I was born in Illinois through no fault of my own. My parents soon came to their senses and moved to Wisconsin when I was twelve. I was home schooled by my parents who made me and my seven brothers walk three miles to school every day. While this didn’t exactly make sense, it instilled in me a deep seated drive to achieve a marginal level of mediocrity.
My first experience with showing artwork was through 4-H. The highlight of this was in 1986 when I had an ink-wash selected to be displayed at the UW Madison, along with artwork from other 4-Hers from across the state.
Since that time, I have dabbled in various mediums as an amateur, while slowly and steadily migrating towards electronic media. My first experience with computer based artwork was with an Amiga my father had through work, and a program called Deluxe Paint. Years later as an adult, I bought a Mac and RayDream Studio 5. I used that until computer and OS upgrades made it very unstable. Fortunately I heard about Carrara 5 and its lineage, so I felt fairly comfortable “upgrading” from RayDream to Carrara. A couple years later, I upgraded to C7 Pro and haven’t looked back.
I’ve used some other programs through the years, including earlier versions of Poser and Bryce, but felt that they were somewhat limited. They each had features I wanted — realistic humans from Poser and realistic terrains from Bryce. Neither one worked well together, especially if you were a novice. More advanced software like C4D, Maya, etc. were both beyond my skill level and my budget, and Raydream was getting a bit rickety. I saw Carrara as a godsend and a bridge to what I wanted to do. Carrara had the tools I was familiar with from Raydream, the terrain and atmospheres I wanted from Bryce, the realistic humanoids from Poser and some of the high end features found in C4D and Maya, such as rigging, complex shaders and more advanced lighting capabilities.
Love your work! wish I could get tutorials from you. Managed to purchase Maya a few months ago but like you said, it consists of a lot of commands that might as well be latin to me. I’ve only been using Carrara for 2months now but i really think i’m getting the hang of it. Anyways, your work is both inspirational and marvellous!
Really enjoyed your gallery. I think Carrara is a fantastic application. I’ve been trying to learn it since Ray Dream Version 3. It is easy to get going with it, but like most applications, the learning never stops.