“I’m president of Hockey Art International Ltd. What I do is an original pen and ink drawing of hockey gear and it is based on NHL jerseys. When the picture’s finished, we make reproductions of them and sell them over the internet, and a few retail stores in Canada and in the United States. We are licensed by the NHL to do this.

When I started to draw, I learned how to draw fairly well, and I taught classes. One of the projects I gave to my students was to draw an object on a chair. I had a number of sets up for this project, including one with my son’s skates, hockey jersey and a stick.

Hockey was invented in Nova Scotia in the 1850's.

I wanted to try this drawing myself and give it to one of my sons as a gift for his birthday. And so he got me thinking that it would probably be a good business venture to mass produce these and sell them to hockey fans.

With the NHL license, we’re only allowed to sell these directly in North America. We had to forecast our sales for the first three or four years to pay royalties to the NHL. So every year we have to pay the royalty that we forecasted we’d do for that year, whether we make those sales or not.

What happens when a player signs anything, usually, they are paid for it. Their rates might be anywhere from $10-$90 per item, but sometimes they’re at a location and they’re just there signing anything that people bring to them. We’ve taken advantage of that for fundraisers. A typical example is one of Gretzky’s prints went to a Lou Gehrig’s disease golf tournament, and it sold for about $850.”

The first official hockey rules was incorporated in Montreal in 1879.