I'm not a professional artist.

My name is Teresa, and I'm a master's student in statistics and stochastic modeling at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My money comes from being a teaching assistant to undergraduate classes there; I usually have anywhere between 60 and 80 undergraduates a quarter who are "mine".

I don't do art for money. I'm delighted if folks want to buy prints, but that's not why I make art. I make art because I want to make things I think are beautiful.

Probably the closest I've ever come to being a professional artist was in 2006-2007, when I was the semi-official photographer for the Department of Mathematics & Statistics and for Phi Kappa Phi at CSU Chico. Photography is perhaps my "best" medium in general, in that I come closest to producing the kind of things I want to produce in that medium.

The fact that I don't make money off my art doesn't keep me from trying to improve. I regularly attend live painting tutorials with =le-mec, I hang out in #DigitalMedia and #DigiBrush and listen to the wisdom there, and I take technical criticism on my work very seriously.

It's just not my primary or even secondary activity in life. During a busy quarter, I may produce absolutely no paintings. I may not even pick up a pencil for any purpose other than statistical derivations. So sometimes it feels like my art creeps ahead at a snail's pace. That's okay---I've accepted that.

One result of being completely aprofessional in my art is that I don't really have any need to do "saleable" things. I can produce fanart and fanfiction without feeling at all bad about it---because I have no desire to ever use those skills professionally. As a result, a lot of my art and writing is in at least some way connected to a fandom or a game or something similar---especially my writing.

Yup. Especially my writing. What probably most of my watchers here on deviantART don't know is that I have three epic-length fanfics in progress, each from a different fandom. As of last count, I think I've written over 400,000 words in the last two years, the vast majority by hand. I have no intention of posting those on deviantART, mostly because I dislike the format for writing here; I prefer to only post short stories/poems on here. Feel free to drop me a comment if you're curious and want the link(s), though

There's a lot of other things I could write about---I'm Lutheran, I'm a vegetarian, I like cats, I dislike snails---but I think that's enough for now.

May the Force be with you---always.