LANSING, Mich. — Napkins are something many of us use to wipe our hands and clean up messes, but for more than 50 years, Dennis Preston used them as a canvas to create some pretty cool art.
"I like to start with eyes because I get an idea of where to center something," said Preston.
Drawing has always been something he loved to do.
"I started drawing in first grade," he said. "What happened was one of my classmates brought a book to class about how to draw woody wood pecker. So, I looked, and I thought hey I can do that."
And as his art skills have grown over the years, it's what he started drawing on that caught a lot of people's attention.
"I started doodling in around 1969, 1970. I was in a band at the time. And we used to hang out at Dogs N Suds on Michigan Avenue, and I started doodling on the napkins to leave them as tips for the waitresses," Preston said.
When he went back, he saw they had been collecting them.
"They were up behind the counter, so there was a wall of them. It kind of made an impact on me and go, hey, people like this stuff," he said.
He did that off and on, and then started doing them at Biggby. And over the years with the stroke of his pen on delicate napkins, he would doodle some pretty cool stuff.
"People and aliens, dinosaurs made up things monsters, and then, I wouldn't write little captions for them or make them say things," Preston said. "I might be influenced by features that I saw on people or something that they said. And then that might, you know, trigger something in me, but I didn't go into a place knowing ahead of time what I was going to draw."
He says his doodling on napkins days ended in 2013 when they stopped hanging them up at Biggby.
But if you add it all up, he had been doodling for more than 50 years.
"I just figured okay, that's kind of the end of the era," Preston said.
End of an era, but not the end of the napkins. Preston now has a book full of pictures them that people can see all his work. He says he still look back at some of the old ones because they make him smile.
For more art work and information, click here.
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