About the cat that runs this site........
As much as I generally dislike these bio pages I figure it probably would be nice to let people get to know the person lurking behind all the furry characters on this page.
Yes that's me looking grumpy, I hate taking photos and believe it or not this was the most neutral one I have;) I've since lost the glasses along with quite a bit of hair, but you get the idea.
(Kese cira. 1977?) As you can see I've always enjoyed drawing animal characters and was into "furry fandom" before I knew there was a name for it. My earliest influences are films such as "Watership Down" and cartoons like "Tom and Jerry" and I would spend hours drawing small comic stories involving talking animals and cartoon violence.
While in high school I took a couple of commercial illustration course(having been booted out of "Fine Arts" for you guessed it, drawing animal characters, usually cartoons) and while I'm sure these classes may have been helpful, I didn't pay much attention to them and spent most of my high school years avoiding actually being there. How I graduated in time and with high marks is a testimony to my abilities under pressure.:P
After graduating high school I applied to "The School of Visual Arts" in Manhattan(I'm a native New Yawker) and was to my surprise accepted. However, the tuition proved to be more than either I or my already financially stressed mother could handle. I opted out of art school and applied myself to a more "realistic" career goal(read: office lackey) I pretty much gave up doing art for the next five years or so.
That is until around 1995 or so when I bought my first computer and hooked up to the Internet. I was a fan of the film "The Lion King" and promptly began looking for TLK sites on the web. What I found was the "Unofficial TLK Archive" run by Brian Tiemann, a young engineering student from California. I began reading a fan fiction story he wrote called "The Pride" and just for fun doing some sketches of scenes and characters from the story(these can be seen in the archive) I e-mailed these drawings to Brian and was very happy to find out he enjoyed them. From there on in Brian was a source of encouragement(whether he knows it or not) for me to pick up a pencil again.
I soon found Yerf(or SCFA as it was called then) and discovered that there were other people that enjoyed animal characters and that there was a wealth of material to be found on the subject. Furry was nothing new to me and it was nice to find out that so many people are into the same thing. It's been a couple of interesting years relearning everything that slipped away during my five years away from art, hopefully I'll get it right soon;)
So, that's my story in a nutshell. Other miscellaneous junk about me...I'm 26, soon to be married, have two cats, two chameleon and am a rabid fisherman, er woman.
Beware of the coatis!
