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Bio

How I Got Involved with Corel Painter, Writing, Painting and Photography

By Karen Sperling

I've had some interesting career twists and turns.

I attended Ithaca College in upstate New York, where I majored in English and minored in art. My mother was an artist and I drew and painted since I was a little kid. But I also was reading and writing. And I've always taken photos. I thought I'd be a writer when I got out of college. My senior year I was the art critic for the college newspaper, combining my love of art and writing.

For the first 15 years or so after graduating from Ithaca College, I worked as everything from a reporter to editor in chief for all kinds of organizations from Gannett to Rockefeller Center. I not only wrote articles, but also took photographs that were published alongside my stories.

Around 1985 or so, I decided I wanted to be a magazine publisher, which you work your way up to through advertising sales. But I had no sales experience. I talked a friend who had a personnel agency into letting me sell for him. Three years and many ad sales job interviews later, I realized I didn't want to sell ads for a living full time. Nor did I want to work in a personnel agency, either.

In 1988 I was kind of lost. I had all this sales experience and a journalism background. What could I do with it? I decided to do something crazy and hope that everything would work out. And it did.

In the New York Times one Sunday was a want ad for a job selling memberships at a video dating service. I thought, now there's a way to meet people, so I applied and was hired. The rest, as they say, was history.

The first day the owner said, "I see you've been an editor. Would you like to start a membership newsletter for us?" I said sure. He said, "Would you like to do it in PageMaker," I said, "Sure, what's that?"

I had been hearing about desktop publishing, but had pretty much ignored it because it had to do with computers, which I knew very little about, although at the personnel agency I had learned the Wang, a word processor that was pretty common in New York City offices in the 1980's.

The owner brought me over to a Mac Plus that was sitting in the corner of the back office, launched PageMaker 2.0 and showed me how you could drag a galley of type across the screen. I was hooked. I decided to start my own newsletter publishing company.

So I quit the video dating service, bought a Mac II, named my new company The Write-Design Studio, and at first desktop published newsletters that my clients would send out to their mailing lists.

Meanwhile, I volunteered to be the editor of the Mac Street Journal, the New York Mac Users' Group newsletter, to network and get business. Little did I know what a great idea that was.

The volunteer production coordinator for the Mac Street Journal pretty soon got a staff job as Product Manager for ColorStudio at Letraset. Most people don't know what ColorStudio is, but it's photo-editing software that predates Photoshop and was written by Mark Zimmer and Tom Hedges, who were about to write a software program called Painter.

One day the Product Manager, Betsy January, asked if I had ever thought of writing software manuals. I had, in fact, after trying to get through the PageMaker manual, but hadn't done anything about it. Would I like to write a manual for her, she asked. Of course, I said. And that's how I wrote the Shapes annex manual for ColorStudio in 1989-1990.

Mark and Tom liked the job I did and brought me in to write the original Painter manuals for versions 1.0, 1.2, 2.0 and X2, the Painter 2.0 Companion and the manual for Sketcher.

The shapes technology was later included in Painter, so in fact, I've been writing about Painter since before it was Painter!

Now it was 1993 and a guy in Buffalo, NY, Peter Jevtic, who was barely 20, began posting messages in the Fractal Design forum (Fractal Design was the company that Mark and Tom formed to publish Painter) on America Online promising a newsletter containing tips for using Painter. I read the messages with interest. I thought it would be great fun to publish a magazine for and about Painter users and wished I'd thought of it.

After many months it appeared unlikely that Peter would publish his newsletter. It's not an easy thing to do, especially if you've never done it before, and it appeared Peter had gotten in over his head. But at this point I had over 15 years of journalism experience. I knew I could publish a Painter magazine.

So I sent him an e-mail one day asking if he would mind if I did a Painter magazine instead. Happy to be relieved of the burden, he gave me his blessing.

My original name for the magazine was Technique, which I decided on in December 1993. At San Francisco Macworld in January 1994 everyone congratulated me on my quick work. Lining the entrances to Moscone Center were people handing out shopping bags emblazoned with "Technique Magazine." Unfortunately or fortunately, someone had beaten me to the name.

As luck would have it, a publishing company asked me to do a Painter book right as I was getting ready to publish the first issue of the printed Artistry. They were slightly optimistic about how long it would take to write a book, and were off by about a year, and Artistry magazine was put on hold longer than I had thought it would be.

Writing the Painter book, Painter 3 Complete, was a great experience. I featured many early Painter artists and photographers. And I wrote everything, plus I did many of the book's illustrations.

I finally finished the book, but then the publisher dropped it!

A little thing called the Internet had sprung into popularity and they decided to publish Internet books instead.

All that work for nothing, it seemed.

At the time, people who knew I was working on the book thought I'd be more upset than I was.

All I thought was, good, now I can publish Artistry magazine, which is what I did, in May 1995, officially launching the first-ever Painter magazine.

Well, on the strength of that first issue of Artistry, a second publisher, MIS:Press, picked up and published Painter 3 Complete

I wrote two more Painter books--Painter 4 Complete and Painter 5 Complete. As in Painter 3 Complete, I did some of the illustrations in Painter 4 Complete and Painter 5 Complete, and many others were by other Painter artists and photographers.

I continued to publish Artistry, too, until Painter fell on hard times and MetaCreations sold it to Corel. This was around the time of Painter 7.

Artistry fell on hard times as a result, and because of Painter's uncertain future, I suspended publication of the printed version of Artistry magazine.

In 1999, I started publishing Painter tutorials in a then brand-new format, digital Adobe Acrobat .pdf files.

The concept was so new that I offered those early tutorials on CD. It wasn't until later that we all began to migrate from dial-up modems to dsl and cable and I was able to offer the .pdf's as downloads from my web site in addition to the CDs.

Then came Painter 8, which was a great version of the software once again, then Painter IX, which really shined and now Painter X, which I think is the best yet. These great versions of Painter, in addition to the proliferation of digital cameras, quick modems, great web sites and affordable archival-quality printing technologies, all add up to Painter being more popular than ever, as are my Artistry tutorials.

In 2004 I started up the first-ever Painter e-zine, Artistry Tips and Tricks. It's in Acrobat format, and I'm still writing about how to use Corel Painter, but nowadays I also cover art concepts for all of my photographer subscribers who didn't attend art school.

What's also different is that I do 99 percent of the images myself from my photographs and some contributed by others.

In 2003 I started my Artistry Painting for Photographers Retreats. Though I've been teaching Painter since day 1, my Artistry Painting for Photographers Retreats were different. I started teaching art lessons in addition to the Painter steps, which has really helped photographers to turn photos into paintings in Painter. I have photographers who go back to their studios and start selling Painter portraits right after they get back from the Artistry Painting for Photographers Retreats.

In 2001, another strange turn of events happened. I suddenly became an artist, after years of thinking of myself as a writer.

It happened when I was invited to speak about Painter at the annual Professional Photographers of America convention. Joan Sherwood, then managing editor of Photoelectronic Imaging (PEI) liked my talk and invited me to do a tutorial for her magazine about my own images. Up till then, I had written tutorials about other peoples' images. The illustrations I had done for my books were just quick examples of the brushes. However, they were illustrations, I just didn't think they "counted" for some reason.

Joan rejected my protests. "You can do it," she said.

I thought maybe she's right, and went about putting together my first real painting. My first thought was to take photos and use them as references for a painting, so on September 9, 2001, a beautiful, sunny Sunday, I walked around Melrose Avenue in Hollywood taking pictures. I was shooting film and brought it in to be developed. Date the prints were due to arrive: September 11, 2001. Yes, that's 9/11. Incredible. Although I lived in California, I am a native New Yorker, and I had worked in the World Trade Center for many years. I felt not just the full tragedy of the attack on our country, but also the loss of the nearly 3,000 who perished in the disaster.

I wound up painting "Tribute to America," in which I used red, white and blue as my color scheme and American icons like palm trees and Cadillacs as an hommage to our country.

It was the first of many paintings. In the past seven years I have been creating my own art both in Painter and with traditional media.

I've been exhibiting in group shows and selling paintings, and I've been commissioned to draw and paint portraits.

I am currently painting a series of abstracts called Magical Mystical Tours. I'm painting the art in the series strictly as art, not for Painter tutorials, which is a first for me. Created with charcoal, pastels, acrylics, oils and Painter, they are mixed media works and they are great fun to create.

I was invited to display my abstracts at Saatchi Gallery. My art was included in a group show at Monkdogz Urban Art gallery in New York's prestigious Chelsea section.

Meanwhile, I wrote, illustrated and designed my fourth Painter book, Painting for Photographers, and it's available at Amazon.

Then there's the Artistry online web site.

I've been using html since 1997, and recently learned some css, and this page is part of a complete web site overhaul and redesign that I started from scratch in July 2008, which, incidentally, is the 20th anniversary of when I got my first Macintosh and started The Write-Design Studio.

My first blog is about the web site redesign, and you can read it by clicking the blog link on the left at the top of this page.

This biography on this page has been here in one form or another since the Artistry web site went live in 1997, long before anyone was creating blogs. I think that qualifies it as one of the first blogs ever!

I think you can see now what I meant by interesting career twists and turns that I mentioned at the beginning of this little history. I've been really lucky to be in on the ground floor of so many technological advances: desktop publishing, digital publishing, digital art and the internet. And I've been lucky to be able to explore my interests including writing, painting and photography. I look forward to some more interesting career twists and turns in the future.

Did I mention I write movies?

Artistry Online ©2010 Karen Sperling/Artistry. All rights reserved. No text or images may be reproduced in any form without written permission from Karen Sperling/Artistry.