The creator of the acorn elves is me, Petr Václavek. Although I studied IT at Charles University in Prague (database and information systems), I liked creative work since I was a kid. I would find the beginnings sometime before elementary school when I used to carve various dummies and cooking pots out of lime wood (I could still find a few memories and notches on my fingers). At home, we had a small workshop full of tools and other junk where I spent most of my free time. I went from simple dolls to carving figures and animals, making models of ships, cannons, guns (mostly based on DIY magazines), wooden jewelry, kitchen tools…
Later, my dad stashed a homemade lathe somewhere – a solid construction, a motor from a washing machine, a chuck from a drill. The power was not much, if you worked it a bit you stopped it with your hand, but it gave my work new unsuspected possibilities – I started turning candlesticks, cups, vases, bowls, frames and also a nativity scene. I’ve been making it for about 4 years, it has about 100 figures in the final version and maybe I’ll come back to it again :) Anyway, making acorn elves reminds me a bit of working on a turned nativity – you have a few basic shapes/components and try to put them together to make different characters and situations.
I apologize for the quality of the photos, but it was taken 20 years ago with some half megapixel compact digital camera, I haven’t gotten around to reshooting it yet.
Photography
I started taking photos in the civil service, where I first got my hands on a digital camera and documented the botanical garden and various events with it. Which I quite liked, so in 2003 I bought my own digital ultrazoom, an Olympus C730 with 3 megapixels. I uploaded the photos to Photopost and thanks to the community there (and their critiques) I learned how to take good photos. This came in handy because I started to sell my photos in foreign microstock agencies and it’s what I do for a living to this day. But that’s another story.
Graphics and post-production in Photoshop
I’ve loved computer graphics since the first time I came across them on 8-bit computers (Sinclair ZX Spectrum). I tried a lot of graphics applications, but I liked Adobe Photoshop the most (after excellent training) and I’m still loyal to it today.
What am I doing now?
I haven’t done information systems or databases for a few years now, I moved away from programming first to web design and then to graphics. At the moment I have been drawing illustrations for foreign photo banks (microstock sites like Shutterstock, Adobe, iStock…) for a few years, designing my own t-shirt prints and writing about Adobe Illustrator.