About Me

For as long as I can remember, I've always had a knack for drawing (as the old cliché goes). Even at a young age, I knew that people and things had shape, and so I never liked drawing "stick figures." I remember once in 1st or 2nd grade, a creative writing assignment I had was to write a short story, and illustrate it with drawings. I was sitting beside one of my friends, and he finished his story quickly and drew stick figures to illustrate his story. Confused, I asked him "are we allowed to do that?!?" So in a bout of laziness, I too drew stick figures on that assignment, although I never felt right doing it.

Since then, I drew off and on, drawing different cartoon characters and such for friends, and learned a lot of what I know from the "Draw 50…" books, written by Lee J. Ames. When I got to college (Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma), I decided to make Graphic Design my major, and was required to take the normal Fine Art classes as well. These classes intrigued me, and I quickly became more serious about my artwork. I learned a myriad of techniques in drawing, watercolor, oil painting, and acrylic painting.

These days, I do the traditional artwork mostly as a hobby. I've sold a few pieces, but most of my work either is for myself, and hangs on my walls, or is meant as gifts for friends and family.

Over the years, my Graphic Design skills evolved more and more into the Web Development arena as time went on; I started off with simple HTML web sites, gradually moving on and utilizing more CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and Javascript. In more recent years, I've began learning about the things behind the curtain, and picked up a bit of Web Programming skills as well. I furthered my Javascript knowledge into the jQuery arena, as well as the basics of PHP and MySQL. I relied on WordPress installations for a while, until I decided to utilize my PHP knowledge, and build my own custom CMS (Content Management System) sites. I feel a lot more in control this way, as there are no updates or things of that nature that might "break" my site.

In a somewhat related field, computer graphics and animation are also a passionate hobby of mine. Special effects in movies and TV shows have always fascinated me. One of my earliest memories is from probably when I was five or six years old, I was watching "Friday the 13th" with my father. When the bloody parts came, he explained that it wasn't real, and that it was "special effects." He went on to say that they turned off the camera, and applied the makeup, and when they turned it back on, it looked like blood and gore. While this was a very rudimentary explanation, it intrigued me intensely, and ever since, I've always taken any opportunity I can to look at how movie special effects were created, and the "Making Of…" specials are always my favorite. Nowadays, the DVD extras are pretty common place, and I couldn't be happier.

So now that I've grown up watching these how-to videos, I've been doing it myself here and there, when I have time (and lot of times when I DON'T have the time). Since I discovered 3D animation back in High School, I haven't rested until I've learned as much as I can, and I still learn things every time I crack open the program. I recall that the reason I even started using 3D in the first place was that I wanted to make a movie, but my friends and family were always too busy or not interested. So I decided to create all the actors I'd need, and just do it on my computer. One thing led to another, and now I consider myself to be a fairly decent animator, especially in comparison to what I started out with, way back in the day.

So here's a few of the videos I've created. Most of the CGI ones were done in Blender, although a couple of earlier ones used 3D Studio Max. To see more, check out my YouTube Channel.