Digital Painting by AJ Brockman

I am excited to be able to share my journey here on Steemit. I will be blogging daily and wanted to start with a little more in-depth background on who I am and what I do. I am an award-winning artist that truly has a passion for art, design and all things that are awesome. I also have SMA (Spinal Muscular Atrophy), a progressive neuromuscular disease, and have been wheelchair-bound since age two. I view myself as being "differently abled" rather than "disabled" and I live life to the fullest every day.

As a kid, I would paint and draw traditionally when I had the use of my hands. As I got older and my disease progressed I turned to a computer in order to still create. I quickly became an expert in Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter. I went to art school and graduated valedictorian with a bachelor of fine arts degree. Next, getting hired by a former professor, I joined the corporate world as a commercial graphic designer creating websites and logos. Although the money was awesome, this quickly became a soul-sucking nightmare dealing with clients that thought they had a better artistic vision then I and just wanted the design to "pop more", Regardless of good typography or color theory. After three years of this, I quit to pursue my own artwork and digital painting full-time.

I consider myself an old soul and that carries through to my work. Using life experiences, my interests, and many other forms of inspiration, I create. My technique is a hybrid of Impressionism and Realism. I use reference photography to get my proportions correct, but everything I do is a unique composition. It is an extremely time-consuming process and I do hours of research on my subject matter before I ever open the canvas. Every brushstroke is created by moving my computer mouse and individually selecting each color. For those of you that are not familiar with digital painting, the easiest way to illustrate what I do is to follow my creative process from beginning to end as demonstrated in this video below.

I have since moved on from creating art full-time to owning an art gallery, craft beer bar, music venue, and establishing an entire arts district in South Florida. Future blogs will elaborate on all of that but I will be posting some of my art over the next few weeks and wanted all of you to have a bit of a background as to how it was created.

Thank you for reading and please consider upvoting this post, following me, and leaving a comment. The steemit community means the world to me and I look forward to posting daily content with all of you.