I strive to be a well-rounded nerd. My career has been a meandering path through the cybersecurity world, but I'm lucky to have access to a thriving artist community. I've studied portrait and figure for over a decade there,
and for several of those years served as a teaching assistant.
Lessons on painting technique have also shaped me into an overall more confident person. Reaching vibrant colors taught me to be a little bit louder than I think I should be.
I practice letting go of the details that are not the focus of the big picture. I swing my brush energetically, suddenly unafraid to take up a little space.
Lately I've been drawn back to my original love of illustration. My favorite subjects are the imaginary worlds inhabited by the smallest of creatures. It's like carrying a pocket full of stories everywhere I go.
I can see their colorful stories in the ordinary woods around me, or hidden in miniature below the mundane floorboards. It's always been fun to translate human emotion onto non-human faces. Now I'm enjoying
fresh challenge of apply the lessons of the last years to visual storytelling -- After the effort to conjure objects from imagination, I need to be able to let some of those details go. A focus on digital media
requires channeling the energy of a large canvas into a small screen, but in turn offers techniques that are impossible in physical paint.
Hardware or software quicks only fulfill my need to always be troubleshooting.
