer or animator that has ever inspired me, names too numerous to mention.