I am into reinventing myself. I’ve done that many times in my life, and I continue to do this. It’s an exciting way to make my life relevant and to stay engaged in it. So who am I and how did I come to be a Photoshop artist, educator, and author?
Finding Photoshop
I came at Photoshop from a roundabout way. It was 1999 and I was operating a bakery which I had conceived, started, built, and for which I had developed recipes. It was a catering operation. I did only deliveries and mail-order, but the huge majority of my business was local.
The idea came to me that, with the internet starting to be a real thing, I could get a website and sell my cakes online. I’m a very hands-on person and decided that I could make my own site. Microsoft FrontPage to the rescue!
Included with FrontPage was a little image-editing and graphics program called Image Composer. So I made little pictures of pies and cakes to go on my site, and janeecake.com was born. (Not a thing anymore)
While I was learning how to do a site, I did travel pages, detailed my other interests, and worked with photos and… I found myself doing more and more image and web work and turning down orders for baking. In 2001, I closed the bakery and sold all the equipment.
So I eventually found Photoshop, in April of 2000 . I was using version 5.5.
Learning and Teaching
Photoshop was daunting! While I’d gotten a little bit used to some of the same sorts of tools with Image Composer, Photoshop was immensely larger and more powerful.
I joined a USENET group, an early precursor to social media. People answered my questions. I tried things and, more and more, they worked!
In the early 90’s, I had been a high school math teacher, so I’ve long had teaching in my blood. So as I learned something new and tried a new thing, I’d write it up. And that’s how my first tutorials were born. My first tutorial was actually an Image Composer tutorial for making snowflakes.
These tutorials caught on in a big way with Photoshop learners from all over the world. One of these learners began to address me in email as Graphics Goddess, so the nickname was born!
I started hosting the myJanee.com Art Challenge in February of 2001. It was a great fun thing and got many people doing photos and art that they otherwise wouldn’t do. The myJanee.community was active and life was good.
Getting out there
I kept up with the Photoshop group and kept on writing tutorials. And it was from my tutorials that I got recognized as a technical tutorial writer of high enough caliber to snag a book contract! (Books and other publications I have done to date are detailed HERE.)
More books followed, and I probably would STILL be writing for Friends of ED, had they not gone belly-up in the spring of 2003.
At the end of April, 2004, I became certified as a Goddess. Well, actually, Adobe calls it “Adobe Certified Expert.” This involved taking the hardest test of my life… and passing it! Adobe was only too happy to award me my Adobe Certified Instructor after they saw my teaching credentials.
In 2003 and 2004, I earned my title of Q&A Goddess for Digital Photography Techniques, a really fine magazine published by Future Publishing in the UK. I’m quite proud to say that I wrote for them for 17 months! I also did 3 big articles for SBS Digital Design. I had a short stint writing for NAPP. And I did some writing for Katrin Eismann’s book published in 2006.
In the meantime, I used my teaching, artistry, and writing to develop class materials for teaching Photoshop and Elements. I taught these classes for some years and I loved doing this.
Quick change of gears
So what happened? Where was I between 2006 and 2020? That’s a lot of time! I was involved in other pursuits: healthcare, interior design and building, travel, and other adventures too various and many to count!
Oh, and I have moved to three different states, bought and sold houses four times, had 4 new cars, and traveled in 6 different RV’s!
And, while we’re getting personal, I helped my late husband Michael to have a pleasant last part of his life, and, 10 years later, I remarried in 2017.
Reinventing myself once again
So I’m back now! In the past two months, I’ve added a bunch of new tutorials to my site, many new pages, and more new files.
My site is now in two chunks — my HTML part and my WordPress part. The Archives section is all the old stuff and that’s the HTML. Those pages harken back to my days of FrontPage and GoLive.
And we move on. I’ve done lots of “What Color is Your Parachute?” type soul-searching. I love teaching. I love Photoshop. And what I love to teach most is Photoshop. When I was very active with my online Photoshop classes, my Community, and my writing, that was when I was at my happiness apex of my life.
Meanwhile, I’m detailing my current sagas and struggles in my newest Blog! Join me there!
