I was six years old and my mom was doing an oil painting of a marina with boats docked and pylons with seagulls perched on them. I came home from school and noticed that she has scrapped all the paint off the canvas. Apparently, she had broken up with her boyfriend and she had been painting it for him. This horrified me and motivated me to pull out some watercolor paints and to paint a picture of my older sister from her school portrait. It turned out very good and much more advanced for a typical kid that age. It was at this moment that I decided that I wanted to be an artist. People would tell me upon hearing my wish that it was unwise and that most who tried would be starving artists. Confident in my abilities, I would counter with “have you ever heard of Norman Rockwell”?

After deciding at a young age that I wanted to be an artist, I excelled in all my art classes in school and won a city wide award in my junior year of high school. I started selling paintings to the theatre department of the University of Washington and to some private clients that I met through my work at a sandwich /ice cream shop near my high school…. Rainier Beach High school in Seattle. I took advanced placement art from a wonderful teacher named Micheal Gervais and graduated with honors. My family then moved to Montreal Canada and I entered the University of Concordia. I didn’t last long there because Canada wouldn’t except my advanced placement from the States. So, I dropped out and created a comic book portfolio and hitchhiked to NYC with a friend and promptly went to the offices of Marvel Comics and pulled out my portfolio of cover work and interiors and displayed them all over the reception area to the horror of the receptionist. A kind older gent came out, saw what was happening and went back in to probably get security, but instead brought out the editor in chief, Jim Shooter. He looked at my stuff and critiqued it saying that I need more sequential story telling and suggested that I get one of the Marvel paperback novels and illustrate a few scenes.. Shortly after that trip, I took a bus across country and stayed in my first home town San Francisco with the parents of my best friend Ben.  They let me stay there for 3 months as long as I enrolled in school and learned something. I enrolled in a community college and learned typesetting and how to use the halftone booth. I made a portfolio with the halftones of my ink wash product illustrations and tried to get a job illustrating for department stores but eventually landed a job as a sign painter for a small sign company that painted wall signs and billboards. It was this job and the generosity of the owner Bob Rubino that changed the direction of my life and put me on the road to my first big career.

When I started painting signs in San Francisco with Bob and he showed me how to layout lettering and then working with his pictorial artist Ivan on billboards, I was 21 years old at that time. I loved working outside and alone along the bay bridge corridor to the east bay. It wasn’t long after being trained by those two that I started subcontracting the jobs and worked solo or with a friend who would help me pull up the block and tackle stage and clean my brushes so I could just focus on drawing and painting. It was a great time being outside, away from the corporate offices that most people worked in. I felt free and happy and I started to make good money. After about a year of working these jobs all over San Francisco, I got the offer to move down to Los Angeles and paint a series of large wall size murals of famous athletes for Nike the decorated Los Angeles just prior to the 1984 Olympics. Upon finishing the last of the six murals with fellow artist Adam Lustig, I remember standing on the roof of the Pantages Theatre and looking up at the giant 100 by 60 foot mural of John McEnroe that we had just finished and thinking… God, you can take me now, everything after this would just be Icing on the cake. Little did I know what would come from these achievements.

After the Nike jobs, I had the opportunity to paint the world’s largest mural at that time on a newly constructed hotel in Las Vegas, the Vegas World hotel. When that job concluded, I rode my motorcade back to Los Angeles and stayed with my girlfriend for about a month till I landed a job at Gannett Outdoor as a journeyman Pictorial artist. I stayed there for about a year and 8 months until more Nike jobs were offered to me, so I left and started my own company David Larks Illustrations. I hired a few helpers and eventually mainly ended up working with one fellow named Ramiro who excelled in learning my techniques and after about a year of working together, I offered him a limited partnership and we ended up working together for about six years and did many notable projects, including more Nike murals, murals for Reebok and LA gear and so much more. Due to a downturn in the economy in the late 90’s, things got a little choppy and some trust issues arose, so I ended the partnership and pivoted my energies into the illustrative comic world again. It was a shock to my bottom line, but after about a half a year and after making some connections at comic con in San Diego, I started working in the comic industry as one of the first digital colorists using photoshop version 2, before version 3 came out with layers and changed everything for the better. This pivot in my Career lead me to start drawing storyboards for the advertising and entertainment  industries and I’ve been actively working creating storyboards, comps and illustrations in this field for over 22 years now and I love it. I became a member of the Art Directors Guild in 2019.