Street Greetings : Entrepreneurism: Ex-panhandler creates personalized, hand-painted greetings for passersby. By the time winter sets in, he hopes to have saved enough money for a hotel room.

You ought to send Harry Warren a card congratulating him on his new job.

And if you can’t find one you like at the store, he will be happy to whip something up.

That’s because after eight years of panhandling in Downtown Los Angeles, Warren finally created his own job. As a greeting card artist.

Each morning he stashes his bedroll behind a Civic Center hedge and sets up shop next to a driveway leading into a Hill Street parking garage. A cardboard box is his table. A milk crate is his chair. The open air is his studio.

The daily parade of attorneys, government workers and citizens visiting the nearby Superior Court and Hall of Administration buildings are his customers. They place orders for custom-made birthday and anniversary cards in the morning. Their one-of-a-kind, hand-painted greetings are ready by the afternoon.

The cards sell for $5 each. Warren hopes to use the money to rent a hotel room when the weather turns nasty.

“It’s going to get cold and start raining,” he said. “I’m not going to get caught out here on the street another winter. I’m 54. My body can’t take it anymore.”

A chance encounter last fall with a passerby got Warren into the greeting card business.

Lawyer Steven G. Kaplan of Encino was on his way to court when he stepped out of the garage and noticed Warren holding a cup in one hand and a sign in the other.

“Homeless and Hungry,” read the scrap of cardboard. But it was different from the signs waved by most beggars on Downtown street corners. Its lettering was neat and clean, almost professional-looking.

“He said, ‘Did you paint that?’ and I said yes,” Warren recalls. “He said, ‘Then you’ve got no business panhandling.’ ”

Kaplan returned in the middle of December with a box containing $150 worth of drawing pens, sketch pads and other art supplies. The pair discussed money-making ideas and came up with personalized greeting cards. Warren painted himself a “Cards for Sale” sign and went to work.

Soon he was busy filling orders from workers in county offices and City Hall. There was a setback during the spring when someone stole the art box. But Warren plowed his profits into new pens and inks, and he searched Civic Center dumpsters for discarded file folders he could use to draw on.

Warren said he has always had a knack for drawing, although it once got him in trouble at a Mississippi prison, where he was serving time for assault. Another inmate objected to the attention that Warren’s art was attracting and stabbed him with a fork, blinding him in the right eye.

Released in 1985, Warren headed for Los Angeles in hopes of finding work. When he couldn’t, he turned to panhandling. For the past few years, he has slept in a Downtown parking lot--the safest place, he says, that he can find.

He washes his clothes and bathes in a five-gallon pail. “I keep my hygienes up. I’m not going to let myself go to the dogs because I’m homeless,” he said.

Warren conceded that on slow days, when he only sells a few cards, he probably could make more money panhandling. “But at least I’m not shakin’ no cup,” he said.

When he works, Warren is oblivious to the other street people who congregate in the Civic Center area. He squints with his remaining eye as he meticulously sketches delicate flowers, birds and sunsets. He magnifies tiny detail with a chipped and scratched lens element from a discarded overhead projector he retrieved from the Hall of Administration trash.

A police officer who stopped to lecture him about conducting private business on government property ended up purchasing one of his cards. Even those who are down and out seem to admire him. “He ain’t bumming,” said Brad Stovall, a Downtown denizen who is a general relief recipient. “If you have a talent, why sit on it?”

“This is an artist,” agreed lawyer Glen Otis of Newport Beach, who paused to buy a card decorated with painted dolphins. “This is a very talented man. This work is too nice to pass up.”

Most of his customers commission personalized cards, dropping off verses and inscriptions for Warren to print. He uses a calligraphy book that a woman in City Hall purchased to replace the one stolen last spring.

Describing his customers, Warren recalled, “One man was in a rush. He said he got caught with two women and he had to get out of the mess he was in. He wanted to say on the card that he was ‘deeply, deeply sorry.’ ”

Another man asked Warren to customize a birthday card for a woman named Lisa. Warren spent extra time painting red roses around the name--and then was dismayed when the man never came back to buy it.

Kaplan, who stops by to see Warren whenever he comes Downtown, was astounded by that.

“Sounds like a breach of contract to me,” the attorney said.