I started out my career in the arts as an embroidery and traditional fine artist painting in oil an acrylic. In the photos of my studio up above you can see some of my floral paintings. I have also been a computer geek for a long time! like when Dos 2.0 was groovy and new and monitors displayed in either green or gray monochrome.When digital cameras and Photoshop became real tools, I added photography to my professional portfolio. Eventually the love of creating art and the passion for computers collided and I decided to get a degree in digital graphic design. That is when I discovered a passion for illustration. There are too many wonderful art mediums, supplies, and found objects needing to be turned into art to limit myself. Most of my current work is mixed media.

I am an illustrator, graphic designer, artist, photographer, mom, wife, homeschool teacher, homemaker, avid lover of cooking and eating food, writer of both nonfiction and fiction with a penchant toward science fiction, fantasy, and horror, occasional crafter with advanced skills I am not shy about, and a woman not afraid to be feminine as long as I can still be warm and comfortable at the same time.

I have been selling my art and design work online since going online meant dialing up to Compuserve on my 28k modem (I had a 14k modem before that, and a 9600 baud modem way before that, but did not start selling online until the super high speed 28k days). .

Art is part of who I am. I am a woman, a mom, a wife, a teacher, and an artist. It is these separate rolls that come together to create the whole of who I am. My goal in all of these roles is to express my view of the universe in a unique style. If my role as a mother and teacher is to express the reality of the universe as I see it to my children, then my role as an artist is to express the universe as I see it in my imagination. I can live in a world of endless bold color with purple skies and magnificently large flowers, or see the entire universe in a single plane of view, when I look at it through my imagination. With my paints and my camera I strive to show the universe of my imagination to eyes other than my own.

My Studio

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Terry McClary was born and raised in Los Angeles County, in Southern California, and now lives in Portland, OR, amid majestic forests, trees, and rivers. She has majored in biology, education, history, and graphic design in college. She began drawing in graphite as a teenager obsessed both with the exquisite detail and form of flowers. In college that obsession turned to graphite drawings and watercolor paintings of sea creatures, earning praise from artists for the quality of the work and biologists for the accurate detail. Over the years her work has grown both looser and more emotional, but still retaining a special eye for the details that matter. Her work has been shown in galleries in both California and Oregon, with many pieces now residing in private collections internationally.

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