What's the story of your skills?

I've been perusing the profiles. I see several graphic designers, web designers, artist, etc. but along with these are several that don't seem to have any correlation to chopping.

Me? I'm a programmer by education and trade. I mainly program in COBOL but I've been known to use VB and VB.Net (if you don't know what those are don't despair it doesn't matter). I have ZERO training in anything remotely resembling an artistic way (no music classes, no photography classes, no design, etc., etc., etc.).

This got me to wondering what training everyone else has had? Are you a trained graphic arts person? Or are you an average joe who just likes to chop for a hobby? Were you trained in brick-and-mortar schools or school of experimentation?

I'm a Master of Arts (law degree). Attended an Art College during some 2 months prior that. I ran away crying.

I began using Photoshop in April of 2004. Since then, I have simply experimented, read books and tutorials, listened to advice and "chopped" a lot of pictures. I have no formal training in art and/or the graphic arts, media design etc. Even so, I continue to enjoy the process of attempting to create images that might have some beauty and/or meaning. So although a lack of basic skills and formal training in art is more often than not reflected in my work, I still have fun attempting to manage color, source elements, composition, theme,color scheme etc. in a creative process that for me is intrinsically rewarding and a lot of fun.

HA!! When I read this...what kind of training...I thought it meant like what type of manners do you have or are you rude....do you have any "home training"!!

i started life as a scaffolder, then a welder, then i got into heavy
plant operating/driving, (digers,dumpers, dozers ect)
then i was an electrician, elctrician to a gang of shop fitters, eletrician
in the telecom industry, then i was a telecom installation tech,
fibre optics tech, many spells of self employment inbetween,
window cleaner, painter/decorator, gardener, doorman, barman, studd
i knew nothing about computers, art, printing or design when i got
my first computer less than 3 years ago, but i knew i wanted to
to get into computer graphics, and what big kid doesn't want to
make his own cartoons ? so i'm learning "macromedia 2004 flash MX pro" now.

Hey Tofu,

Good topic!

I have no training in the arts whatsoever. I am a programmer by trade and am using ASP.Net with C# (very similar to VB.Net, except the syntax is a bit different). I became interested in chopping on another site that had movie of the week poster contests and someone gave me a link to this site and I was hooked.

Unfortunately, lately real life has been getting in the way of my addiction, but hopefully I'll have some time to do some more chopping soon. It's good to see those here who are doing well and are not graphic artists by nature!

I run computerized macining centers by trade...a machinist. But got into graphics as a hobby and still is just a hobby. If I knew I could make money at this I'd give it a try but just way to many good graphic designers. When I got my first computer many years ago it had corel photo paint on it. The computer was a state of the art 286 with a 40mb hard drive and a screaming 1 mb of ran. Most of my time was waiting for the thing to render. Think im showing my age here cause the computer really was state of the art when I bought it....ugh im old!!!

I'm training to be a cage fighter.

im totaly faling college about to switch to be a multimedia major ..

No formal design/art training.

I started with a graphic design class that included photoshop 1.0 my junior year of H.S. back in 1990, which lead to my love of everything graphic design. WOW has this program changed since then. I would chop my friends heads into famous pictures for fun..... then I done went to college, at first I wanted to be a History Teacher... then I decided to get lazy and went with my passion art.
I have a 2 associates degrees, 1 in art and 1 in photo/offset graphic design.... went to school for 4years to learn the trade including 2years running a 5 color Heidelburg. THAT was fun. Finished in the top 10 of my class and graduated with honours at Triton College. Now I work for a label printing company (Flexography). I hardly ever get to use my skills in photoshop other than for color correction. Thank GOD for this site, to keep my skills going... and if I werent cheap id get the Advantage package to really improve the skills.... but im happy with an hour of chopping... THERES SOME REALY BIG TALENT HERE!!!! If I hadnt found a job in my field, I would prob be working at a Kinkos somewhere, or being a stay at home daddy.

My dad teaches at a college so he got PS 7 for $30.
I started using it and just messed with pics and then took some tutorials.
Then i found PSC and ive gotten a lot better.

I never took an art class in high school. I was so sure I wanted to be an architect that I took extra drafting classes to satisfy my art/music requirement. I got into the Nw york Institute of Technology's When I got to college, I didn't have the love for architecture that I thought I did. I wanted to design homes and everything they were teaching was office buildings and bridges. I didn't know what to do, so I took all of my core classes, e.g. Science, Philosophy, Speech, Math, English and to keep my GPA up for my scholarship I took a couple of art classes because I figured I was good at drawing and with a 2 to 5 male to female ratio (as opposed to a 10 to 1 at the school of architecture) it was a good way to meet chicks (plus I heard a rumor that they used NUDE models!). After a few weeks into my first semester taking art classes, I was as good as may of my classmates who had taken nothing but art all through high school. After a year or two I was as good or better than most of my professors at drawing and painting. I fell in love with art and became an artist. I wanted to become a painter, but my father was worried that I would end up living in Central Park drawing people for beer money so I had to choose between photography and computer graphics as a major. I hated the smell of fixer so I went into computer animation. We used Amiga computers my first taste of a photoshop like program was D-Paint. We also got brand new state of the art Silicon Graphics Systems to use. I had to take a television production course as a requirement and met several ex-architecture now communications major friends and loved that to so much that I took TV2 and 3 and 3 Film classes and basically had a communications minor, if my school had offered one. I graduated cum laude with BFA in Fine Art / Computer Graphics with 165 credits. When I graduated I had 3 choices. Move to California and do C.G. work for movies, move to Florida and do C.G. work for Disnay or Pixar, or stay in NY and become a desktop publisher. I chose to stay home, I bought myself a Power Mac 7200 and took a class in QuarkXpress and self taught myself Photoshop 2. I got a job designing bicycle decals for Ross Bicycles and self taught myself Adobe Illustrator. I worked there for a year and a half and moved on to work as a pre-press production artist at a Flexographic Printer, where I've been for the past 8 years. It's good work and I excel at it, but it is not creative at all and my only Photoshop work is in the form of color correction, or scanning in and recreating a logo. I still paint and draw for fun, and have even sold a few paintings, but I don't have the time or the spact to do it as often as I would like. Photoshop is a lot more easier to clean up and put away when I am done and has become my main creative outsource. Thanks for taking the time to read this... I guess I like to write too,

mere_artist a fellow artist in Flexography! I too was self taught in Illustrator (since thats what they use here almost 100% of the time) mostly I do Milk Jug Labels (EFFING BORING)

hey shaman, fellow flexographer

we do mostly pharmaceutical and candle labels here. Mostly Illustrator here too, but I output everything through QuarkXpress. Speaking of Illustrator, are all those little "website design toys" getting to be a headache for you too? Hard edges, trapping issues, I'd be a happy camper if they threw away both the transparency and the apperance pallettes! Oh well, before I was in the printing industry I used to design things with 57 pantone colors and RGB photoshop images so I guess it's just a karma thing now.

-bill