Clifton, VA illustrator Michael Gibbs knew he wanted to be an artist the day he discovered the work of legendary illustrator Maxfield Parrish. Gibbs, then 12, happened on one of Parrish's classics, "The Arabian Nights," when his parents took him to an auction at an old farmhouse in rural Maryland. Stashed away in a corner was the old children's book, a forgotten antique to its owner. For Gibbs, it was a treasure.

"The artwork was stunning," recalls Gibbs, who still owns a copy of the book. "The power of that one illustration -- the cover -- with its colors, its power, its tight composition -- it really turned me on to illustration."

Though intrigued with illustration, he was equally fascinated by other careers that allowed creative freedom, including photography, architecture, and even archaeology.

But freedom of another kind distracted Gibbs in his freshman year at the University of Maryland. After spending four years on the honor roll at a Catholic high school in Washington, DC, Gibbs admits the temptations of being 18 and away at college in the early 1970s were too inviting. "I was supposed to be an architecture major, but I pretty much spent the entire year majoring in partying and skydiving," he says.

Gibbs took the next year off to think about what to do with his life. Photography had become a passion and creative outlet, so he applied to Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, N.Y., as a photography major. He was accepted, but quickly ran into creative differences with his instructors.

"The photography professors were more into teaching photo-journalism, and I was into composed pictures full of light and shadow," he says. "They hated my approach, and I wasn't too crazy about theirs."

As fate would have it, the mandatory freshman curriculum required Gibbs to take a drawing class. By the end of the term, he found art was his calling. Gibbs switched his major to illustration, with a minor in design. Then, he started to make up for years of lost creativity.

"I pulled 29 all nighters my first year as an illustration major," he says. "The next year was the same -- only crazier. I remember staying up for 86 hours straight to finish an assignment."

With money getting tight after his junior year, Gibbs decided to leave Pratt, returning to the Washington area and taking a job in the graphics department at AT&T. He stayed for three years -- just long enough to get the experience and portfolio pieces he wanted, plus two shares of AT&T stock through the company's profit-sharing program.

"The graphics department had a lot of very specific design standards, and I found that frustrating," he says. "On top of that, the opportunities to actually do illustration were few and far between. I knew if I stayed too long, I'd get sucked in to staying forever because of the promise of more perks and money. Then, one Spring day, something snapped. I remember it being beautiful outside -- but you couldn't tell from my desk because the windows has this dull greenish gray film on them. I knew it was time to make the break."

On that day, Gibbs quit his job to freelance.

It was a gamble, he knew, but when he arrived home after his last day of work, a call offering him his first freelance assignment was waiting on his answering machine. The client: the American Cemetery Association.

"It wasn't 'Arabian Nights,' but it was a start," he says.

Today, 20 years later, the phone is still ringing, and Gibbs is busier than ever, illustrating magazine covers, book covers, annual reports and brochures for clients that include American Airlines, Verizon, Johns Hopkins University, IBM, United Airlines, Delta Airlines, the IMF, Harvard Business Review, and The Washington Post.

He has received national acclaim for his work, winning awards from prestigious arts publications and organizations such as Communications Arts, Print Magazine, and American Illustration. Locally, he has won dozens of awards from the Art Director's Club of Metropolitan Washington, and the Illustrator's Club of Washington.

The Society of Illustrators in New York City, the profession's most revered organization, has also given Gibbs's work a nod. In the last seven years, his art has appeared in most of the Society's annual juried exhibitions. In 2001, he participated in a Society tribute to the September 11 disaster. Gibbs's contribution was an illustration of two firefighters, looming over New York's skyline in the space where the World Trade Towers once stood.

Still, Gibbs considers his art to be a work in progress.

"The illustration field has become so competitive, that you have to keep evolving," he says.

Over the last decade, his style has evolved from traditional acrylic painting to a complex mixed media technique combining traditional painting with digital techniques. After completing an acrylic painting, the artwork is scanned into his Macintosh computer and finished in a software program called Photoshop.

"I can really manipulate and refine the illustration using this technique," he says. "The computer gives me tremendous versatility, letting me add found objects to the work -- from antique photographs to gears to barbed wire."

Gibbs has also been experimenting with another style in recent years, which he calls Rock Art. In addition to having a primitive cave painting feel, the images themselves are painted onto the surface of a rock, utilizing the natural texture as the background.

His new style, as well as his old, receives accolades from his peers. "Mike's work is so unique because of the way he thinks," says Martha Vaughan, a Maryland illustrator, past president of the Illustrators Club of Washinton, and former chair of the Society of Illustrators Annual Exhibition. "I always look at his work and wonder, how did he come up with that?"

How does Gibbs come up with an idea?

"That's a great question, and I'm not sure I really have the answer," he says. "I focus on finding an idea, but in the end, it feels like the ideas come to me, rather than me going to them.

"It's very serendipitous," he says. "And it's a little scary to realize that your livelihood depends on serendipity."

But, Gibbs does have a method.

"To get an idea, I usually read an article two or three times and let it soak in. To find the main point, I take out a thick black marker and remove attributions, quotes, numbers, job titles, and anything that distracts me."

Eventually, he narrows the article to a single sentence. "It's basically a reversal of the writer's process," he notes. "Whereas a writer starts with an idea, develops an outline, and then fleshes it out, I take a story, reduce it to an outline, and then find the original idea. Often, the whole article can be summarized in a phrase or sentence. That's what I try to illustrate."

With that phrase in mind, Gibbs grabs a cup of hot coffee and opens his sketchbook.

"I usually draw a rectangle and focus on it as I meditate on the summarized article, which almost becomes a mantra. Eventually an image just starts to take shape," he explains. "Then, I sketch it what I see in my mind's eye, and refine it."

Though sometimes the ideas come quickly, "it can be an arduous process, because I'm always looking to add an interesting visual twist or an additional layer of meaning to the article," he says. "I work to stay as far away from the literal as possible because that's the article's job. I believe the artwork is there to provide an interpretation and add visual impact. After all, that's what makes illustration so compelling."

About the author:
Hope Katz Gibbs is a freelance writer in Clifton, VA. Her articles regularly appear in The Washington Post, Crystal City etc., Washington Woman, and other national and local publications, as well as promotional material forGreatHandmadeGifts.com. Hope can be reached at: .

Michael Gibbs can be contacted at 703 502-3400 or by