Born near the heart of Silicon Valley—I have always had an attraction to the confluence of the arts and sciences, and I think my work is—in part—a reflection of that. It was difficult not to be influenced by that aspect of the local culture back then as it drove a lot of what was going on all over the area. It was an amazing place and time to grow up in, and I count myself lucky to be apart of the generation of artists that straddled the transition from traditional to digital tools.
I won a scholarship in High School to attend the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, but I resisted to attend right away as I was hungry for some diverse life experience and spent some years working for the San Mateo County Park Service. I wore a badge and a uniform, the whole Park Ranger bit, but as amazing as that experience was I felt compelled to come back to my first love —creating, making, painting, drawing, animating, designing, writing, joke telling —in essence; synthesizing my observations and life experiences in compelling, useful, interesting, and original ways. This brought me back to the Academy of Art with a focus on traditional animation and illustration.
From there I started working on my own projects and spent a sizable chunk of my student loans on insanely expensive software for traditional animation (before Flash) and created a independent animation project which helped launch my career as a commercial artist. This sent me moving to Southern California and since that time I've worked mostly in the interactive entertainment field commercially.
Between all the artistic pursuits I've managed somehow to skateboard around this world for way too long without doing any kind of real damage to myself or anything else. Which makes me wonder oftentimes if the best thing I ever did on a board was something I've never done.