Hermiston native Steve Mills remembers being fascinated by the colonial artwork etched into his mother’s plates.

The patterns, line work and sketching inspired him to draw as a child, and, with a little help from a teacher at what is now Armand Larive Middle School, he began cultivating the skills to create highly detailed portraits and other images.

“An art teacher named June Hansen at Hermiston Junior High (School) got me really interested in art,” Mills said. “She just showed me that I had the ability, and I was already interested anyway. I picked it up then, and I’ve been trying to draw ever since.”

He took art classes for the next six years, graduating from Hermiston High School in 1972, and, with some additional help from Hansen through the years and “a little advice here and there” from others, Mills now creates lifelike images in black and white.

“I don’t see things as color,” he said. “I can’t think that way. I can only think in the value. I see the dark and the light. I’ve always worked in monochromatic art.”

He uses pencil and stippling, a method of completing an image using only tiny dots with a fine ink pen.

“It’s about the size of a human hair,” Mills said of his stippling pen. “You just make millions of little dots. Now that I’m doing this, I’d rather do that than anything else. It’s just looking at dots, and you put it up on the wall, and it looks more like a photograph.”

He said he has found a few stippling artists on the Internet, but the style is rare. Mills enjoys creating unique art but said the process is difficult, especially for portraiture.

“If you put an ink dot down, you can’t take it back, and every little dot can make a huge difference,” he said.

He has been stippling for about five years, but each piece requires six to 12 months to complete. Even quicker pencil drawings take him at least two months to complete.

“I can’t sit with somebody and do (a drawing) because it takes so long,” he said. “I couldn’t sit you across the room and knock out a sketch of you in a couple hours. That just doesn’t happen. I’m a maniac for details. Every little thing has to be in there.”

Mills begins by making a rough sketch from a photograph — or creating an image from several different photos. After that, he said it is simply a matter of taking the time to draw it out in detail.

He has created drawings and stipplings from historic Hermiston photos and plans to concentrate on making commissioned portraits for people. With more than 20 years of professional photography experience, he can also help people get the photos on which he models the hand-created portrait.

Mills photographed weddings, dances, sporting events and graduation shots of high school seniors in Hermiston from 1982 until 2003.

“I was still shooting film, and the world was becoming digital very rapidly,” he said. “They needed less and less film photographers. I wasn’t ready to shift gears.”

He has since made the switch to digital photography and shoots extremely close-up macro photos, “artsy stuff of bugs and plants and flowers,” but few of people.

Mills has also been playing guitar since he was 10 and still spends time pursuing all of his artistic loves.

“All three of them are always there as an option,” he said. “If I don’t feel like this today, I can do this. I can go with whichever one is drawing me at the moment. I never get bored at all. I can do today whatever is most interesting today.”

Mills said art is as natural and as necessary to him as breathing.

“They’re just things that were embedded in me, and this is what I love to do,” Mills said. “I never wondered who I would be. When I was young, all I did was play guitar. I went into photography as a career. I’ve done that, and the rest of my life is going to be concentrating on this.”

His current goal is to build up a collection of drawings and stipplings to show around the Northwest. Mills does not sell his work but said he plans to sell prints. He also hopes to create more commissioned portraits for others.

Some of Mills’ detailed art is on display at the Hermiston Public Library throughout the month of December, and images can be viewed on his website, pencilartist.com.