My artistic interests are wide and varied but costuming and replicas are a primary passion. I can rarely watch a film or play a videogame without finding new inspirations. I want to make them exist in the real world, and time is really my only limitation. I have an absolute passion for solving technical artistic problems, and there are always new technical challenges in sculpture and costuming. I am big fan of the expanded Star Wars universe, especially KotOR, as well as many other sci-fi and fantasy games/films.

I am primarily self-taught as an artist but with some formal art education including a Bachelor's in Fine Art with a specialization in sculpture (UCF). I also have a Bachelor's in Physics (USF) and have taken many grad school courses in both subjects. I taught physics classes at UCF and USF and currently work as a graphic designer.

I am in my early 30's and have lived in Florida most of my life. I have broad interests including art, music, science, invention, and creative writing. I consider myself a student of nature. My biggest heroes are Beethoven, Da Vinci, Mozart, Galileo, Einstein (all of the natural scientists really), Carl Sagan, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Mark Twain. All creative, original, and free-thinking people are an inspiration and a hero to me, especially those who challenge the status quo and charge ahead.

Thank you for visiting my website and for taking an interest in my artwork.

~Robert Rodgers

The influence of a vital person vitalizes [the world], there’s no doubt about it. - Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth

The secret of happiness is to find something bigger than yourself and then to devote your life to it. - Daniel Dennett

Krishna’s dictum: The best way to help mankind is through the perfection of yourself.

"We succeeded in taking that picture [of Earth from the distant Voyager spacecraft], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

- Carl Sagan, The Pale Blue Dot

You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. - Thomas Paine

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. - Thomas Paine

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry. - Thomas Paine

My country is the world, and my religion is to do good. -Thomas Paine

The Takers are a profoundly lonely people. The world for them is enemy territory, and they live in it like and army of occupation, alienated and isolated by their extraordinary specialness. - Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

"There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now. - Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

"You can't say, 'We're going to change the way people behave toward the world, but we're not going to change the way they think about the world or the way they think about divine intentions in the world or the way they think about the destiny of man.' As long as the people of your culture are convinced that the world belongs to them and that their divinely-appointed destiny is to conquer and rule it, then they are of course going to go on acting the way they've been acting for the past ten thousand years. They're going to go on treating the world as if it were a piece of human property and they're going to go on conquering it as if it were an adversary. You can't change these things with laws. You must change people's minds. And you can't just root out a harmful complex of ideas and leave a void behind; you have to give people something that is as meaningful as what they've lost—something that makes better sense than the old horror of Man Supreme, wiping out everything on this planet that doesn't serve his needs directly or indirectly." - Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. - Mark Twain

As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death. - Leonardo da Vinci

The one who tells the stories rules the world. - The Hopi

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. ... Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone! Where will the eagle be? Gone! And what is it to say goodbye to the swift pony and the hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival. - Chief Seattle

I met Brian Muir at a 501st event. At age 23, he sculpted the original Vader helmet based on one small sketch by John Mollo and the Vader body armor based on McQuarrie's concepts. Brian still sculpts for major motion pictures. He just wrote a fascinating book about his sculpture career and has a website: www.brianmuirvadersculptor.com

We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your own depth. All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time- namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be. - Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth