Featured Artist - Sketch Gustafson

While attending Dakota County Technical College, in Rosemount, MN, Sketch realized his knack for being able to pull, twist, and stretch a funny situation out of life's most mundane occurrences and put it into cartoon form. His cartooning ability was reinforced by his friends and family and he decided to go into the field of Computer Graphics and Animation after graduation. Sketch graduated at the top of his class, Student Senate President, with honors from Phi Theta Kappa, two years later.

Sketch was accepted to a school in Florida where he hoped to graduate from and move on to Disney Animation. Unfortunately, life does throw a few curve balls every now and then and on the day he was to enroll he found out that he was financially unable to afford the tuition. After packing everything he owned into a truck and moving across the country to Florida, and not wanting to return back to Minnesota empty handed, he found a job at the Walt Disney World Resort in food service, then moved on to the character department, and finally landed in management. It was at Disney that Sketch met some very talented artists who taught him some valuable skills that he still practices to this day.

Upon moving back to River Falls, WI, Sketch met and married his wife Shannon and began to work not only as a assistant manager in a retail store but also volunteered his time to the River Falls Fire Dept until, in June of 2002, a serious back injury changed the course of his life forever.

Unable to work for several months, Sketch was forced to take a serious look at his life and the direction that it was heading - and not liking it - he and Shannon rededicated their lives to faith and made the decision to follow what path God laid before them. It didn't take long for Sketch to find that he had been blessed with the ability to talk to teenagers and not long after that decided to further his education in youth ministry. After minsitering to young adults for almost 5 years, his father in law became ill and at his urging, Sketch made the decision to go back to his art work.

Today Sketch has a successful cartooning business, newspaper cartoon syndication, and greeting card company as well as being published in many magazines and periodicles. "It still is amazing to me that I can sit at the drawing table and put something to paper that people really enjoy. Realizing that makes me truely blessed."

Sketch Gustafson - http://www.cartoonsbysketch.com