BIOIt doesn't matter how far back I remember, I was always drawing. I guess I was about ten years old when my love for fantasy fiction met my love for art. I don't think I can remember a single restaraunt trip with my family, where I wasn't drawing dragons or fairies or elves on a napkin with a borrowed pen. As I got into my teens, friends had nearly constant request for various damsels in distress and other mythical compositions, and I happily supplied as many as I could. In the Army, my talent for drawing was used mostly to draw tatoos on fellow soldiers with a ballpoint pen while out in the field. By the time I was out of the Army, I knew I wanted to be an artist professionally. I had already attended an illustration program at Otis Parsons Art Institute in Los Angeles while I was a junior in high school and thought I knew everything I needed to make a business out of it.
Sometimes you're more wrong than others.... After struggling as an illustrator for some time, I decided I needed to go back to school, and went to Platt College in Newport Beach. There I learned about the wonders of computers. It was love at first sight. Three years later I was running Janq Designs. For the next ten years, I would be designing magazine ads, websites, shirts, half sheets for movies, dvd covers, book covers and corporate branding (where I would develop logos, color themes for the company, font selections for all occasions, letterheads, graphics for signage, etc...). These skills eventually got me hired as Art Director for Telstate International, Inc.
Now, all these years later, I have come back to my roots of fantasy art, and it's been great.