Ideally,an illustration does more than make the imaginary visible - it makes it believable. The portrayal of a piece of hardware should engage the analytical and imaginative minds as one.

My recent work is rooted in my experience of the analytical and imaginative. I am a pilot, and the son of a pilot; he flew military and civilian craft from the beginning of World War II to th present. I have worked as a technical illustrator for NASA. I have years of experience as an amateur astronomer.
I have also been imagining and creating: producing pen & ink art for traditional role-playing games; designing real environments for virtual reality installations; composing and painting promotional art for computer games; and creating digital assets for use in those games.

The tools I use to create are, in some sense, the intersection of the imaginative and the analytical. Practically, they are tools: whether the traditional pencil, pen & ink, and acrylics; or newer digital tools such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightwave 3D. As tools they require analytical understanding and practical experience to master. But they are also an extension of my imagination. Mastery of a tool, divorced from imagination, yields a good draftsman. Imagination without the necessary skill to render it yields an incoherent mess.

My intent in this portfolio is to show what can be done when the imaginative and the analytical temper each other; to produce art that is inspirational and accurate at once, that educates even as it stirs the emotions. I strive in my art to achieve what the best illustrators do - to engage the hearts and the minds of the audience.

Tom with his wife Diane, and a 1937 Gull Wing Stinson at the EAA's Pioneer Field.

Tom Peters has been an illustrator for many years, working as a technical illustrator for Interstel, a NASA subcontractor, Virtual World Entertainment, a Pioneering developer of Virtual Reality, multiplayer experiences, a marketing and informational graphics graphic designer, and a senior Lead Artist and Art Director for PC and Platform based video games.

He lives outside Chicago, with his wife, Diane.