after i lost my job as an animal control officer (that was my career at the time) i decided that i wanted to really give making art for a living a shot.
till that point i had self published a great deal of work, i had done roughly 15 comics, a semi popular website (for 1999) and a series of flash animations and interactive toys that had a small following online (even gotten in a few magazines back in the day).. but i wasnt making close to a living at all.. i was usually making enough to fund whatever i wanted to do next.
i always wanted to make art my career, but i wanted it to be on my own terms and was very bullheaded about it. i wanted it my way or no way.. so when i realized after many years that it wasnt realistic for me to make a living of my weird art.. i gave up on it and got a real job.
i knew id always still make art on the side but it wasnt till losing my job that i decided to stop being so stubborn and actually use what i was good at to attempt to make money… so put together a portfolio and started shopping my work around locally.
i would literally emails 100s of local companies (mostly magazines, newspapers and the like) asking if they needed an illustrator.. a few months into my search i got a contract job making a logo for a magazine called “your music magazine”. they liked the logo and asked if i could design covers for them, this became my primary job for the next few years (though i still had to work part time at gamestop and do other contract work on the side).
while all this was going on i still took time out of my day to work on my art projects. at this point these projects were all being done in flash and moving closer and closer towards “games”. i worked with a few programmers and was informed by a friend that a company down the street from where i lived also made games like mine, they called them “indie games”.
this company was chronic logic, i asked if they needed a part time artist and they hired me on as one. a few months later i pitched the idea for my 1st “sold” game, Gish.
in 2004 Gish was released for 20$ sold via our website and a few tiny portals. Gish made me enough money to quit my gamestop job and focus more on my own projects.
in 2005 Gish won the IGF grand prize, this was the start of the 1st big indie boom (Gish, Alien Hominid and N) and was the point where i officially started using video games as my artistic medium.
