I’m Steve and I’ve been trying to make art/craft in all forms since I was little. Alongside various sport, it has been a constant in a much changing life. I have painted, drawn, used most printing techniques, sculpted, made posters, drawn cartoons, made furniture, designed made and painted stage sets, painted murals, landscaped gardens, made animated images and who knows what else. I keep trying and sometimes I am more pleased than others with what I’ve produced by the time I get to the point where I am just going to make it worse.
Alongside that I have also been involved with computers since the 1960’s. I have always been the person who can be given the most technical problem to solve but I was very pleased when someone said of me that I was also the person who could talk to any person at any level of an organisation and explain how things worked and how to use them best.
When home computers came along, I bought one to explore and to get my children used to them. I wrote and amended graphic computer games for them. Being a cruel person, I made them do arithmetic tests scaled to their age to get into the games. All the neighbourhood kids came round.
In 2003/4 Wayne and I went to New Zealand and walked the Milford Track. Each day I walked of ahead and then picked a spot and sat and sketched. People came along and looked at what I’d done and chatted. I’d been playing with my own website for years and after the walk I put all the sketches up there and everyone, from all over the world, who’d done the walk knew where they were and could look at them and remember the spots.
About 10 years ago Ruth bought me a Microsoft Surface, which is an iPad rival. I experimented with it but realised that other tools were often better suited to what I wanted to do. I did take it along to my eldest daughter’s birthday party to play with and ended up surrounded by kids and I gave each of them a new painting to work on in turn. Afterwards I put them all up on Facebook and they were shared around all over again. This year I put a new web page on my current website called The Fridge Door and I put those party images up there alongside all the images of kids’ art I had collected over the years. Cue a lot of sharing and relatives and friends being entertained once again.
Using computers I have put images on T-shirts, sent images to other parts of the world, put scenes on table and cup mats, sketched out designs, helped people get messages across by simplifying them into cartoon like images.
Today’s session should help you further along your journey to explore what a computer and a few apps cane do to add to your creative fun.