Ever since I was a boy, I knew I was a creative person, and while I enjoyed creative writing, for a long time I knew that my true passion lay in drawing and painting. Unfortunately, for the first 30 years of my life I was convinced that I could not learn how to draw. However, in 2022, I finally broke through this self-doubt and began taking private art lessons from a former Disney artist with over four decades of experience. It wasn’t long before I started seeing amazing results, and over the course of the next three years I sampled many different mediums including graphite, charcoal, ink, and gouache, until I finally began focusing on digital art using Photoshop, Krita, and Clip Studio Paint.
One of the original reasons I wanted to learn to draw was my love of manga, and my desire to create my own manga online on a private website. To this end, I pursued my associate’s degree in Web Development and Digital Media from Johnson County Community College, and found that making websites is just as creative and artistic a process as drawing and painting. Now I’m attending Fort Hays State University, working towards getting my bachelor’s degree in Information Systems, and eventually my master’s degree in Applied Statistics, Analytics and Data Science from the University of Kansas. My goal is to become a data analyst and data scientist so that I can help make the world a better place.