I'm super late to this party, but better late than never, right? I think it's a little more relevant now anyway--this year is my 10th anniversary for online art communities. Crazy!

The images marked with stars are the most significant of that year, usually because I made a big leap in quality or technique while making them.

If you want to see more old work/ bigger images, head over to the image archive on my website! [link]

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So, a brief history:

-As a kid I loved to draw. I mostly drew cats and landscapes from calendar photos though!

-Around 1996 (age 10) I was exposed to fantasy. Dragonlance, D&D, the Hobbit. I started out copying Larry Elmore's cover paintings of the Dragonlance Chronicles (hahah!) and began to make up my own characters too.

-In high school, around the start of this meme, I started to take art more seriously. I became disillusioned and bored with high fantasy so I stopped reading novels, but I continued to develop my own world and characters. The current world I'm still illustrating, with the Dhuriiehm, first came to fruition when I was 15 and has dramatic evolved and matured alongside me ever since. (The pale characters with the black eyes were from a previous project I eventually scrapped because it was too lame to salvage.) This world-building was fueled by my discovery on online art galleries (Elfwood, Epilogue) where I stumbled across brilliant artists and saw what was possible. Shortly after I got my tablet, and started posting in art forums. The internet became my mentor. I spent every spare moment drawing.

-Towards the end of high school I scrapped my plans to major in English in favor of being an illustrator. I entered college in Fall 2005. I won't tell you where because honestly it wasn't a very good art college. I learned some foundational theory but not as much as I should have. All my digital work was done on my own time, after I was finished with homework. I began working for ImagineFX and Fantasy Flight Games in 2007, doing the commissions on the weekends. What social life?

-In my 3rd and 4th year of college I had the good fortune to be commissioned by then-unpublished author Peter V. Brett. He's kind of a big deal now. He's also responsible for drawing me back into the fantasy lit world, thanks to how rockin' good his novels are. The final year of college was unfortunately a bit of a disaster. I had no time for personal work while preparing for the thesis (which was a bunch of writing, not painting). I was very disillusioned with school, and became pretty bitter and depressed and burnt out from it all. As a result my first year freelancing was a bit of a rocky road because I had serious art block and had no clue how to market myself (thanks again, college). Tripped up a lot, but had some awesome experiences along the way. This brings us up to last year. In the fall I had the great fortune of attending two amazing conventions: World Fantasy Con, where I hung out with all of Brett's publishing friends, and Illuxcon, which ended up being the best and most rewarding 4 days of my life.

Which brings us to now. What's next? All I know is it should be pretty good.