My name is Smitha Prasadh ("Smith-uh pruh-Sod," not "Smeetha" or "Pras-dah"). I'm 23 years old, and a recent graduate of Georgia Tech, with a BS in a media studies and a minor in Japanese. I currently work as a web designer in downtown Atlanta, designing sites for small to medium-sized businesses in the southeastern US. I'm a die-hard fan of Star Wars (classic trilogy and Expanded Universe), science fiction, fantasy, animation, and visual and creative expression in general. Besides drawing and writing, I deeply love music and playing the violin, which I've played for 12 years, and I played piano for 3 before that. I'm also a "grass-roots" web and graphic designer, and I'm currently planning on getting my masters in either graphic design or interactive media.

» Art

I've been drawing ever since I could hold a pencil, but never took any classes outside of the grade school required ones. I had a sloppy-ish style up till high school, when I discovered Japanese anime (namely Sailormoon) in 9th grade, and applied it to my style, radically changing it. After entering college and discovering the artist communities online (primarily Aimee Major's messageboard), I sought to change my style and make it more realistic. I know I still have a ways to go, but it's come a long way just in the past 2-3 years. I finally took a "real" art class this summer, a 6-week figure drawing class, which was an amazing learning experience.

Since I've pretty much taught myself to draw, I work best with regular pen and pencil, but I've worked with digital painting, I own a set of Prismacolor pencils, and my figure drawing class introduced me to charcoal, pastels, and Conté crayon. I also need a lot of practice with drawing males--thankfully, I do go to a school with 4 boys for every girl, and my guy friends enjoy "modeling" for me. ;o) My favorite artists are Mucha and Waterhouse, and I really admire quite a few of the big names in the online art community.

» Writing

I only really got interested in creative writing just prior to entering high school. I wrote a "novel" the summer before 9th grade (about 40-50 pages long), which was my first major attempt at original fiction. I started writing more fan fiction in high school, and I discovered an online round-robin script-style story-writing forum that I stayed involved with all through high school. I started to take writing more seriously upon entering college; during my first 2 years, I worked on a story that evolved into a 295-page (10-point Arial single-spaced) novel, which sparked my love for writing (and kept me sane through some pretty rough moments). I've sought to improve my style and develop more serious pieces, and I participated in NaNoWriMo in 2001-2003, actually winning in '01.

I generally lean towards writing urban fantasy scenarios--ones that take place in "our world," with a few fantasy elements woven in. My favorite authors are Neil Gaiman, Timothy Zahn, Michael Stackpole, Mary Higgins Clark, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, and J. K. Rowling, to name a few. Some of my other favorite novels are Stephen King's 7-book Dark Tower series, The Mozart Season by Virginia Euwer Wolff, Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Neverwhere and Stardust by Gaiman, and I, Robot by Isaac Asimov.

» Design

I first got on the web in late 1995, and was so excited by it that I signed up for an account with GeoCities during the summer of 1996 to create my very own page. I had very limited access to paint programs, so my layouts were more text-based, but after acquiring my first scanner (which came with MicroGrafx PhotoMagic), I started to get more creative, trying out "cute" ideas and deriving inspiration from various sources (images, elements in other layouts, etc.).

It wasn't until I got into college that I realized that web design is actually a serious field, and I was introduced to Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop to do graphics for my co-op job with IBM (that are still in use on their intranet sites, I believe); that was what really made a big difference in my design style. A couple of years later, I switched out of Computer Science and into Science, Technology, and Culture, an interdisciplinary program that examines the role of media and humanities in a technological society. I did my senior thesis on genre on the web, and I fully intend to continue producing and studying media in the future.

My general design "philosophy" is to produce works that are simple, clean, well-organized, and still eye-catching. I lean more towards greys, blues, greens, and earth tones, and I like to use the central area of a site to enclose all my content, but in such a way that I don't leave too much or too little space unused. I taught myself HTML, and am working on integrating more CSS into my sites to keep up with the changing standards.