How would you describe the feedback you've gotten on your work?

Well my friends tell me they love it, I haven't heard a negative thing from anyone in my circle of friends, but you can't put stock in those opinions until you get opinions from people who aren't there to support you. So when the article went up on Destructoid, I was a little let down with the way people reacted. It was such a 180 to what I had heard before, but the comments felt more like a stab at what I was doing instead of the actual quality of the work. I understand that you can print things off your computer or even take a jump drive to a local Kinkos and get these things printed out. I just think there's a lot of love for the games put into the work I do and the application to a canvas gives the images something you can't get from a flat poster.

I'm not saying everyone can't do this. Everyone can do this. It's just right now, I'm one of the few who actually is. So I offer the service up to people who love games and love artwork but might not have time or the resources to get something like this done.

And then after a few negative comments (which I guess for the internet is getting off lightly) I ended up with a few emails from people who did like what I was doing and wanted work done. I actually sold the Duck Hunt series to someone in Washington and I'm working on a custom piece for another person, along with a few more requests for custom pieces on the back burner.

An interesting component of your art is that they're accurate (realistic, you might say) reproductions of unreal things. Where do you see your work fitting in alongside more interpretive game art?

Actually, the book "I AM 8-BIT" is another inspiration for starting these things. My work really can't compare to those kind of art pieces. Some are almost exact representations of certain games, but for the most part they are more interpretive and have a lot of personal ideas sewn into the paint. I have immense respect for artwork that forces you to put your ideas out for everyone to critique. I don't pretend that what I'm doing is something that can only come from my paint brush, whereas many of those pieces are amazing chances to see a game through the eyes of that one artist.

What's appealing to you about the 8-bit color palette? Have you considered producing work on 16-bit era or later games?

The first Castlevania painting is a 16-bit image that occurs within an 8-bit game, so I got a taste of an out-of-game screenshot with that kind of color palette. It was so much fun to see an image come together with so many seemingly random colors sitting side by side, only to see the random colors help shade and shape the whole image. The 8-bit palette is just to really get myself comfortable with working on images and with canvases, and because I have a pretty extensive collection of emulators on my laptop to take screenshots of (while playing through the games one by one). As far as custom work goes, I will work with 16 bit images, I just don't get many requests for those kind of paintings.

Similarly, how would you describe Nintendo's aesthetic? Why is it so appealing and memorable to people?

This generation of gamers grew up on Nintendo. My first real memory is playing Bubble Bobble on my Nintendo I got for my birthday when I was four. Nintendo and gaming for that matter is like the collective baby of this generation. We've seen all the companies and developers grow, fail, and adapt and I guess these images and games are like baby pictures for a lot of us. A lot of memories with friends from when I was in middle school and high school involve playing video games. They were such a great way to sit around and bullshit and I never used games as an excuse to not be with people, instead I used them as an excuse to get people together.