ADVOCATE ORNAMENT

The Advocate Foundation’s limited-edition, numbered, and hand-painted ornament; perfect gift for the new home owner or Dallas transplant. Sales benefit neighborhood organizations. 214.292.0486 foundation.advocatemag.com

Colby Jones sketches and paints for the love of art, not money, though sometimes he makes a little. “I am not a salesperson. If someone shows up and wants to buy something they’ve seen online, great. People have hired me to do portraits. I try to talk them out of it. I don’t like to charge them what it’s worth for the time it takes,” he says. And if a nonprofit organization asks for something, chances are Jones won’t charge them for it. Case in point, Meals on Wheels asked for (and was granted use of) his “Texas Christmas” illustration, which depicts wise men as cowboys and a 10-gallonclad Joseph standing over the Christ child, to use as its official holiday greeting card. Colby, a Bryan Adams High School alum, started his art career drawing paper dolls for his older sisters. By junior high he had dreams of being a cartoonist, but after he got sidetracked and wound up working for the Park Department. “That partjob lasted 30 years,” he says. Twenty of those were spent at the Lake Highlands Recreation Center, which originally was called Skyline. “You used to be able to the Dallas skyline very well from there, until the trees grew up,” he says. From his he fondly watched Lake Highlands families grow up. “I saw 5-year-olds grow into 30-year-olds and bring their own children back,” he says. Even when his art was less drawing and more about finding creative ways to do his job, he never gave it up. retirement he started his website, sircolby.com, where visitors might find detailed portraits, charming sketches, clever cartoons and religious depictions. In the 1960s he on a state championship soccer team and later was a referee, and he recently illustrated the cover for the “Soccer Federation Laws of the Game Made Easy,” a soccer book. When he’s not drawing, or singing in the church choir, you might find Jones the set of a local TV show — “Dallas,” “GCB” and “Prison Break.” Well, on “Prison Break” only his arm holding a briefcase showed up on screen, he says. “I took a still shot of my arm, autographed it and sent it to my friends.”

—Christina Hughes Babb