How did we get here?
From a small child, Cilenia has always played a little on the dirty side... that is with her paints and artwork! Well... on bikes and cars too along side her brother Christopher! Her mother and grandmother always supported her in her creative endeavors. All the females in her family line had been artistic and created in one way or another and Cilenia did them all. Quilting, sewing clothes, painting, drawing, garden design, home renovations, antique restorations... you name it. She had a passion for anything creative and everything vintage and it showed.
She started drawing on a computer in 1986 in AutoCAD along with her brother Chirstopher creating Electrical Engineering and Architectural drawings and both were totally self taught. Funny how breaking your arm can turn your whole life around! She could no longer draw on the drafting boards and there it sat, a compy with AutoCAD that not one our of 200 people knew how to use. So she picked up the book and learned! She was hooked! She went on to drawing and her brother went on learning how the computer all worked inside and out with electronics, networking and being a webmaster. Back then that was pretty impressive seeing that was really the beginning of the Web and home computers.
Since then she has used many computer aided graphic programs and somewhere around the year 1994 she started drawing her art on the compy for her and Weezer's first website GardeningClub.net, which still exists today, and also for doing scrapbooking creating journaling, Wordart and stickers. I don't think the phrase Hybrid Scrapbooking was even thought of yet!
By the year 2000 she was well on her way to being almost 100% digital. But back then, it was hard to find digital art for sale as there were not many sites yet. She started restoring antique photos not only for personal photos, but for her local Historical Society. For scrapbooking she mostly still only played with photos, and began finding people as mentors online. Anna Aspnes was her first inspiration before Anna was even known. And then she followed Katie Pertiet as her soft vintage style called to her. She has many of their earlier kits and started putting the puzzle pieces together of how to create her own. She was a sponge and read everything she could get her hands on and asked question after question of anyone who would answer. Now she could create the art, but how to work with it was the next question. Up to this point, it was pulling digitally scanned photos onto a blank pages and creating the art right there with it. All in one file, one layer just as if she had the paper in front of her. She knew nothing about layers, masking, papers or elements.
In 2008 Weezer introduced her to a few online classes for digital scrapping and she learned how to apply all her photoshop and computer skills and knowledge to actual real digital scrapbooking. The light bulb went off! Now she had the tools and knowledge to create and within 3 months was asked to join a shop online to sell her art. She had been laid off her job with the rest of our country, and very little consultanting work available, she decided to take the chance and pour her heart and soul into building up yet another business. But this time it was for her!
Although the people of the other shop were very friendly, they had extreme issues with their host, not their fault, and soon Cilenia found herself desiring her own shop. She had good basic knowledge of what needed to be done, but lacked the deeper knowledge needed to run a site with a shop.
In steps her mother, Weezer, who is very artistic herself and had good solid knowledge of CSS website building and business organizing, and her brother Christopher a total IT Guru who knew the inside out of computer languages. They took a vote and decided to do it. They each had a key ingredient to contribute to make it all work… together… as a family!
And that is how Digital Designer Shop was born in December of 2009.
From a small child, Cilenia has always played a little on the dirty side... that is with her paints and artwork! Well... on bikes and cars too along side her brother Christopher! Her mother and grandmother always supported her in her creative endeavors. All the females in her family line had been artistic and created in one way or another and Cilenia did them all. Quilting, sewing clothes, painting, drawing, garden design, home renovations, antique restorations... you name it. She had a passion for anything creative and everything vintage and it showed.
She started drawing on a computer in 1986 in AutoCAD along with her brother Chirstopher creating Electrical Engineering and Architectural drawings and both were totally self taught. Funny how breaking your arm can turn your whole life around! She could no longer draw on the drafting boards and there it sat, a compy with AutoCAD that not one our of 200 people knew how to use. So she picked up the book and learned! She was hooked! She went on to drawing and her brother went on learning how the computer all worked inside and out with electronics, networking and being a webmaster. Back then that was pretty impressive seeing that was really the beginning of the Web and home computers.
Since then she has used many computer aided graphic programs and somewhere around the year 1994 she started drawing her art on the compy for her and Weezer's first website GardeningClub.net, which still exists today, and also for doing scrapbooking creating journaling, Wordart and stickers. I don't think the phrase Hybrid Scrapbooking was even thought of yet!
By the year 2000 she was well on her way to being almost 100% digital. But back then, it was hard to find digital art for sale as there were not many sites yet. She started restoring antique photos not only for personal photos, but for her local Historical Society. For scrapbooking she mostly still only played with photos, and began finding people as mentors online. Anna Aspnes was her first inspiration before Anna was even known. And then she followed Katie Pertiet as her soft vintage style called to her. She has many of their earlier kits and started putting the puzzle pieces together of how to create her own. She was a sponge and read everything she could get her hands on and asked question after question of anyone who would answer. Now she could create the art, but how to work with it was the next question. Up to this point, it was pulling digitally scanned photos onto a blank pages and creating the art right there with it. All in one file, one layer just as if she had the paper in front of her. She knew nothing about layers, masking, papers or elements.
In 2008 Weezer introduced her to a few online classes for digital scrapping and she learned how to apply all her photoshop and computer skills and knowledge to actual real digital scrapbooking. The light bulb went off! Now she had the tools and knowledge to create and within 3 months was asked to join a shop online to sell her art. She had been laid off her job with the rest of our country, and very little consultanting work available, she decided to take the chance and pour her heart and soul into building up yet another business. But this time it was for her!
Although the people of the other shop were very friendly, they had extreme issues with their host, not their fault, and soon Cilenia found herself desiring her own shop. She had good basic knowledge of what needed to be done, but lacked the deeper knowledge needed to run a site with a shop.
In steps her mother, Weezer, who is very artistic herself and had good solid knowledge of CSS website building and business organizing, and her brother Christopher a total IT Guru who knew the inside out of computer languages. They took a vote and decided to do it. They each had a key ingredient to contribute to make it all work… together… as a family!
And that is how Digital Designer Shop was born in December of 2009.
