I was born on the east side of the Cascade Foothills on a rainy Saturday morning, November 14th, 1987. I forget to update this thing for years at a time so let's just say I'm in my 20's, and maybe when I turn 30 I'll remember to update it. And yes, I do remember the rain that morning, the warm autumn sunlight and the sound of my mother's voice. I remember much of my first few years, too, mostly the toys I had and my first attempt at catching a faerie.

I don't know whether faeries are real, but I believed it back then. I had never been told any stories about faeries, but I dreamed of them all the time and spent most of my childhood in the forest trying to find one. It always seemed to me they were just out of reach, and I eventually gave up on trying to find them. When I was 11 I had very invasive spinal surgery, and for some reason after the surgery my fine dexterity seemed damaged. I was never clumsy before, but I started dropping things all the time and could no longer draw the smooth lines I was so proud of as a child. After that I was convinced there was no magic in our world and I stopped drawing.

However, when I was 16 I finished high school early and found I had a lot more free-time than I ever thought I'd have. I started messing around with Photoshop and eventually got pretty good at it. A friend convinced me that if I had a tablet I could try to draw on the computer, and it would be easy to keep editing my drawings until they looked the way I wanted them to without damaging the paper. So my grandmother bought me a tiny tablet for Christmas and I worked at that for a while until I could afford a larger tablet.

So, when I was 18 I bought myself a 9x12 intuos 3 tablet with money I had saved up from selling my prints. Immediately I noticed an improvement in my digital drawings and I have been using and abusing that tablet ever since. I gave up a long time ago on seeing a faerie, but I've learned to tap into that feeling that something is there, and have been using it to inspire my faerie paintings ever since.