My life as an artist began in January 2012 when I first stumbled across DeviantART.com, the world’s largest art website.

It was by sheer chance that I happened to come across yuumei's incredible gallery, but it was those long hours spent in awe over the beauty of her digital artworks that inspired me to try digital art, a medium I had never even known about before.

As I explored deeper and deeper into digital art, I found myself falling in love with this medium that called to me as traditional art never had before. I adored the clarity of its brushstrokes, the vivacity of its colors, and the versatility of its infinite canvas which made me feel as though I could create anything that I desired.

Suddenly, I began to spend hours and sometimes entire days at my desk with my hands flying over my tablet as I struggled to find enough time in the day to turn the thoughts of my imagination into realities. I spent the next two years soaring through all the kinds of digital art I could get my hands on, trying everything from paintings to pixel art, and loving every second of it. Below are some of my artworks:

It was not until several months later that I realized the significance of that day, but I eventually came to understand how life-changing of a moment that was for me. For the first time, I had direction, meaning, and purpose in my life because I had discovered something crucial about myself.

But my journey did not end there. After about a year of exploring digital art, I stumbled across another fascinating discovery: web design.

The moment I laid my eyes upon the web design languages of HTML and CSS, I was completely hooked. I threw myself into trying to crack the languages that made up the web, pouring over the codes written by other web designers and tinkering with each line one by one until I could feel my understanding beginning to grow. I published my first one-page web design in October of 2013, and since then I have continued to develop and fine-tune my skills by creating themes and skins for websites such as DeviantART and Tumblr.

Here is a quick summary of some of my major accomplishments in the past 18 months:

I have designed and coded 20 free skins for DeviantART which have been installed 10,000+ times.

I have been commissioned for skins by 31 artists, and I have sold 400+ paid downloads of my themes.

3 of my designs won a Daily Deviation, an award given to only the top 30 out of 140,000 submissions made to DeviantART daily.

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I also set up my own website at simplydevio.us to serve as both a platform for selling my CSS resources as well as a playground for me to practice my coding. I now not only work with the basic design languages of HTML and CSS, but also with Javascript, jQuery, Python, and PHP to make my websites more dynamic and powerful.

And so I soon realized another fact:

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Web development allows me to mold together my love of digital art and coding, which I have come to see as two remarkably complimentary fields. There is a clear, rational logic to design just as much as there is a delicate art to programming, and I adore being able to weave together these two forms in order to build, discover, dream, and create.

I relish in the challenge of keeping up with ever-changing technology and pushing the boundaries on what can be done. Every day I strive to learn more and new build products always better than my last.

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I am an artist, a coder, and a creative imagineer, and my

passion

is
web development.

This webpage was lovingly hand-crafted over the course of two weeks using Photoshop, HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, and copious amounts of magical fairy dust.

The code required to put together this page totals at over 1000 lines, and the page sources can be viewed here for those who are curious:

• HTML (with Javascript and jQuery)
• Main CSS
• Slider CSS modified from code by Steven Wanderski

To view the artworks previewed here in full size, please visit my DeviantART gallery. To see some of the CSS resources I have coded with Javascript, please view the Resources page of my website. [Update April 2022: Link no longer exists]


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