About the Artist/Author

December 11, 2007 by Christina Wentzel

I'm an 18 year old college student at Augustana college in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. My majors are Psychology and English at the moment, though I will be dropping the English one down to a minor.

As an artist I am not incredibly experienced. Art has been a hobby of mine since fourth or fifth grade, when I started drawing horses, but I have only been seriously involved for about 3 years. My current goal with my art is to basically just keep improving and become good enough to work as a freelance artist on the side. I don't have a whole lot of time paint and draw, but if it becomes a source of income, I'll make time.

The types of art I do are:
Oil and acrylic painting (beginning to learn to work with watercolors though)
Graphite and Charcol drawing
Mixed media
Digital painting
Tattoo designs
Photography
And there are other things I like to experiment with from time to time
I will try just about anything though.

As a writer, I am even more inexperienced. I think that I got my start in writing poetry in the eighth grade for my reading class, although I didn't write anything else until my sophomore year. I became serious about it almost instanty that year. I could tell right from the beginning that it was just a passing interest. My biggest turning point was when I joined deviantArt. I can honestly say that some of the people I met on there were the reason that I kept at it and improved. They were my biggest supporters and were always there to give me advice. Joining DeviantArt was probably the smartest thing I've ever done to improve both my poetry and my art and helped more than any class ever has. The spring of my senior year, I published a book of my poetry entitled, Words Never Spoken.

I got my start in fiction writing with fanfiction, actually. I started reading fanfiction in 2003-2004 and seeing all of these ordinary people, some as young as me, posting their stories gave me the courage to start one myself. Now, I can't say that my initial drafts were extraorinary, but it was a start. After a ton of plannning and about six written chapters, I laid my fanfiction to the side and began work on more serious projects. In early 2005, I began planning for a story all my own. My first original fiction was entitled A Risk Worth Taking, and it is still today my favorite story. After that came Moon's Anger and ideas for a prequel and sequel for Risk. Recently I have started plotting out new stories. Needless to say, it is hard to find time to work on 6 different stories at once, and sadly, I have not yet actually finished a story, but I will continue to keep on writing.