Joel Carlo is a multifaceted artist with a talents ranging in traditional and digital illustration, 3D modeling, motion graphics, instructional content, and web design just to name a few. He is known as MechaHateChimp in our CG communities and is also co-founder alongside Rebecca Kimmel for their website Foundationalarts.com, both of whom are major art contributors to the site. Joel's style, talent and will to succeed have proven him to be an outstanding CG artist. http://www.joelcarlo.net/

SQ – First off, please tell us a little about yourself? My name is Joel Carlo, also known as "MechaHateChimp" in the online cg communities. I'm a multimedia developer based out of Denver, Colorado and have worked as a freelance and commercial artist for the last 14 years.

SQ – When and how did you become involved in digital art and 3D? If we're talking literally, my very first experience painting with a computer would have been using a program called MacPaint which came bundled with those old Macintosh systems back in the late 80's. I was about 13 at the time and really had no idea what the hell I was doing. I just remember taking forever to draw anything in that application. I pretty much gave that the finger and just stuck to doing things in traditional media. Beyond that, my exposure to digital art and 3D had been mostly coincidental up until about 1998 when I began working as a web developer. At that time, I had just started using Photoshop to create web graphics which eventually led me to experiment with digital painting and 3D applications. But it wasn't until a friend of mine introduced me to the online cg communities a few years ago that my interest in digital art really piqued. The caliber of work presented on these forums was something I had never seen before. I knew I wanted to create work of that standard, so I set out to learn as much as I could which I'm still doing to this day. It was probably the most humbling and provoking experience as an artist I've ever had.

SQ – Where do you work at the moment and what’s your position there? Right now I work for the satellite television company, DirecTV, creating interactive flash training tools. In my spare time I work as a multimedia developer and the work I do varies from day to day. This can range anywhere from creating websites, book illustrations, instructional content, motion graphics, audio scoring... it can seem overwhelming but I actually enjoy the challenge.