I grew up among the oak trees and rolling hills of Central California. I remember long, hot summer days spent exploring the neighborhood and growing flowers and vegetables in our backyard.

I never really thought of myself as an "artist" (I can't draw or paint to save my life), but my family owned a picture framing and art gallery business. I would spend most afternoons helping at the shop, every day seeing new and more beautiful work by artists such as Scott Gufstafson, Bev Doolittle, Charles Wysocki and Art Wolfe. The mesmerizing colors and details of their artwork were inspiring, but I didn't yet know what to do with that inspiration.

Then in 1993 I was introduced to a computer game called Myst, a ground-breaking mixture of puzzles, story, and stunning imagery. I was inexplicably drawn to this game, and the sequels that would follow. There was something so incredible about creating worlds from scratch, building an image from lines of computer code and photographs of various rust and stone textures.

I remember seeing one scene in the second of the series (Riven) that shows a blue lagoon, strewn with plants and rough stones. A green and blue sea stretches off into the distance, framed by wind-blown clouds. That was the moment I knew I wanted to create images like that, ones that mix reality with fantasy to craft new worlds and new ways of looking at the ordinary.

I took a web design class in high school, the closest class offered for the direction I was being pulled in. After high school, I spent two years at Cuesta College, in San Luis Obispo, working on general education, and delving into the world of web design. In this field I discovered a combination of computer programming and graphic design, something that was very close to what I found intriguing about the Myst games.

After that, I was off to Santa Barbara's School of Media Arts (SOMA). I earned two AA degrees, one in Graphic Design and one in Media Arts, taking classes in web development, photography, and digital imaging. It was through these classes that I discovered an interest in digital photo montage, a process I like to think of as merging and transforming several images into one piece that is more than the sum of its parts. There is a great energy that emerges when multiple images coalesce into a single, ethereal scene, as objects and landscapes are seen with new eyes and dreamlike vistas come to life.