I have been playing with computers and using them to make art from a very young age. I am 29 years old now, and have been using Apple products for almost 25 years! My first family computer was a Macintosh IIx, manufactured in 1989. I remember it had a drawing program called Canvas 2.0, made by a now long-defunct software company called Deneba Systems. It was pretty much a precursor to Adobe Illustrator, from about 1985 or '86. While most kids were scribbling with crayons on paper and putting them up on the fridge, I was actually drawing things with vector shapes on the computer. Printing them out on dot matrix paper, and then putting them up on the fridge.
I have been toying around with Photoshop since about Version 5.5, and even before that I knew how to color correct digital images and do some rudimentary "artsy" things with them. I really wish that I still had the stuff I made in those early days, they were interesting coming from a grade school kid.
Late in my high school years, I was still using the same computer I cut my teeth on as a small child. The old Macintosh, a model from 1989, was my gaming machine and homework station until it finally died in the year 2004. Sadly much of my early work has been lost, and the data is now irretrievably stored on 2 MB floppies, Iomega ZIP disks, or some broken drive in the electronics graveyard of my basement.
By the time I was a senior in high school, I had pretty much decided that I wanted to be some sort of digital artist. I looked into going to school to be an architect or an industrial designer, but didn't have the math and the engineering skills to succeed in either of those fields. So what did that leave? Graphic design, of course!
You could say it ran in the family. My grandfather was a Navy man who later worked for the Department of Defense, and not only did he have drafting skills, but his skills were amazing! He personally designed some uniform patches to commemorate his service aboard his submarines. He was a radio technician and engineer who was able to draw detailed schematics of circuits before he built them, and even drew out the floor plans for remodeling his own house. All of this was done by pen and paper, in a time before computers were even thought of. If you want to learn more about his achievements, you can visit my other blog.
Also, I have a great uncle who went to school to be a "commercial artist"in the 1930's and 1940's, a profession we now call graphic design. He attended the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, and I believe later taught art classes there. And my dad's father was a traditionalist oil painter, he also enjoyed photography. So you could say it's in my bloodline from both my mother's and father's side. I guess I was born to be some kind of artist.
In college, I pursued a four year Bachelor's degree in graphic design. My first year, the computers we used were Powermac G3's and saved things on Iomega Zip disks. They were running Adobe Photoshop 7.0, Illustrator 10 and Quark XPress 6. By the time I graduated, the graphic design lab was full of shiny G5 Mac Pros, with flat panel LCD screens and DVD burners running Adobe CS3! And now 5 years later, those have become obsolete and were replaced again. As we all know, technology moves so fast now that we can barely keep up as professionals.
I can't even imagine what the technology will be in another 20 years. Maybe we'll have animated motion graphic prints on digital paper and 3D holographic art, monitor displays that hover in the air and laser projected keyboards on any surface. Or maybe a direct hardwire into our brains. Who knows?
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