>> I originally came to Cal State Long Beach as an accounting student and I was going
to get a degree in accounting, but I paid my way through college doing commercial illustration
and graphic design on the side, and at some point I realized, "Hey, what am I doing?
Why do I want to be an accountant when the thing that I really love, which is doing art,
is paying my way through school?"
So, I switched my major to art and I got a BA in Fine Art.
Well when I first graduated it was still all commercial jobs,
but I knew I could make a living as an artist, even if it was a commercial artist.
And I sort of developed my own art on the side a little bit, tried to inject it
into my commercial and eventually people started noticing my own sort
of distinct style I was putting into the work I was doing, and people started asking about that.
People started asking me if I was ever going to make paintings and put them in a gallery,
which originally wasn't my intention, but eventually I moved towards that.
I moved towards making my own art.
And when I actually did that, that's when my career really took off.
So, for some reason people could see in the work I was doing, that the pieces I was doing
that weren't commercial pieces, I was doing them just for myself, there was something there
that people really reacted to, and that's sort of how my career as an artist started.