A long time ago, in a valley far, far away . . .

I NEED ANOTHER WAY TO SPICE THIS UP . . . gah!

I grew up loving to draw, but it never really clicked with me that art could be a career until my senior year of high school. I was studying on my own to be a marine biologist and was going to try to go off to school to learn about reef genetics (I was particularly fascinated with coral reproduction and conservation). I had a reef tank at home and loved to study the water chemicals and how that affected the overall well-being of the fish, corals, anemones and other critters.

Well, at the beginning of my senior year at Wasatch High School, a friend of mine asked if I’d be interested in joining a 3D animation class, and that blew my mind! I had no idea that could even be a thing! I started the class and fell in love with it. Obviously, my first work wasn’t much to look at, but I was fascinated by the ability to make things in a virtual space.

During that school year, Brent Adams (the then head of the BYU Animation Department) came to visit and tell us about their animation program.

I was hooked.

I started traveling to the BYU campus a few nights a week to work on the current student film, Pajama Gladiator. I got to learn a lot about troubleshooting shaders in SLIM, rendering in RenderMan, and compositing in Nuke. It was a great opportunity to learn more about the professional pipeline and to network with other artists who would soon be in the industry.

Before I left to college, I left to live in Chile for about two years. There, I was privileged to learn Spanish and meet many wonderful people.

After coming home from Chile, I started my art blogging at full-steam by posting everything I ever made to my blogger page and DeviantArt. Not the best way to showcase your art, but I felt like I could punch a hole in the sky and that I would get the right traction and land my dream job. Kind of a simple A-Z sort of process . . . so I thought. It ended up being a lot more like a roller coaster with a lot of uncertainty, growth, and long bouts of unemployment. The highs are really high, but the lows are mighty low, too. I learned early on that it’s important to keep a broad perspective and to always work with intention and direction.

 TRIVIA: SMAARTIST is a serendipitous combination of my initials (SMA) with the word “artist.” Now you know!

Like many other people in this industry, I started with jobs and projects that weren’t exactly what I really wanted with the hopes of simply “getting my foot in the door” and growing my skills so that I could become industry-ready through my efforts. It was a ton of work, but it started paying off little-by-little as my gigs got bigger and bigger.

I now enjoy a fulfilling career as a Senior Character Supervisor on Overwatch at Blizzard, teaching at Gnomon and in my spare time (if ever there was such a thing!) I love to livestream as part of the official ZBrush LIVE channel and my own Twitch channel.

My ambitions continue evolving and growing. Keep an eye out as I release content to see what I’m up to!