My name is Tiffany Toland-Scott, but I prefer to be called Tiff, and I was born and raised in the Cascade foothills of Washington State, but felt the wanderlust early on and was always dreaming of where I wanted to go.  As a child I struggled with a crippling musculo-skeletal condition that left me unable to participate in many physical activities and I turned to drawing my horses when I couldn't ride them.  Eventually the drawn horses became unicorns, and my love of fantasy was born.

Being very competitive gave me the desire to be the best at drawing in my class, and it eventually became an all-consuming pursuit of perfection.  Shortly before my sixteenth birthday I decided to drop out of high school so I would have more time to spend on my artwork, a plan which obviously made my parents very happy (teehee).  But it wasn't long before I had earned my GED and was spending every day, and most nights, making artwork.

A few years later I decided to move to Phoenix to obtain a degree in video game design, but quickly realized the life of the game designer was not for me.  After switching majors a couple of times, and sometimes having double-majors and taking 36 credit hours a semester while attending two colleges, I was burnt out, fed up, and pretty much convinced that a "practical" art job was not my style.  The only teacher I got along with asked me, after grading my final project, why I was even there and told me I could go into the workforce today if I wanted to.  So, I did.

I moved back to Roslyn/Cicely and opened my first studio, which happened to be a renovated hay barn sheltered by the ancient evergreens of the Wenatchee National Forest.  I named the studio Strawberry Moon, for the full moon that shone that June night when I first was settled in and able to work.

About a year later I found myself inexplicably drawn to this little convention in Missoula, Montana, of all places.  I had never been to Montana and had only ever heard horror stories about how everyone in Montana was a hick, so my sudden overwhelming desire to go for a visit is still rather beyond my understanding.  All I could say was that every year I sent them art, and every year they sold it all, so why not?

I ended up meeting the man who would become my husband (and many wonderful souls who would become my best friends) there, and just a few short months later I closed up Strawberry Moon and moved to Montana.  The day I moved in we got engaged, and shortly after we were handfasted.  A year and a day later on November 14th, 2010 (which happens to also be both of our birthdays), we got married, and on March 5th of 2011 our son Wolfgang Thomas was born.  The print my husband bought that weekend we met still hangs on our wall and probably always will (awww).

My husband, Luke, does a lot of the heavy lifting around here and frequently takes the packages to the post office, which gives me a little more time to paint.  He cuts mats, helps put things in frames, and now he puts together stretcher strips for canvas prints and various other odd jobs that require a more calloused hand than my own.  He's also tech support and rather frequently is tasked with the absolutely awful job of making our Epson fine art printers behave themselves.  Poor guy.

He is also my, "Hey, why are you doing it that way?" guy, which I both love and hate him for (why is he so much smarter than me?  Argh!).

These days I paint book covers, illustrations for magazines and books, license my work, wholesale it, run Wholesale Fantasy Art, do a little product design, paint stuff for games, do shows, and so on.  I don't teach though, and I really don't do private lessons.  Sorry.