DECATUR - Jon Griffin has the luck of the Irish, but it's not always been easy drawing on his good fortune.

His mother, Patty Wiegand, says her son's great-grandfather arrived fresh from the Emerald Isle, and somewhere in the bequeathed genetics was the gift of art. "By the time he was in the fourth or fifth grade, I got called in to talk to the teacher," says Wiegand, 56, who lives in Decatur.

"Jonathan (his full name) wasn't doing real well in English or math or something, but I saw there were just some great drawings on the edges of his papers. I was all excited about it. His teacher wasn't."

Oh, well. Albert Einstein's grade school teacher used to say he'd never amount to anything, either, so Wiegand figured the pedagogical species' track record on talent spotting wasn't so hot. "I had gotten to see some of the things Jonathan could do with a pencil, and it just blew my mind," she says.

Her son, however, wasn't an easy sell on his own abilities. For a while, in his 20s, he went through a dark night of the soul in which all he created was eraser shavings. "I thought everything I did was garbage, or I just wouldn't draw at all," he says.

His cure was finding the determination to finish everything he started. "I decided no going back, so I put down the pencil and started drawing in permanent black marker," he says. "And, no matter how it was going, I would keep moving forward and finish it. It was then I began to find I was happy with what I had done."

You can get a sense of the artistic exuberance now flowing from that mental discipline by going to www.gtci.us/2008.html, where there is a nice selection of his output. The hectic universe of his drawing creativity includes everything from laughing wine bottles to giant babies wandering through cities while helicopters hover overhead carrying huge pacifiers. A Griffin art tour will leave visitors' heads spinning.

There also are sour-looking cooks, old ladies, monkeys, elephants, grinning skulls with blue eyes reflecting shapely women, several leprechaun types, skateboarders caught in midflight and all kinds of character studies. A lot of this stuff would look cool on T-shirts, mugs and things, and you can do just that by going to www.zazzle.com/jiveafro, which also features his art and allows customers to apply it to T-shirts, ties, aprons, mouse pads and a whole bunch more.

Even postage stamps are now available from Zazzle that feature Griffin art and can actually be used to mail a letter. "And the stamps have been selling a bit, which is nice," he said.

His Irish eyes have a lot of other reasons to smile these days. After college in California and a teaching job in the Golden but expensive state, he came home to affordable Decatur with his California wife, Amy, in 2005 and bought a home where they are raising children Patrick, 9, and 6-year-old Emily. He's very happy in his day job as a production artist for Decatur-based Jump Co., an advertising and design firm that won a contract to do the NASCAR racing logo for the Nationwide Series, and Griffin says life is pretty good.

The freelance art continues to pour unbidden from his head in any spare moment he gets, and he's been finding time to reach out an encouraging pencil to artists of a different feather, too. A serious music fan, Griffin has dashed off, unasked, posters for local bands to help them promote themselves and seek success. He wants the musicians to have the courage to lay down their metaphorical pencils and pick up their metaphorical permanent markers and surge forward in pursuit of an artistic dream, just as he did.

"The lesson I've learned is to keep going and don't stop," he says. "You'll find what you are looking for, or it will find you."

Tony Reid can be reached at treid@herald-review.com or 421-7977.