Stills - Background [ecarlsen.com]

Design - Background

My work in design, specifically artwork and graphic design, started in early childhood when I was always doodling and drawing cartoons. At every orchestra concert I attended as a kid I would take the printed program and cover it with drawings (a habit that continues to this day), whether with characters or architecture or small scenes or even just random shapes to fill the space. I also wrote and illustrated several short stories which my parents helped me "publish"; some were spiral bound with plastic while others were assembled on photo album pages.

I continued to develop this interest through many art classes in high school, and then my college New Media courses began introducing me into all of the professional illustration, design, and publishing tools such as Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. Suddenly I could take these doodles and designs that I'd been hammering out with pencils, pens and markers and start to migrate them into electronic media.

Though New Media provides many new creative possibilities and allows for near perfection, I try and always start design projects with a pen or pencil and a piece of paper, because that's where it all started.

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