It's been 11 years already

My graphic design journey started in a high school photography class. I was less than a year away from graduating. I was in an art class with several of my friends and it was our last year of high school. The teacher was a sweet older lady who was passionate about art. Too bad she had a class full of crazy teenagers hell-bent on making things as chaotic as possible. Thankfully I was well behaved and actually took the time to focus on the art assignments we were given.

At the time I was shooting with my very first camera, a tiny little 8MP Canon Powershot SD1100. I wasn't able to do anything spectacular with that device, but it did allow me to find out that I had a natural eye for framing a proper photo. It was in this class that we were introduced to Photoshop.

My teacher always was very supportive of my work and constantly told me that I was an artist at heart. Never once in my life had I been told that before, until I turned 18, and was stuck inside of this classroom. It was something totally unheard of for me. All of my life I was an athlete, gamer, and jokester. Never an artist. I was intrigued by being good at something brand new, so I decided to pursue it further and see how good I really was, despite nearly everyone in my class claiming art was not cool.

I found a cracked version of Photoshop online for free and became obsessed with looking up tutorials online. I would spend hours daily trying to figure out basic the basic functions of Photoshop. I was pretty bad at first but eventually started figuring some things out. This Wiz Khalifa design was the first thing I ever completed outside of school's basic photo editing.

I was so proud of what I had done, but when I look at it now it is far from perfect in my eyes. I had at least figured out how to cut out people from the background, download custom fonts, blend textures/colors, and rip .pngs from google. I was on to something and was having a blast getting to be creative finally.

Right around this same time, I discovered my love for partying for the first time, the summer before I started college. I began drinking alcohol and smoking weed like many of my favorite hip-hop artists. I wanted to have fun more than be productive and find success. This led me to major in fine arts in college, I thought it would be easier and allow me to party more. Plus I was loving this whole graphic design thing.

I lasted less than two years in college. I didn't even make it to the graphic design courses, I was still just doing basic art classes which I didn't really enjoy. Throughout all of this time, I was still designing daily in my free time and absorbing as much knowledge as I could. I can say that I am 100% self-taught, literally, nobody has ever been there with me to teach me anything in person. Videos online and experimentation have shown me everything that I know now. The fact that I have so many shortcuts memorized by heart is pretty satisfying.

I am so thankful that I stuck with graphic design and allowed it to become one of my many passions. I began by focusing on the custom cover art for my favorite hip hop songs, but my skills have expanded far beyond that now. My favorite thing at the moment is creating custom thumbnails for all of my posts on Hive. I am drawn to movies, music, books, etc by the artwork that represents them. It doesn't 100% sell me, but it is one of the first things to capture my attention always. That is why I spend so much time on my thumbnails because I know that is a great way to get people to glance at what you've created.

I think I am far from a master of graphic design still, but I am confident in my skills and use them daily. I truly have to be thankful for that poor art teacher back in high school. She is the first person in my life to tell me that I had a unique skill to be creative. I believed her and now think what she said is more true than ever. Creating things is one of my favorite hobbies in this world. I am obsessed with unleashing all that lies within my soul to the world. I'm lucky as can be to have such an awesome place to share all of my work on Hive.

I thank you tremendously for supporting my creative ventures. If you enjoyed reading this story, leave a comment and let me know.