For ideas, he has artifacts, gear, clothing, and more than 5,000 old Western movie stills. In addition, he does a great deal of preliminary work, including small oil sketches and posing models on the roof of his city apartment. Hantman thinks an artists should get as much professional training as possible, and studied at the University of Miami in the 1950s, for eight years at the Art Students League, and later worked as a commercial artist. He has painted more than two hundred covers for Western paperbacks, and was featured in Southwest Art, fall 1976.Source: Harold and Peggy Samuels, "Contemporary Western Artists"