From the time I could hold a crayon, I was drawing. Well, probably scribbling, but I was always fascinated by creating something out of nothing. My earliest memory is from when I was around 6 years old. I drew a pencil sketch of my grandfather, and my mother took it, showing it to everyone. I remember her saying it looked just like him. It is possible that it was a stick figure, but that memory of my early interest in drawing stuck with me.

My favorite subject was interiors. I would sit and draw the complete room I was in. I was very interested in the details. I discovered that I could leave the room and still have a vivid memory of it, allowing me to recreate the space in fine detail, even when I wasn't in the space.

After rooms and architecture, I moved on to drawing people and cars. I was the kid in school who had sketches of everything on the sidebars of my paper tablets. It was never anything Gothic, or gory (skulls and blood); it was always something I saw while walking to school, or something I saw in the room.

The hobby turned into a career in the late 90s. We lived in a house that my parents had designed with the help of a local architect. It was beautiful on paper, but failed miserably in reality, and my parents had to live with it or spend thousands to change it. I worked construction through high school, and sketched every project, from 2D drawings, so the client could see what we were building before we swung a hammer. The builder I worked with loved it because their clients loved it for it.

After high school, I attended college to study architecture. I was a dropout because it wasn't what I thought it would be; there was very little art about it. We were given spaces to design, with very controlled parameters, and drew lines on paper. I wanted to draw the room with pencil, markers, and watercolors. I then attended a technical school to learn CAD, which was also dull. I knew that I could build boxes on the screen, which I would print out and use for perspective and lighting.

After college, I worked for the town of Downers Grove as a CAD Draftsman, and then for Chicago's gas company as a CAD manager. Try to master every aspect of the digital world. I learned 3D CAD and started working for architects and developers. From Hotels, motels, to high-rises. To schools, and of course, houses.

Thirty-plus years later, I am still creating architectural renderings, product renderings, and animations. I am a full-time architectural illustrator, helping architects, builders, developers, and, more importantly, home owners who are spending their life's savings to build their dream house, like my parents, which sparks my creative fire.