So...as I'm just getting set up around here, I figured I'd introduce myself a little bit.

I am the daughter of an artist (my mother), the granddaughter of an artist (my paternal grandfather), and the niece of an artist/novelist (one of my paternal aunts). Both of the latter two (as I was exposed to it) came to their creative endeavors later in life, but my mother was an artist longer than I was alive. She was interested in art as she was growing up, and went on to the Cleveland Institute of Art after high school - so art was always her passion. She was interested in computer graphics and computer animation after a time - and thus went into computer programming and IT in order to learn the tools of the trade when I was a child. She never did get into computer animation (though she got *very* close - she had an interview with Pixar), and eventually retired to become the iconographic "art hippie on the mountain" as we lovingly call her around our home. Literally - she lives up on a mountain, and she has turned her home into a gallery - both inside and out. It's beautiful!

My grandfather started painting in his retirement. He couldn't handle being idle, and turned to painting scenes on sand dollars, leaves, wooden boards, etc...He'd long done work with his hands, fixing cars, doing odd bits of fine carpentry - so this was essentially an extension of bits and pieces he's done all his life.

My aunt pursued various interests - one of those was card making, and she'd draw pictures for the outsides of her cards. She eventually turned photographs into paintings and then painted original works. Now she's writing children's books and young adult novels.

So this is where I come from.

As I grew up, I found that I was always doodling and drawing. I was drawn (pun intended) to natural subjects - birds, fish, rock formations, etc...this was probably in large part due to the large number of art supplies constantly available to me from my mothers art studio (she owned her own graphic arts business which was run out of the house)...but it wasn't until years after I moved out of her house that I would really get bit by the art bug.

Around my Junior year of college I started working the Rennaissance Faire circuit (small faires, Southern California) under the wings of a woman who sold painted tambourines. The original intent was for me to play flute outside her tent and draw in customers - but that never actually happened. I helped her sell her tambourines instead...and eventually she taught me what she did to paint them - and I did that for years...eventually when I moved up to MN, I painted them on my own, started painting bodhrans as well.

Ironically, I found that I could only paint on tambourine and bodhran heads - I couldn't actually paint or draw on traditional media. It was bizarre. So I decided about a year ago that I was going to learn how to draw again. It's one thing to know how to apply a design and how to mix color. It's another thing entirely to know how to create. I need to know for myself that I can create outside of a single framework - that I'm not tied to a single media.

For a while I was solely sketching on paper. I was going to apply that same philosophy to digital media as well and make sure that I had mastered the concept - but...in watching Songwind apply the tutorials - I'm thinking that perhaps that philosophy might be wholly appropriate on paper - but might not be applicable to digital media. So I'm going to go through digital art tutorials for a while and see what I end up with.