About Jill

You can get her CV at her professional page: jpwatercolors.com

Jill is my wife of 22 years. Most of her youth was spent in the Pocono Mountains working multiple jobs in an inn her folks owned. She got a bachelor’s degree in  mass communications at Bloomsburg University (PA), where we met as pen pals; that is, she wrote to “any soldier” in the 1991 Gulf War, which I picked up while serving in the Army there. We met shortly after the war, got married the following year and lived in Germany with follow-on assignments in Arizona and Colorado.

During these Army years, Jill continued to paint in oil and started learning Adobe Photoshop. This was valuable for her as she learned how to be a graphic artist basically by self-determination and really good tips and tricks Adobe made available. She also did public relations work with the Red Cross.

 

In 1995, our son was born. One month later, I had to go to Canada to help train up their military for Bosnia. At that moment, I knew it was time to leave the military. There would be no family time.

In 1996, we left the Army. During a one-year stint rediscovering what I was going to do next, I got interested and learned how to code HTML. Jill and I decided to try our hand at a web development business (1996). This was fairly new ground and we had a few customers, mostly real estate, but people were very slow to adapt to the Internet where we were in Pennsylvania and eventually had to rediscover a new path.

In 1997, I got a job in the metro-DC area, and we moved to Virginia, which is where we have been ever since. Jill started back up to her first passion of painting in a spare and small bedroom for seven years in one home and then another small room for one year in our latest home. She also learned watercolor during these years. She took to it very quickly and that became her primary medium.

In 2010, we remodeled the basement as a full-fledged working studio. Jill started back with oils in 2011 and it did not take long for her to catch up. During this whole period, she has also kept up with technology. Never stopping from the Adobe line of products and experimenting with other like products to digitize her work and do her own prints (giclees).

Now on a number of social media outlets, she continues to paint and refine her watercolor and oil skills.