I'm Michael Hartmann. I've been an artist my whole life. As soon as I could hold a pencil, I was drawing. For most people, drawing is their first way of communicating but as they grow older and verbal skills catch up, they draw less and less. I'm the other way. Though I can be very verbose, I still love to draw. When creating a new illustration or print, drawing is still my favorite part of the process.
My art education started early on. My Mom signed me up for drawing classes at a local art shop when I was 9 years old, but I was already ahead of the adult teaching the classes and soon moved on. I took art and drafting classes all thru high school. Encouraged by my Dad, I would persue engineering when I entered college but added more and more art classes to my schedule, including painting, photography and design. After graduating I would take airbrushing classes with master instructors and focus on hyper realism (realistic carictures) and photo realism.
Almost 10 years after graduating, I started working professionally as an animator, illustrator, designer and developer for a toy company. There I would get a heavy dose of web development and design and multi-media creation. From there I would work at different companies that would give me the chance to be invovled with some amazing organizations in my career including, AT&T, Anhueser Busch, Cartoon Network, Disney, Energizer, Hostess, Lucas Film, Metlife, Microsoft, Nickelodeon, Purina, Warner Brothers and many more.
I'm a lifetime movie geek and love monster movies, comic books, video games, anime, Legos and heavy metal. I have also been playing guitar for over 30 years. Like drawing, I try and play guitar everyday. Playing music is a great creative release and being a player has also made me a fan of the art and design of the guitar. So much so I have a new site dedicated just to my guitar creations, www.vctrgtr.com
I am blessed to have two incredible daughters and a wonderful, loving wife that are my amazing support team, along with our dogs, Jake and Luna.
You can reach me through my social media pages or directly at mojomann@gmail.com