David R. Darrow's entire career has been rooted in just about anything related to art. After graduating from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA in 1980, earning a BFA in Illustrartion, as he puts it, he "served a 9-month sentence as an art hack at General Dynamics, Convair Division in San Diego." Darrow reminisces that he thought working in the Defense industry would provide a good steady income, and he could learn new skills doing artist's concept illustrations of warplanes, battleships and cruise missles.

But he ended up drawing cartoons of corporate retirees for their good-bye party flyers, and pasting-up overhead slide presentations for "what looked like really boring meetings."

After nine months, a 400-employee layoff washed him off the deck, and the next day he began a 17-year stint as a freelance illustrator. The nice part was, however, he was "stuck" in San Diego.

I drew or painted everything from kitchen appliances to penguins to automobile renderings to medical intravenous equipment to Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator in one of dozens of film promotions I worked on for Hollywood. The latter part of my career had me focusing intensely on portraiture and exact likenesses, which let to other figure work, such as romance book covers, mystery novels and magazine illustrations.

There was never a dull moment, and in that many years of observation I really learned what stuff looks like and how to reproduce it in paint.

These experiences took advantage of Darrow's natural curiosity and ubiquitous observational bent, approaching life almost entirely visually. Switching over to Fine Art was only a matter of time, as Darrow saw the natural connection between the romance novel paintings in oil he was doing and the figurative and portrait work he longed to do — without an Art Director involved.

Darrow has taught advanced illustration techniques and painting at SDSU in San Diego and at Art Center College of Design; he's taught Life Drawing, Anatomy for the Artist, Color Theory and Basic Drawing at the Art Institute of California - San Diego.

Darrow is planning an Advanced Portrait and Figure Painting workshop called GoFigure™ for later in 2007.