A Knoxville couple illustrates their own fantastic world
by Mike Gibson
It's unlikely that the average reader of this magazine has heard the names David and Lori Deitrick. But if said reader is given to frequenting toy stores, gaming shops, or the sci-fi section of local book racks, there's a better than even chance he/she has run across samples of the couple's work.
Like, for instance, the hard-bitten space warrior, teeth a-grinding, all high-gloss armor and cybernetic accouterments, blasting his way off the cover of the Paul Brunette space opera To Dream of Chaos. Or the bat-eared purple incubus poised and battle-ready on the front of Aboriginal Science Fiction magazine, a model David crafted for an action figure company. Or the series of gracefully-rendered illustrations—of ethereally-hued butterflies, of busy carnival scenes, of regal medieval fantasies—the couple is currently co-creating and that will comprise the visuals used in a series of children's jigsaw puzzles for Patch Products.
"We're nearly famous," says David Deitrick, with a certain jovial humility. "We overlap in four or five different science fiction/fantasy markets. In some, we're known very well, and in others we're not so well-known.
"My goal is to be the Joe Walsh of the field," Deitrick continues, drawing a parallel to the well-traveled blues rock guitar shaman (the Eagles, the James Gang, et al.) who is David's favorite '70s-era rocker. "The people who know about him love him. But he's usually content to stay in the background, as a sideman, a cultish figure."
Now in their mid-40s and living in a neat, whimsically-decorated suburban cottage off Oak Ridge Highway, the Deitricks launched both their personal and professional associations in 1976 at Rick's College in Rexburg, Idaho, a pair of young artists-in-training thrust into the same industrial design course.
Even then, Lori favored the rounded elegance and free-flowing lines that today characterize her striking portrait work. The industrial design course, with its emphasis on perspective and precise geometry, fell outside the purview of her artistic forte.
David, whose own work is marked by sweeping spatial renderings and minute technical detail, flourished, and Lori says she spent most of her time "sitting next to him and his buddies, flirting, smarting off in class. I didn't take things seriously enough. It finally cost me my scholarship."
"That (design class) dealt with how to draw products and technical objects, with lots of perspective, and Lori wanted to draw ducky heads and bunnies," David snorts. He adds, tongue firmly in cheek, that when Lori dropped out, "I felt obligated to marry her."
Even without academic pratfalls, the path the couple had chosen was not an easy one; illustration per se had not entered the lexicon of many standard college art programs, and most instruction was limited to traditional media such as painting and sculpture.
"Art wasn't 'hip' then," David says. "You didn't have specialties in design and illustration unless you went to certain schools. I had even considered at one point becoming a lawyer. But halfway through my first year, I realized that what I really wanted to do was draw."
The ensuing years saw David further both his academic and professional strivings, earning art-related degrees at Rick's, Brigham Young University, and later the University of Tennessee. Lori fell away from her artistic inclinations, assuming the role of housewife and mother; today the couple have three children, including 22-year-old Conrad, 19-year-old Sean, and waifish, doe-eyed Megan, 6.
David relates that his earliest artistic influences derived from toys and the late-'60s/early-'70's milieu of DC Comics superheroes, rendered by the likes of the neo-realist Neil Adams and consummate comics fantasian Jack Kirby.
As an adolescent growing up in small-town Alaska, David says he haunted two local drug stores that sported comic book racks; he negotiated an arrangement with both store owners whereby he was allotted first choice of the new magazines in exchange for unpacking the comics when the monthly shipments arrived in brown cardboard boxes.
His entry into the world of professional illustration took a parallel course. Still in college, David began entering book and gaming stores and seeking out those toys, box and book covers which had the poorest artwork. To those companies, he sent a cover letter and accompanying samples, volunteering his services at no charge.
"They usually said, 'We'll even pay you,'" says David. "I always looked for the books and games I knew I could beat. And I never hesitated to undercut. Once I had a portfolio with those smaller companies, I used that to go to the next tier, to bootstrap my way up."
Lori, in the meantime, found herself lost in her workaday guise as mother and homemaker, availing herself only of occasional opportunities to paint portraits of family members and friends. "I sat down one day and thought, 'My life is passing me by,'" she remembers. "I was doing mostly 'mom' stuff up to that point. I decided it was time to get serious."
In 1985, she began attending science fiction conventions with her husband, making industry contacts and gradually picking up clients along the way. Today, she works with her husband in the fancifully-appointed studio in the basement of their home, a makeshift draftsman's workroom decorated with paintings of wistful fairy princesses and grim-jawed space walkers and painstakingly crafted toy figurines of gargoyles and cyborgs and swordsmen...
Though they often collaborate, the couple rarely work in tandem on the same elements of a job, preferring instead to put their personal artistic signatures on discrete elements of a single project. For their current undertaking, the duo have divvied the jigsaw renderings according to their respective preferences.
"It's important to be able to say, 'This is mine,' for the work to be part of your identity," Lori says. "We know our strengths and weaknesses. David is good at technical things and spatial perspective; he's also very good at drawing hands."
"And I always have her check my faces," David adds. "But one time we tried to work together on a single piece. It was an illustration for a science fiction magazine, and it was a dismal failure."
Dave says he still derives a child-like satisfaction from the opportunity to create those things which most fascinated him as a youngster, magazine covers and toy models and role-playing games. He remembers with no small pride a series of Star Trek-related trading cards and game boxes he designed between 1983 and 1994, including a game box with two oddly familiar figures, reminiscent of Kirk and Uhuru on the bridge of the Enterprise, garbed in smart red Federation uniforms.
"That's modeled after Lori and me, in younger and thinner days," laughs David, surveying the trim and well-groomed couple in the illustration. "Captain David" is the less recognizable of the two figures, as Deitrick's soft, agreeable face is now awash in a graying sea of whiskers.
The illustration game is a cyclical one, David says, and the nature of their efforts—both the market and the media—may change considerably from one year to the next. "It varies. In the mid-'80s, role-playing games were hot. Later it was trading cards, and now our biggest business comes from these puzzle designs. There's an old adage, and it's very true: Eighty percent of your business comes from 20 percent of your clients.
"I can't complain about any of it," David smiles, once again the 10-year-old who earned his monthly comic book allotment unpacking the freshly-minted treasures from shipping crates. "I can design any toy I want to; every day, I get to do something really cool."
March 1, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 9
© 2001 Metro Pulse
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