Digital art has a special space in my heart, ever since I first worked with Photoshop when I was thirteen years old. Teaching myself over the years led me to explore all different kinds of art forums, such as photo manipulation, pixel art, digital painting and graphic design. My digital and traditional art experiences allowed me to attend two art schools (Huntington School of Fine Arts and Oyster Bay School of Fine Arts) while in high school, as well as have my work featured in two galleries after receiving the All-County Art Exhibition award, twice. This opened many doors for me in college, where I began applying my art towards game design.
Since I was only thirteen years old, I had to thrive on my own when it came to understanding Photoshop. I began taking stock images of models, video game characters, anything really, and manipulating them using a series of brushwork, adjustment layers, clipping masks and other tricks I've learned over the years. I would place these images in my "signature" on the bottom of my forum posts, which led other internet dwellers to request my work. By age fourteen, I ended up having my own shops around forums, taking requests from people and creating artwork for them -- just for the fun of it. I've made buttons and banners for websites, backgrounds, and tons of other things.
Delving into the world of pixel art was a large step for me. Being used to working in high-resolution, larger formats, pixel art was a territory I never explored before. Since I enjoyed creating my own artwork for my games, I've began teaching myself. As other students in my program became interested as well, we began teaching each other what we knew in an independent study. Nothing would make me happier than to keep improving my work.