About

I was raised and currently reside in the Greater Toronto Area. Growing up, I was always fascinated by people who could draw. When I was about 12 years old, out of extreme boredom one evening, I reached over and grabbed a picture of Captain Jean-Luc Picard ( the TNG Star Trek character portrayed by Sir Patrick Stewart) . . I took a basic HB pencil, a piece of printer paper and began to draw. A beautiful portrait is the result. My first ever portrait!

While in high school I took all the art courses I could, but also became disillusioned with all the “rules” that “good art” entailed. Surprisngly enough, my art teacher Ms Campbell thought I was so good that she allowed me to skip to the eleventh grade (from the ninth) ! I made many achivements in art in high school , but sadly because I graduated in the 1999-2000 year, there was all that talk about the Y2K Scare. If you remember, people were simply worried that technology would just stop working. The concept of having months of no electricity or modern machines was a real threat in many people’s minds. The idea that billions of dollars were going to be injected ito the Y2K issue was one of the reasonswhy I did not go to art college, and instead pursued a degree in computer science.

After graduating in 2004 with a Hon. B.Sc. in Computer Science, philosophy and math, to my surprise I somehow would still find the time to draw doodles here and there, and eventually one day took out my sketch book again and began drawing again!

Soon, I decied to start asking people to bring in pictures for me to draw. I continue to do this usually on the GOTrain , and it gives me a lot of free portraits during that time!!

I decided to give drawing another shot so I purchased a set of quality graphite
pencils and a sketch pad. By far the best book I found to assist me was How to Draw Lifelike Portraits from Photographs by Lee Hammond. Her techniques on shading really propelled me forward in my own style.