My name's Ben, I'm 38, born in New York, grew up mostly near West Palm Beach Florida, and now live near Provo, Utah. I'm married 12 years now, got 4 kids from 10yrs to 6 months, and I love cars.
I started drawing cars around age 12 and by high school was pretty confident with my skills. I hated regular classes and barely passed but loved art and always got A's there. I had an art teacher my junior year that put a stop to me drawing cars (which I did for evey project
) because as she said, "there's no money in automotive art". I was pretty discouragerd and pretty much lost interest in drawing. Drag racing replaced it as my hobby and by age 21 I had built an 11 sec Nova that was my daily driver. At age 25 I pulled my head out and moved to Utah for college. I attended graphic design classes at the junior college anticipating transferring to BYU once I got my GPA up. The head of the department saw some of my older car art. After talking about it she realized my passion for cars and my mechanical abilities and suggested I get into the Industrial Design/Transportation Design program over at BYU. I never heard of Industrial Design and checked into it. I transferred, joined the program, and was stoked about drawing cars again. By graduation time I think the folks from GM, Ford, & Honda that worked with us on projects were pretty much sick of my retro based designs. I realized I had little interest in designing new cars and fresh out of school I got a job doing graphic design in Utah. I've been doing old car art on the side since then as well and am now trying to make it a full time gig.
I started doing my art by hand, but now pretty much everything is Illustrator and Photoshop. I also like doing fine art working with pencil and watercolor but can't find much time to do it anymore. I also try to find time to work on my car projects now and again. I still have the Nova, am slowly building a G-machine out of a 79 Cutlass wagon, and also have a restomod Nova collecting dust. I've worked most of my life in auto parts stores, speed shops, tire stores and in a shop restoring muscle cars. Eventually I'd like to open a small resto/hot rod shop and start building some of my own designs.
Here's a face with a name...