Portfolio|About

Name: Tom Carroll

Age: 18

Location: Lakeville, MN

Born: March 4th 1990

Birthplace: Manassas, VA

Currently, I am a student at Brown College in Mendota Heights, Minnesota going for my BS in Game Design and Development. I have been involved with art since I was young and got involved with photography and computer graphics around 2000. I started out with work in Hammer as part of the Source engine SDK. I spent 6 years making maps for Half-Life 2 and Garry's mod. I made 13 or so fairly popular maps after an original popular map that got me started in it all (Gm_Falleritus7). Working in Hammer, I felt the limitations of the textures that they provided for the designers, so I got interested in making textures of my own. I went on to working in Photoshop and getting involved in photography.

The past 7 years have been spent doing work in Photoshop. From textures to photo enhancement and graphic design. I've made hundreds of desktop wallpapers, a few complete game texture modifications, hundreds of game, model and level textures as well as getting involved in modeling most recently. After spending hours upon hours trying to manipulate the 'brushes' in Hammer to work in achieving the goal of somewhat realistic or representative objects, I decided to pick up modeling. I tinkered a few years off and on in 3ds as I tried to figure things out, but didn't take it very seriously until sometime in 2006. I finally took the time to educate myself on the processes of making a model properly and got things working. I'm currently taking my time outside of school to best improve my modeling skills and more specifically the UVW mapping of the models and the general application of textures, as that is still an area of challenge.

Although I've always considered the saying of 'Jack of all trades, master of none'.. but I never paid much attention to it, I always figured if I spend enough time to master each individual trades, then I can fit in wherever I feel needed, so that's what I've been doing: mastering as many different mediums and trades that I can before I dont't have time to expiriment anymore.

With that in mind, I took my original art skills of drawing and applied them to new genres of art and even expirimented with painting, charcoal, and even more forms of digital art. I have also spent 4 years learning the French language and multiple coding languages from Actionscript, C++, flash and LUA to C#, I'm always interested in finding a new way to problem solve and express my creativity and ideas. A large amount of my work can be found in my gallery section, which is being continuously updated as my expiriments develop along with my style and education.