Most people know Terry Crews as the towering, muscle-bound presence from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Expendables, and those Old Spice commercials. What they rarely know is that he arrived at the NFL as a trained fine artist - with a serious resume in visual art that predated pro football by years.

Drawing What He Could Not See

Crews grew up in Flint, Michigan, in a strict religious household. His mother did not allow movies, so when classmates talked about what they had seen, he went home and drew the scenes from their descriptions. It was an unusual way to learn draftsmanship - but it built a precision that his teachers noticed.

Art First, Then Football

That precision earned him a scholarship to spend a summer at the Interlochen Arts Academy in northern Michigan, one of the most competitive arts programs in the country. He then enrolled at Western Michigan University on an art scholarship - as an art student, not an athlete. Before the NFL, he worked as a courtroom sketch artist in Flint for television station WJRT, covering high-profile cases in the city.

He later switched to a full athletic scholarship for football and worked his way into the NFL.

Making Art Pay on the Roster

Crews was drafted by the Los Angeles Rams in 1991 and went on to play for the San Diego Chargers and Washington Redskins. But NFL rosters cut players constantly. Every time he was let go, he turned to the skill he had been building since childhood.

He would go back to the locker room and offer to paint portraits of the players there. The commissions ran $5,000 each and took roughly two months per painting. At times, those commissions were his family's primary income.

Still Working

Crews eventually left football for Hollywood, but he never stopped creating art. He has continued painting and drawing throughout his acting career, and his photorealistic work has been shown and sold to collectors. The man best known for flexing his pecs on camera has been a working artist longer than he has been a TV star.

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