Ok, where do I begin? at the...... yes!

I was born on Christmas day in 1970 in Cardiff, South Wales, believe it or not it was snowing.... I grew up in a medium sized town called Port Talbot, an old steelworking center with a strong working class ethic. I grew up on a large housing estate in a comfortable home. Early life was a combination of play in the great outdoors (I lived half a mile from the coast and a huge beach) and play at home with many toys (as my grandmother worked in a toy factory) and with cardboard boxes (I had a vivid imagination, to me a box was a thousand things, one of them being a box of course....)

I took a shine to artistic pursuits at an early age with the usual nursery school dabblings in painting and pencil drawing and even at that age my teachers picked me out as having a tallent. I was ok at most other things too but art in general seemed to be my strength, I had good observational skills (an eye for detail). As I went on through my primary education I came to the conclusion that I would eventually like a career in art (as for what area I hadn't got a clue).

During secondary education I also got my first introduction to computing, firstly through early games consoles. First I had a Binatone games console with pong, tennis and shooting game unit and ater through the Atari VCS. My real budding took place when the first home computers hit the UK shores with the Sinclair ZX80, ZX81 and later the ZX Spectrum. I plumbed firstly for a Dragon32, not a bad machine, with an at the time pretty massive amount of RAM, and designed and built in Wales in Port Talbot!!. But alas.. the company went bust. However, luckily my powerpack failed before they did and I asked for a refund (and got it!) and immediately ploughed the cash into a Commodore 64.

Well, this period of my life revolved around games, hey I was a kid.... And great fun it was. I also dabbled in programming and weirdly found assembly coding to be more rewarding to program in than basic. Hey you could actually do things comparable to the things you were seeing in games using assembly, instead of the slow and cruddy things you could do with basic..

So, secondary school came and went and I decided to concentrate on art, I liked programming, but I am no maths genius and so I felt my art skills were still my strongest area. At college I took only one A level, Art & Design, and a number of supplementary O levels to make up the course requirement. From there, two years later I moved on to a foundation course in Art & Design in Swansea, just down the road. It was here I found an affinity with Graphic Design.

In time I applied for a place on a Graphic Design degree course at Birmingham University, and I was accepted. During my time there computers in design education were in rudimentary use. They had a suite of apple Macs on which to learn layout and paint programs, mostly older machines, and one Apple Quadra 900, which was the only machine capable of running Photoshop 1.0 (yes, I'm that old....) but as ever computer time was at a premium. As for CG, well at home I had an Amiga 1500, and I was dabbling with Real3D, a program written by two Finish bothers if I remember correctly. It used parametric solids and was a great introduction to CG.

After leaving College my first job was at a computer systems and software manufacturer called ICL (known as Fujitsu UK these days). I moved down to Reading in Southern England and set about my task, to design and produce presentations for the companies products. These would be used at computer shows, in stores and at other venues.

The real perk of the job was I had to learn how to use PCs, sounds weird but up until that point I had only used Apples at college and Amigas at home. I also had to learn a piece of software called 3DStudio v1.0.... It was great, I found the modelling system to be a real release when compared to real 3D. By todays standards its really very poor, but for the time it had a great modeller, texture system and scaline rendering engine (it was fast!!) and at last I could produce models, textures and animations of real complexity.

To be continued.....