Right now i'm trying to improve my skills in photoshop doing vector line art and such. It is really familiar like when I was a kid putting stuff under paper and tracing it out for fun. Among other things it has got me wondering where we began as amateurs picking up these skills of ours. Where exactly did you start as an amateur doing what you love to do right now?

I've been drawing on pencil and paper since elementry school and now I draw on my PC and do a decent job at it. One program I fell in love with is Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 :wub: , this program has been a god send to my cartooning and photo editing and I still haven't touched the full usage of this program.
Here's a sample of my greatest work.
http://i413.photobucket.com/albums/pp212/sbcmarine81/AdoraShe-Ra.png

I started doing some woodworking in highschool and loved it. I worked in a woodshop for about 10 months and finished my first year of an apprenticeship. The amazing thing is that when I was choosing my classes in grade 9 I put woodworking as my alternate and infotech(which I thought was about computers, but was actually about making movies) as my main choice. I didn't like infotech so I tried woodworking, fell in love with it and even took two classes in grade 11. When I did my apprenticeship, the last project we had to do was a table that we designed ourselves. I'm still proud of the fact that I am the only person who has ever asked my instructor if it could have 8 legs.

Alright, I'll take this a different way, but I think it still meets your intent.

I grew up making firewood with my dad as a kid. Wandered the woods while he was cutting, throwing insects into spider webs, etc. Grew up with a lake for a front yard and a forest for a back yard. I spent MANY hours in the woods, fishing, walking on the ice, etc. Getting the picture?

I now work as an outdoor eduator, teaching people about the natural world. Taking folks out into the woods and providing positive outdoor experiences.

It all started when I was a widdle kid.

Well, see, my mommy and daddy loved eachother verry much...

I was in high school ( two years ago ) and everyone in it is required to submit a "senior project" the last year of school. I talked to my friend who was building a computer, and he said "you should make a game for your senior project." Looked up what it took to make a game, and been coding ever since. I ended up dropping out of high school, but kept coding anyway. It was actually a request of mine that should they put me in a programming class I would stay in school, call it pride or ignorance, but they decided to not fulfill the request.

When I was little, I would make "magazines" out of scrap paper, drawing pictures of fashions we would be wearing "in the future" and writing silly short stories. Then when I was in my teens, I got into writing "fanzines" - home-printed magazines originally put together with a manual typewriter and photos I took myself with the cheapest camera on the market, and photocopied at the corner shop in batches of 50. I'd go along to local gigs, review and interview the bands, and then sell the issues at the next concert. After a couple of years, I got a friend involved who had a computer and it started to look slightly more professional-looking, though very obviously home-made. Then in about 1998 we started uploading articles online and ditched the paper issues.

At around that point - maybe a year or two before - people started asking me to write things for them. A friend of mine worked at a record label and if she was too busy, she'd pay me to write press releases for her acts. Another friend got a job as an editor at a magazine and asked me to contribute reviews, and from there I got work with other magazines, just doing freelance reviews and interviews.

I got tired of it after a few years and stopped doing it for a long time, but occasionally got roped in to contributing articles to friends' websites, such as a couple of interviews with Bethesda staff I did for Oblivion's Real Estate. Then last year I decided to start a music-and-entertainment blog and from that people started contacting me again, asking me to contribute to this and that. I suppose I've come full circle, but I'm currently really enjoying it.

There was a bright light, and then someone hit me.

My father would read Sun Tzu the art of war to me as a bed time story, among others..

I was eight.

So are you "Pinky" or "Brain"?

:bolt:

You can't be serious that is one of the things that made you a contractor?

Started teaching myself how to write BASIC programs on my Commodore 64 when I was around 11 or 12.

I remember seeing Col. Potter reading an FM on MASH once :nod:

I grew up watching Jaques Cousteau and Vicotry at Sea....so I joined the Army lol

I've been texting since I was 11.

I used to draw a lot of stuff when I was little. Then when I needed a DDS plugin for Morrowind I discovered Paint.net! It is great fun. I can mess around with filters and gradients and overlays to make something that looks nice without actually having the skill to do it normally!

Retexturing stuff is fun. Like this http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/rr212/Qeros/creep2.jpg I made, for the fashion conscious wasteland lady.

When I was little, a dragon destroyed my village.

And that's the story of how I became a dragonslayer.

We had one of those, there was a pamphlet of games to write included in our package. I promptly followed the directions, decided I wanted to make the space ships smaller and faster, and the laser rays more intermittent, and figured I'd change the colors too. I also liked the drawing and music features.
After a month or so, I got bored.


I spent hours hiking, biking, picking and drawing plants, reading books about plants, nurturing plants, and playing in the dirt.
I still like digging around in the dirt.

Over the past month, I figured out how to work recording and basic video editing. I am about to start making short machinima movies that I hope will one day be successful and get me started in a film career.

Hehe...I remember those. I had some books of various programs you could type in. Couldn't save them, though, so when you turn the computer off they were gone. It wasn't until later that I discovered how to save things to a cassette tape.


I didn't. I guess that's why I've been a software developer for 14 years. I've come a long way from BASIC programs, though.


Cheers to being lucky enough to get paid to do what you like. :foodndrink:

Thankfully, computers can say the same.

I've been drawing, and gaming since I was only around 3 or 4 years old. I only drew doodles and stuff, and played games like Lego Island, Spy Fox, Pajama Sam and Freddie Fish. I've been writing stories since about 5th grade where I realized how much I enjoyed writing narratives. While I enjoy it the most, I don't mind other forms of writing either. Working out is probably the latest thing I started enjoying which was almost 3 years ago. For the first couple of months I really hated it, and only did it because I was overweight and was under risk of serious health threats such as diabetes and a couple of heart problems. But ever since I started seeing results, I've been hooked.

In all of these things, I started from zilch. I'm not an expert at any, but I'm always improving.