Matthew Winters hasn’t been short of opportunities to channel his creativity. Starting as a young child, his babysitter would fill their time together with an abundance of crafting projects. Those hours of hands-on activities allowed for his young mind to experiment and form a strong foundation for the passion he still works with today.

An especially pivotal occurrence for the young Matthew was in fifth grade. He was participating in a poster contest with the objective of creating a visual aide for a proposed tooth brush company. Just as everybody else did, Matthew began drawing. He soon realized attention was being drawn to his work. Matthew unsure of what the fuss was about continued to work diligently on his poster. However, when a few fellow classmates began coming to him to ask for help on their own drawings, he began to realize he may actually have something to offer them. Matthew went on to place third in the contest. This interaction with his peers and successful participation in the contest impacted Matthew’s thoughts of himself and his skills.

(A few months later he ended up taking third place in the entire contest.)

During Matthew’s Junior and Senior years in high school he was able to have more choice in his final classes. Matthew opted to take a fine-art class in sculpture and a technology-based art class dealing with web design and photo manipulation. The sculpture class was a success from the start- Matthew got to work with numerous mediums; he had a lot of fun during this class. For one project, he recreated a goat sculpture which was featured in a web-cam conference-call between his high school and another high school in China.

Even though Matthew was excelling in his sculpting, it was the class on web design and photo manipulation where all his passions culminated. Here he was introduced to Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop allowed Matthew to use his own imagination in conjunction with the immense power of the software to endles