I was just sitting here at home doing some art for work and thought how far I’d come as an artist and the long road it was to get here. Maybe some of you would like to share too.

I’ve always been interested in art. I think it first stated with comics when I was a kid. I took art in high school and had a fun teacher but didn’t really learn any technique. I think he was more interested in showing us what he could do. Later I thought it would be cool to join the Navy since the recruiter said I was so smart. I ended up being a Missile Tech on a submarine. I woke up one day and thought to myself “Good God, what have I done?” Spending time punching holes in the ocean wasn’t my idea of fun. Later during shore duty I got my first taste of a graphics program on a Digital workstation. I can’t remember the model but it ran a version of windows that had a crude paint program. Every chance I got I played with that thing and got pretty good at drawing stuff on it.

After I finally got out of the Navy I went to work for a military contractor. It was then a friend was selling his old 8086 lunch box PC. I had to have it. The Sharp PC-7100 was a virtual powerhouse at 7.37Mhz. It sported 320k of ram, 2 5-1/2 inch floppy drives and a thermal printer. I was in hog heaven. I played with some programming in basic mainly simple card games. I remember a friend gave me a CAD program on 12 floppies. Every time I performed a different operation I had to stop and change floppies. I couldn’t really get my art fix on this thing but it was a good experience.

Next I saved up for my killer system. The year was 1989. At the time Gateway 2000 was the hot ticket. At least in PC magazine it was (It had the most ads). I spent around $1600 for a new Gateway 386SX 16Mhz PC with 2 mb of ram, 1mb Diamond Speedstar video card and a 40mb hard drive. It was the shiznit.

The day I loaded Corel Draw 2.0 I was so hooked I can’t describe the feeling. For all you Corel fans. Remember the sample file of the locomotive? It took probably 5 minutes just to load on my system but I loved watching it draw on the screen in amazement. I just got so hooked on drawing shapes and coloring them and manipulating them. I loved playing with fonts and gradient effects. I even made up signs and labels for work. With the help of my friend and fellow artist we learned everything there was to know about Corel. I even got a Compuserve account (pre internet) and hopped on bulletin boards to ask art questions and questions about my favorite game at the time DOOM!

At work I was a mild mannered technical publications writer. It wasn’t what I wanted to do but it paid the bills. Eventually people at work noticed my art abilities. Every time someone need art for a presentation I was johnny on the spot with some cool vector art that I did at home. Work was filled with Wang workstations and cad terminals so people wanting art quickly had to go through outside groups to get it. People started to rely on me for art stuff and I enjoyed doing it.

Zoom forward a about 6/7 years ago when a Cad artist was retiring they started a search for a replacement. I volunteered to leave my nice comfortable tech pubs job where I had built my own empire of paper. It was kind of scary because I didn’t know CAD but I was a fast learner. After about 2 years of doing CAD (Microcadam), they abandoned CAD in favor of Illustrator because of the type of art we produced was more illustrative than for manufacturing. They were playing right into my hands now! It was then that I got introduced to Illustrator 8. I never looked back. As much as I loved Corel, Illustrator just had the extra features I was longing for.

I still love it because everyday I learn stuff from other great artists. Being self taught has it’s advantages. When you are self taught you are usually self-motivated to learn stuff on your own. The main disadvantage is sometime you learn bad habits or learn the hard way when there are much easier ways to do things. I think that is what I like best about IW. I can always learn some time saving tips from experts here and I never have to worry about asking a dumb question.

OK… I’m done. Sheesh I should just write a book!