Never give up on a dream...PLEASE read... I recently had a dream come true. I grew up loving National Geographic magazine. I kept stacks of them under my bed and escaped into their pages every day. I dreamed of visiting the exotic places featured in the articles, and I used the animal photographs as reference material for my drawings. I collected the maps, too. For years, I had maps of Alaska and Africa hanging on my wall. They were my dream destinations, and I looked at them every day, imagining that someday I would make it to both places. More than anything, though, I loved the illustrations. Every issue seemed to have something new, and I grew up wanting to create illustrations like the ones I saw in the pages of National Geographic. When I went to Ringling College of Art and Design, I majored in illustration because I wanted to get a job at National Geographic. I worked hard, but I soon found out that, at the time, National Geographic was freelancing all of its illustration work. Whether that was entirely true or not, I still don’t know. But I had freelanced my way through college to pay my bills, and I wanted a job with a little more security. So I started looking elsewhere. That’s when I learned that Disney was offering internships for the first time to students outside of animation schools. Ringling didn’t offer animation back then. Animation wasn’t nearly as big as it is now. But I thought working for Disney could be interesting, so I put together a portfolio and was accepted into its summer internship program in Los Angeles in 1988. Glen Keane was my mentor, and he got me hooked on animation. I was hired after my training, and the rest is history. But some dreams never die. I held on to my love of animal drawing, and I never lost my love of National Geographic. About six months ago, I received an email from Monica Serrano, an art director at National Geographic magazine. She wanted to know if I would be interested in illustrating a six-page spread on the life of a male lion. My jaw hit the floor. We set up a Zoom call, I received the brief, and I was off and running. Forty years. It took 40 years from the time I headed off to college in 1986 to this year. I’m incredibly happy to say that my illustrations are now part of the September 2026 issue of National Geographic magazine. I’ve checked another dream off my bucket list. By the way, those maps of Alaska and Africa followed me all the way to Disney. I kept them pinned to the wall over my desk. I made it to Alaska in 1993. I went 5 times. I went to Africa for the first time in 1998. I've gone 4 times. The photos I used as reference for the illustrations were photos I shot while in Kenya. A trip manifested by looking at that map from National Geographic magazine!
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