About Craig

For as many years as I can remember I've been an artist and throughout my life I have ventured into other areas of the creative arts. I began drawing while in grade school, moved into painting and printmaking in high school and then sculpture and jewelry while an undergraduate at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC. In grad-school, I studied under Winthrop's Art Department chairman, Mr. Edmund Lewandowski, a precisionist painter whose work is known throughout the country. Under Ed' s tutorage, I learned the basics of graphic design and decided to use graphic arts as my career. I have worked as a graphic designer my entire adult life and hardly a day goes by when I don't see one of my logo designs on the side of a truck or a billboard. I have taught computer graphic design at the collegent level using the Adobe CS4 Suite and the Corel Draw X5 Suite. I still use these tools every day in my freelance design business.  

I have always loved drawing and my favorite medium is pencil on paper, although I still use other mediums. In 1978 I developed a technique where I could literary brush and even paint pencil onto a surface to create photo-realistic effects. In the near future I'll add samples of these drawing to this site.

Graphic designers are always in need of photographs and I prefer to use my own over stock photos. I studied photography in college under Rex Stambaugh, and eventually built my own darkroom to develop the prints. With today's digital cameras, the dark room has yielded to the computer and I have used Photoshop for over two decades. With these tools, we can do things we never dreamed of in the dark room -- effects that are limited only by our imaginations. The photos you will find under the Scenes from my Novel page were all created using special effects in Photoshop.

About My Writing

Artists like to dabble in the other arts, but creative writing is probably the last thing I could have imagined being good at. Yet, graphic designers need advertising copy and that’s how I discovered that I had a knack for words. I recall the wonderful stories that my teacher, Mrs. Gwen Crawford read to us in third grade, (she also taught me how to draw) and the love for literature that Mr. William Boyce White instilled in me during my junior year at Rock Hill High School. Everything I have achieved as a writer, I owe to them and my fellow authors at the South Carolina Writers Workshop. Gwen Hunter (Faith Hunter) was our SCWW mentor, and Dawn Cook (Kim Harrison), Misty Massey, Kim Boykin and many other now published authors, all started out in our chapter.

I started my first novel in 1993, and after four years and 226,800 words, my sci-fi trilogy was finished. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what I was doing, but at least I learned how to type and finish a major work. I still consider that book as my master’s degree in the wrong way to get published. Shortly after joining the SCWW writers group in 1999, I started writing short fiction and was astonished when my very first short story won Best of Issue in the, South Carolina Writers Workshop Horizons Anthology competition. My hobby as a writer had taken on real potential. 

As of this date, I have been published seventeen times in short stories, articles and plays, and have won twenty-nine literary awards – eleven of which were first place. My short story, House of Ruth, won 4th place in the 80th Annual Writers Digest International Writing Competition and in 2014, my short story, Den of Rhyme was a finalist in the William Faulkner Pirates Alley Short Story Competition. A full list of my published credits and literary awards can be found on My Bio link. 

My second novel, The Spectrum Conspiracy, won the 2010 Carrie McCray literary award for Best Opening Chapter in a novel. It also was a finalist in the 2014 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion competition and a short-list finalist in the 2012 William Faulkner/William Wisdom Pirates Alley competition and a finalist and semi-finalist in the 2010 and 2011 Faulkner competitions. The Spectrum Conspiracy was published by Bella Rosa Books in 2103 and its book trailer won 2nd place in the MARSocial International Book Trailer competition. The novel is available on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com and BAM.com. Click on My Novel link for a sample of the first three chapters.

I have also written a number of articles on the process of writing, networking and getting published which I plan to make available on this site in the near future. I plan on posting many of these on my Publishing Advice link and you can receive a copy by emailing me at craigfaris3@gmail.com . I hope you enjoy the site and I always welcome comments and suggestions.