Pamela Graphics

My first art medium was pastels. They were portable and inexpensive. I briefly tried acyrlics. The colors were bright and cheery, but they dried too fast for my level of inexperience.

When an artist friend offered an oil painting class, I explored oil painting. When my second child was born, I put the oils away. Some oil paints are poisonous, and paintings need to be left out while they dry in between session.

My next adventure in art was watercolors. I started out with the little strips that you buy for children. I could pick up a set inexpensively any time an artistic mood struck me.

After a Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival watercolor class at the University of Alaska, I invested in tube water colors and 100-lb paper which made all the difference in the quality of my paintings. My husband liked my birch tree study so much that I had it professionally framed for our anniversary.

With the blank cards made especially for watercolors, I made greeting cards for my friends.

At the same time I was learning watercolor painting, I took up sketching. I found my artist eye developing because of the keen observation required for sketching. Sketching is not only portable, but it also occupies my mind while I'm listening to a boring speech at a conference.

Some time between the oil painting and the sketching, we purchased our first computer. Try as I might, I couldn't find a program that allowed me to draw anything -- well, anything I'd want to keep.

Enter Paint Shop Pro 5. I immediately fell in love with this program. I couldn't wait to draw with it. After a few false starts, I found a tutorial on the web that got me started. I wish I could remember where it was, but I've visited so many sites since then, and I've got a different computer so my bookmarks are gone from that period in