Chasing Apples

by Matt Stevens

Art has been my passion since the coloring book. I have grown as a graphic artist since 1987. Making it beautiful, while staying within the lines.

To impressed my friends in elementary school, I was making caricatures of students and teachers. Just a good ole #2 pencil on looseleaf paper. Mrs. Hill, my 2nd grade teacher, brought in a device one day. This device made stinky blue carbon copies. Our assignment was to make a flyer that would discourage people from littering. My headline was "Don Not Liter! Eat Candy Wrappers!. The drawing was of a boy putting a wrapper in his mouth and throwing his candy in the trash can. LOL! My report cards were average from K to 12. Thank God I was always able to express I had some intelligence in all my art classes. I LOVED graphic arts! Making art, while using machines?! YES!!

During my studies at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, I also worked at a mom and pop print shop called Franklin's Printing. Cutting and pasting with exacto and wax. Little did I know, the box shaped mac plus I was using for typography would evolve into the most important tool of my career. With its 9 inch monochromatic screen and bulky single click mouse, I considered it nothing more than a toy. Sure enough this toy became a dream come true for graphic artist all over the globe.

I was riding on the desktop publishing wave and chasing after new technology.  Apple was progressing a bit more with each model. So In 1991 I bought my first Mac. Out of the box the Apple IIsi was boasting a huge 4MB of ram and a whopping 80 mb hard drive! That's mb for MEGAbytes! This was before Photoshop introduced "layers". I was designing ads and catalogs for and eyelet manufacturer called Stimpson, while using Aldus PageMaker and Adobe Photoshop. At this time, imaging from a mac was still unrecognized in the offset printing industry. I was anxious for Adobe to translate RGB to CMYK so I could start retouching for print.

This finally happened while I was working at South Florida's "high end" separation house, GraphTec . Mostly running on Scitex machinery for assembling and retouching. The scitex machine for retouching was called "The Blaze". It had it's own room and was operated by only the best. GraphTec was suddenly converting it all over to the Macintosh enviroment. Not only did I get my chance to retouch for print, I learned some amazing imaging technics from seasoned veterans. Instead of learning "the Blaze", I trained them to work on a mac.

I've been blessed with many mentors in the design to print & online industries over my career. We have work on some very exciting projects together. I am thankful for the skills I've gained as a graphic artist, producing many award winner pieces. But most thankful for the relationships that developed while making it art with amazing designers like Tim Ravenna. "...is it art yet?"

Everyday is a chance to find something unexpected that God is bringing my way.  Maybe it's some new way that challenges and expands my abilities. Or it could be someone to encourage and inspire. Each day has it's adventure! Now is the time to embrace it! "Now" is all we really have! Let's do this thing!

Aloha!!