Tim Simmons
I was born on July 25, 1963 in West Memphis, Arkansas. I started painting sometime around 1985 after watching Bill Alexander and Bob Ross on TV. I was finishing college and in 1987 I graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science. I worked full-time at various jobs and rarely painted. I spent almost all of my spare time on music and in 1994 I release my first and only guitar CD, "Eternal Dream". During this time I was hired as a computer programmer at FedEx (back then it was known as Federal Express). I won many awards during my five year tenure at FedEx. During this time, I was still dabbling with oil painting the Bob Ross way. After five years with FedEx, I quit to pursue a career in music. I began teaching guitar and doing consulting work as a means of income. I created two video soundtracks for the Army Corps of Engineers as well as a children's website. Unfortunately, I managed to injure six of my fingers and after about two years I was forced to give up playing the guitar and using those fingertips completely. Two and a half decades of guitar playing suddenly came to a screeching halt. A few years before this timeframe, sometime around 1995, I had visited a friend's house and checked out a neat device known as an airbrush. I had never actually seen one in person and was simply fascinated. I guess I knew from that point onward that I was hooked on the airbrush even though I would only come to use it a handful of times in the next nine years. I ordered my own airbrush, a Vega 2000, some Createx paint, a small air compressor and began making big messes on posterboard. My first attempts were, of course, disastrous and even if I had any pictures of my first attempts I'd be too embarrassed to post them here! I improved with time and practice but from 1995 to about 2003 I probably had not painted ten paintings with the airbrush. The reason is that I was still working full-time at FedEx and I was still doing the Bill Alexander/Bob Ross oil paintings about once a month. The urge to get serious about airbrushing, and art in general, hit me sometime late in 2003. Up to this point, I had not painted one portrait in my life but I made some decisions that took my results to a new level. For starters, I decided to get a new airbrush and compressor. I did some research and finally decided to get an Iwata airbrush. The HP-SB is a finely-tuned instrument, giving me a much smoother spray and more detail than my previous airbrush could muster. I also changed to ComArt paint which gave me more consistent results and less clogging of the airbrush. The third decision was to order some instructional videos where I could see firsthand how the professionals do it. Finally, instead of painting in my garage as I had done for years, I decided to turn my last spare bedroom into my art studio (spare bedroom number one was actually the music studio). No more mosquitoes. No more heat stroke. No more putting off painting because of the humidity or cold. I could now paint 24 hours a day, seven days a week in my own art studio. Over the years, I have won several awards in local and regional art shows. Read a few of my thoughts on art in "What Is Art?".