About Us

I could use we, us, & our & try to project a bigger image, but “The Digital Artiste” is me!  All creative work is by a single individual, a retired USAF C-130 & C-141 long haul & airdrop navigator & retired professional tennis coach, instructor & trainer.  That was my life until a little over two & a half years ago when I lost my lover, my best friend, my soulmate, my spouse, my Debbie!  In July of 2024 I started my YouTube channel: "The Undertaker Navigator."  As a navigator I worked with computers in the business of airdropping 2,000 pound pallets of supplies, equipment, ammunition, Claymore mines, mortars, & various weapons.  These drops were first made in training in the US but were clearly proven with drops from over 15,000 feet in SE Asia, primarily in South Viet Nam, Laos & Cambodia.  However, officially I was never in Laos & Cambodia!  Wink!  Wink!  In late 1973 I left active duty for the USAF active reserves.  For 13 months I was a USAF C-141 Starlifter navigator & I was a rooky CPA trainee at the Big Eight accounting firm of Haskins & Sells (now Deloitte) flying & working out of Los Angeles, California.  Specifically I was an accountant working out of the downtown LA office of H & S and a world-wide navigator flying out of Norton Air Force Base, San Bernardino. I was in the USAF active reserves while I was fully employed by H &S.  I maintained the same minimum flying requirements of my active duty colleagues.  The LA rat race finally got to me after my daughter was born in Fullerton, CA and the smog became unbearable in late 1973.  On a single phone call I left an accounting career choking on the smog and moved back to Arkansas where I had flown in the wonderful C-130 AWADS birds as we referred to them.  I had played varsity tennis on full scholarship at Indiana University from 1966-1970 & won a Big Ten doubles title in 1970 with considerable help from my Australian born partner, Geoff Hodsdon, originally from Perth.  For about 2 & half years I was a C-141 navigator flying out of Charleston AFB, SC and a teaching tennis pro at Burns Park Tennis Center in North Little Rock, Arkansas.  Left mother Air Force in 1976 after over 3,000 flight hours, all 7 continents, 57 counties and about a dozen unique destinations all over this planet!  What does all this have to do with becoming “The Digital Artist?”  I was exposed to computers in the early 70’s because the Adverse Weather Aerial Delivery System (AWADS) utilized the leading technology of that era.  Military spending fueled the personal computer revolution forcing the miniaturization of computers because weight is a deterrent to flying efficiency.  A standard C-130 Hercules cost around a million five hundred thousand dollars in 1971 but our AWADS C-130’s cost over 4 million!  The AWADS technology was leading edge & expensive!  I had a Ka-band radar that had better resolution than most TV’s at the time.  So I was hooked on computers and their peripherals.  In 1978 I got my first head pro tennis job and help set up business software and hardware for the brand new private indoor club that hired me.  Two years later in 1980 I was hired back to be Director of Tennis for the City of North Little Rock, AR.  Personnel computers were starting arrive with the VIC-20 (1980), Commodore 64 (1982), the TRS-80 at Radio Shack (1977) , etc.  I was to computerize my entire tennis business at the Burns Park Tennis Center.  IBM released the IBM Personal Computer in 1981 with the Microsoft MS-DOS operating system.  I researched extensively before deciding on a Texas Instrument clone with a better graphics card than the IBM PC and invested around $20,000 in hardware & software.  Thankfully I took the 179 immediate depreciation write-offs and let Uncle Sam basically pay 50% of the cost.  I made another major life move in 1989 to become a corporate officer in a start-up movie theatre chain company doing accounting and computer networking in their corporate office.  Learned a lot but the guy who started the business venture ultimately went to prison for defrauding his equipment leasing companies.  That setback prompted me to start my own software company selling two packages that I had developed while was running Burns Park Tennis Center in the 1980’s.  Lotus 123 was the most amazing piece of software allowing me to delve into programming through its macro language per se.  I was really attracted to Quattro Pro for DOS (1990) that had its own scalable and changeable fonts well before Windows 95.  One was CATT (Computer Aided Tennis Tournament) and CALM (Computer Aided Leagues & Mixers).  Both major tennis pro certifying associations used my tournament software to run their annual International Tennis Championships for their thousands of certified teaching tennis professionals.  The USPTA used CATT for 5 years and the USPTR (now just PTR) used it for 6 years.  I was competing with a wonderful female pro in Georgia and her computer genius family for the $1,000,000 USTA contract to become the standard software for all sanctioned tournaments in the US.  Fate intervened in October of 1997 when at age 49, I suffered a brain hemorrhage stroke that paralyzed my left side and put me in a wheelchair for 4 months.  Fortunately, the Arkansas Tennis Association hired me right after I learned to walk & drive again.  I was their first IT Director and responsible for ad sales in the Association's Yearbook that went out to all USTA members in Arkansas.  While working at the ATA I decided to go to computer networking school and became a Novell Certified Network Engineer.  By 2003 I jumped ship to go to work for a former student of mine in his retail & wholesale flooring business. I was the Director of IT and assistant comptroller.  This move was for money but also because my boss was one of my best tennis talents who had played on a Top 5 college team at Clemson U. after being ranked the top junior player in the Southern section of the USTA, nine states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, & Tennessee.  He turned professional in 1983, his junior year at Clemson but two & a half years later shredded his left elbow triceps in during his Wimbledon main draw qualifying match in 1985.  It was not reparable thus ending his hope for a professional playing career.  He did not miss a beat, came home from England, accepted his fate, passed the series 7 brokerage exam, got married, worked for a bond brokerage firm and jumped to E.F. Hutton by 1986.  Met his future business partner there and within a couple years they bought a discount lumber company from an E.F. Hutton client, and added the Carpet One coop brand to their business.  The retail flooring business dominated and they sold off the lumber side.  Today Richard, my talented student, runs multiple stores in seven states having bought out his partner a few years ago.  Only in America can you suffer career ending strokes & injuries and just adapt to “keep on truckin’” as the saying goes!  I left Richard’s business and the opportunity to help grow his business because a former age division doubles partner from the 1980’s and early 1990’s convince me to get back into teaching & coaching tennis.  I was working in the Carpet One business and I was around 55.  It was great!  He had become head partner in a nationally recognized commercial real estate law firm in Little Rock and their number one client had decided to sell off an insane amount of commercial real estate in the US and Gary had to commit 70-75 hours a week to this venture or lose his firms #1 client.  No time to teach his 10 & 12 year old daughters tennis.  Solution: Have his friend, me, teach them at a rate equivalent to $75 if not $80 per hour today.  No problem when one can bill out your time at several hundreds of dollars per hour and there is about three years or more of that work coming down the Pike!   The two girls went on to All-American status playing Division III college tennis for the University of the South in Sewanee, TN.  They have known nothing but success in their lives and easily qualify as super-achievers.  Jenny is one of the lead dermatologists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.  Lindsey Ann is a magazine editor headquartered in Charleston, SC.  In 2006, I moved home to be with my sister Gayle and my parents who were 83 & 84 at that time.  They were going strong.  I will never regret spending those years back in my home town of Olney, IL.  Dad had a freak accident in 2011 when he slipped reaching for a brace on a scaffold and fell onto a concrete florr of his business’s warehouse and broke his back completely in two.  He lasted a month as a complete invalid for one month and passed away the day he was to transfer to hospice care.  He was and is my absolute hero!  He flew 38 very dangerous combat missions during the last 15 months of World War II as a B-24 bomber pilot attacking Hitler’s oil supply fields in Romania and all the infrastructure networks used to transport the oil back to Germany.  Most of those targets were more heavily defended than Berlin.  They rarely came home with no additional holes in their B-24 Liberator.  Mother was driving quite well until she was 91 and then suffered two strokes within a week that made her totally bed-ridden for her last 15 months.  She passed peacefully at age 92.  When I was born, I won the best lottery in the world.  I was born to parents that were simply the best role models and an older sister who was valedictorian of her high school class and obtained a master's degree in ceramic engineering from the University of Illinois.  I had to keep up just so she didn’t get out of my sight.  This young lady standing 4’11” at age 14 raced open class twin engine go-karts primarily against men.  She owns three motorcycles today at age 79, lives on our old family farm dating back to before the Civil War in a house built in 1896.  She completely restored a 1939 Ford Coup only to have it totaled just as she was putting the final touches on it.  A drunken migrant farm crop picker ran into her car while she was park on the main street of a neighboring town.  He had no license, no insurance, and no money!  She was spared a serious neck injury because her bench seat had not been bolted down.  Well I came back to Arkansas in 2014, reunited with my third wife and remarried her making it four mariages but only three wives.  Debbie and I never fell out of love, but I was a miserable soul to live with while I was trying to adapt after my paralyzing stroke in 1997.  We had divorced in 2001 after nine years of marriage.  It took 13 years to find each other again and then I lost her for good in 2022 to early morning stroke or painless heart attack.  Why is the phrase “lost someone for good?”  I think it should be “lost them for bad!”  There was nothing good about losing her!  Well I hope that long bio helps you know who you will be dealing with if you decide to engage some of what I am offering.  I like to please others!  This is a specialized business that is much like teaching and coaching individuals in tennis.  Each encounter will be unique and I will get to know my clients.  Hope you will become one soon!  Here’s the summary of my services and related products flowing from the initial image creation in most cases:   My primary service is creating fantasy images for my customers.  Then I offer printing services for the reproduction of the fantasy images on letter, legal, tabloid, and Super B sizes on semi glossy white cardstock.  In addition I offer the created image reproduced on a white cotton T-shirt of variable children and adult sizes.  The second facet of my services is producing talking avatars of no more than three minutes.  These avatars can address an individual's birthday, graduation, sports achievement, anniversary, and/or any other significant event in a person's life that could be exalted in a two or three minute video. The presenter in the video can be a celebrity, historical figure, cartoon character, a friend, and/or a relative.  The third area of service offered are full length videos from 15 minutes to two hours featuring a subject chosen by the customer with them providing hard copy photos, digital images, and/or video recordings.  In addition the customer would provide a rough script of what is to be included in the video.  An additional printer will allow me to offer full standing life size representations of real people that can be mounted on quarter inch Masonite or hardboard.  This printing capability will allow me to print banners 36 inches wide by almost any length.  My goal is to have an online store capable of accepting almost all credit cards, the ability record and forward customer fantasy scripts & instructions, display pricing, a bio on myself, and examples of my services and products.  I basically have two physical locations for my business.  One is a small production lab & office built into a warehouse that I own approximately eight miles from my home.  The second location is my home in Hot Springs Village AR.  I feel like the area of operation can be the world at large because almost everyone has fantasies putting themselves in a more positive representation.  I will be able to operate the retail arm of my business from the warehouse location on a major highway serving the Hot Springs AR business area.  Some of my more localized promotion will be to target my fellow senior citizens living in Hot Springs Village AR, a community of about 15,000 seniors that I can reach via a weekly newspaper and rotating ads on a tv screen in a popular dining establishment.  The biggest obstacle to being able to service customers outside the United States will be the shipping cost of the physical products that I offer.  The actual fantasy images, talking avatars, and even longer videos can be delivered as email attachments to a certain degree.  My building is tan with a burnt red trim, so for continuity's sake that might be something good to blend in to the website. Obviously I would like it to be cheerful and good natured promoting a fun experience for the customer. I am only interested in in creating images and videos that are lighthearted and with the intent to solicit at least a chuckle or two from those associated with the customer.