OK not sure why anyone would really want to know about me, but what the heck.

I wish I could say that I'm a disciplined prolific artist who started drawing as soon as I could hold a pencil in my cherubically chubby little fingers. But that wouldn't be true, the first thing I remember drawing was these strange geometric robots in my first year of high school while living with my mother on the coast of Maine. That year I spent a lot of time on my own off in our little house in the woods and I guess I picked up a pencil to stave off the boredom. But all through high school I became more and more interested in art until I graduated and decided to go to art school.

In Art school I excelled in the use of the airbrush and made some money doing retouching of photos. Little did I know at the time that a little known new program called Photoshop would make retouching by hand a dead art in only a few short years.

After art school that infamous lack of discipline that I mentioned earlier, descended in full force. And I drifted from job to job for the most part in picture framing, ( though I did a stint as a perfume blender and running a mobile catering business ) and while I became quite accomplished at Framing and restoration of artwork, I produced very little of my own other then the odd frelance job that fell into my lap.

Somewhere in there I got interested in Stunt Kites (two or four line controllable kites) and developed a process for applying dyes through an airbrush to the Ripstop Nylon Material that the kites are made of. I created and sold a number of pieces of aerial art. and to my knowledge am the only person in the stunt kite industry who has used that process. I am not currently doing those kites (as a large amount of well ventilated space is needed for this process which I don't currently possess.) But I hope to get back to it eventually.

I have also always had a love of carpentry and have produced a few interesting pieces through the years.

All this while a new phenomenon was creeping up that I had very little interest in, after all I was a "Fine Artist". this enigma was the personal computer. Now I was aware of PCs from their inception. My step brother had one of the early commodore 64s. I remember playing around with the original text based games. (" You enter a long corridor at the end do you go Right or Left?") and trying to create a picture with strings of ones and zeros. But this wasn't the tool for me. It held no real interest. Years later my sister started using a Mac for graphic design and I noodled around with photoshop and illustrator, I recall she had Painter and Bryce but painter was so rudimentary that it paled compared to my precious airbrushes. And bryce was this strange little program that was supposed to spit out little landscapes though the controls were minimal and I never had the patience to wait the days it took to render the images. I abandoned the thought of the computer as a serious artists tool. This was the period when the internet first started gaining momentum, and I did find that intriguing, though I had no idea what it was good for.

In 1997 I moved to Florida to run a skate shop my brother had started. At the time he had hired a web design outfit to build a website for the business. The site was frankly a piece of crap. a few plain white pages of tables listing products with no images or imagination. I immediately stated that I could do better, it didn't stop me that I had never coded anything in my life. And didn't even have the foggiest idea how to write a single line of html, I knew I couldn't do worse then the schlock that had been foisted on my brother. So on the spare computer in the back of my store I began to learn to code HTML. I hand coded that whole first site by referring to HTML for Dummies.

It wasn't long before I had to deal with graphics and photos for the site and it was a revelation to me how far and how powerful computer graphics had evolved. While I was still working in oils and watercolors as well as my airbrushes these new tools called to me. So while continued doing websites both for my business and eventually others I started to get into doing artwork on the computer and eventually stumbled on Poser and Bryce and my love of 3d graphics began. But not only did the new forms of artwork interest me but the great communities that have sprung up around it, this is something I had sorely missed in my art, a true sense of community.

For the past few years I have been making my living actually producing and selling models for Poser and now DAZ|Studio.

William Dupré 7/12/05

contact me at : Will(at)willsmind(dot)com