i have decided i will give a little intro here about myself and what some of my intentions are on this account.

my name is jake i am currently 21. ive always been interested and have always attempted artwork at least as far back as i can remember. to back that statement up my mom has saved notes from a preschool teacher stating that unlike the other kids that age i would color parts of pages given to students to color that the other kids paid no attention to and that i also stayed in the lines. maybe not a big deal but i would say it all starts somewhere it just is tough to remember exact points when the memories of things so early in the stages of ones development are so cloudy or not recallable. anyways, through the stages of my life i spent most of time attempting to draw with plain old graphite on cheap paper or doodling in notebooks etc. had a few classes doing some painting and colored pencils but mostly i still stuck to the number 2's(pencils you sicko!). i always seemed to be ahead or at least on level with all artists in highschool (and i didnt see much good artwork at the schools i attended so i may have only been mediocre but i seemed to have a big head about my abilities in those days) upon finishing highschool i began drawing classes and other art classes at the college level and learned in overwhelming amount of things including that all the way up through highschool almost every bit of teaching i had recieved was bullshit (which was ok because i kinda just did my own thing anyways but isnt it great that the public school system can pay someone to waste your time?) i made major artistic improvements durring a few semesters in the art dept. of the college and was working towards an associates in illustration. mostly i was still sticking to traditional media with some exception to spending many hours of my weeks picking up skills and techniques in photoshop(which i also spent every year taking classes about in highschool). photoshop had incorporated into my being an interest in the digital realm of art but for the most part all i had been producing up until this point were sub-par photomanipulations and photocollages. occasionally i would doodle things up in photoshop but nothing too great as i was not too fond of drawing and painting with a mouse. somewhere in my pursuit of attaining a greater understanding in the world of visual communication i decided i had a terrible time finding useable refference photos and photos that could be used for my photoshop work. i also began to realize that using found images also contains problematic issues relating to copyright so i decided i would buy a, what i thought at the time would be a nice and seemingly expensive, point and shoot digital camera. the camera was usefull for some of my needs and was able to give me new creative abilities and freedoms i'd not had. however it didnt take me long to realize this new tool i had wasnt allowing me some of the control i desired so working two jobs and saving money i aquired a d70 and the semester of school immediately following this purchase i began photography classes at the college along with other drawing and traditional medium related classes. this was a landmark in my development as a visual communicater. illustration, while having qualities and characteristics was becoming to seem like less of a good idea due to certain demands and requirements it would take to make it a logical career choice and photography being a medium which offers more career choices and a variety of employment levels quickly became the focus of my education. my photography skills quickly improved and my understanding of the tools i had to work with increased dramatically with the first class or two. my photoshopping also dramatically improved as well as i began to understand some of the concepts that photographers must learn relating to the quality and look of an image. i have now taken about 6 photography courses and have had 3 photoshop classes(on the college level its more like 6 if the classes which i used it in highschool count). i still have a very enthusiastic interest in illustration and plan to do much more learning in that realm of the art world and i experiment as much and as often as i can to incorporate it into things i do with photography. photography just is the current priority and i am relatively close to having my associates with photography as my emphasis.

with all of that having been said i have been using deviantart for a couple years and it has aided my growth and my standards for quality a great deal and it has also inflicted some bad habbits here 'n' there but overall has been a benefit. my first account got filled up with randomness and mostly it was work which i now would simply call garbage. i grew sick of the screen name which i had hastily used just to aquire an account and get started so i decided it was time for an update and a change and my account was created. that account has been my regularly used account and shows a wide range of progress but become primarily filled up with photography. i dont think of it as a problem as that is what ive spent most of my time doing for the last year and a half or 2 years but the work done in other mediums in that account seems overwhelmingly scarce and mostly ignored which was the main factor that instigated the creation of this account. i am going to seperate photography and photo manipulation (or leave it where its at) from the other art in my gallery which will be resubmitted here. unlike the previous accounts this account will have a limit placed on the number of things i allow to reside in the gallery at any time. hopefully this will be less cluttered and as time goes on the quality in this gallery will become higher and higher. it will also help me lessen the clutter of the other gallery and might make each gallery feel more unified.

while i like having "friends" and giving watches, since this will be the account i check less often and for the most part will just be a secondary "side project" of sorts if you will, i wont be giving watches and fav's on this account if you give me one here and dont get a response of any kind that is why. please dont be offended, i do appreciate all feedback, fav's, and watches. if you'd like to communicate with me it might work better for you to send notes or comments that dont belong to specific pieces to ~neurophonix or to my myspace account [link]

if you read all of this or even just some of it i appreciate the time you've spent. i didnt realize this was going to turn into a novel when i started typing it out, so kudos to you for even glancing at it! if something about this has provoked a thought in you, a feeling or any sort of inspiration i would certainly love to know about it. if it leaves you in a state of having an inquisitive mind then dont hesitate to ask any and all questions that you have, i love it when people take an interest in me or my work.