Joseph Leyba doesn't look like your typical artist. In a pale blue T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, battered black cowboy hat sporting a snakeskin hat band and well worn canvass work pants, Leyba asks if it's OK if you sit outside to talk about his work.

"I was at the Los Lunas swap meet all morning, sitting in the sun in a black hat," Leyba says with a laugh, looking much cooler in the shade of his front yard. "And, I don't know why, but whenever I get a phone call, I always wind up outside wandering around talking."

And outside at Leyba's Los Lunas home isn't a bad place to be. A bit off the beaten path on north Los Lentes, his yard is home to several of his large metal sculptures, fountains and a shade structure in process — a triangle of curvey, bark-covered poles is joined together at the top with two-by-fours awaiting a cover.

A fountain burbles energetically while a figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe quietly looks to heaven.

A small basketball court is edged with rocks from across the state that Leyba has brought home to be incorporated into his artwork.

Leyba came into his art form kind of sideways. As a high school student, he took art classes and found some success in drawing.

"I drew people, my favorite baseball player," he said. "Did all the basic stuff you do in school, but it didn't really do anything for me."

What really got his attention was working for a company erecting communications towers hundreds of feet in the air.

"We were working with all this big equipment and things like hammer drills, using metal fasteners to mate things to concrete," he said. "So I went out and bought a $700 hammer drill. I use it for work, but I use it for my art too."

It was that melding of dissimilar materials — steel, rock, wood — that caught Leyba's imagination seven years ago, and led him to begin creating abstract artwork as well as more functional home accents.

"I like to use old wood, and I hunt for the metal just like I do the rocks," he said. "A lot of stuff I find in steel yards and in trash cans."

He lifts up a two-foot long steel tube with horizontal slits down one side and a hole on the opposite side.

"Do you know what this is? Neither do I," Leyba said. "But to do this, you need a CAD (computer assisted drafting) program, plasma cutter and this was on an arm that could rotate. That's not cheap. There were four of these in the trash, and I got them for three bucks each."

What most might consider interesting junk at best, Leyba sees as potential light sconces somewhere down the road.

"That's how I do my projects so I can give people the best price on things," he said.

Leyba's current line of work as a journeyman contractor with O'Connor Brothers Design Build allows him the opportunity to work on projects that are not only art, but also practical for homeowners.

"It's a four-man company, and one of the other guys is a metal artist, and one of the owners, Brian O'Connor, who is an artist down in Veguita," he said. "We've done everything from carports with exposed structural steel, metal gates with three-dimensional horses and tile and metal shower enclosures."

Working with metal, stone and concrete takes some forethought and planning, Leyba says.

"I don't do a lot of shows. To do a show means I have to hook up my crane," he says with a shake of his head.

But working with pieces the size and heft of Leyba's sculptures does force him to take his time.

"I have to really think about what I'm doing, where everything is going to go and how I'm going to install it," he said. "I did a barbecue grill once that was probably 3,000 pounds after installation. I had to pour the footing first, then put in the back splash. It's not the kind of thing you can just set into place and be done."

While it might seem that metal and rock are unforgiving materials, Leyba says they are surprising sometimes in their malleability.

"You can take two pieces of steel and weld them together, grind it down and heat it and you will never know that it was two separate pieces. You can't do that with wood," he said. "And yeah, you might be drilling a rock and it splits. You like the rock, so now you have to find the best way to use the two pieces."

And when things don't work out as planned, Leyba takes that as a learning opportunity.

"It's all a learning process, and now you know what to expect next time if you do it again," he said. "If you do it again, you just do it a different way. I just try to look at it as turning a negative into a positive."