Name: Elisabeth Mautner a.k.a. Ella M.
Born: 31. July 1980 in Vienna

I started to draw as soon as I could hold a pencil, like most children do. The difference with me was, that I didn’t stop even when people told me, that artists normally starve. I just couldn’t think of anything else I would love as much as drawing and painting. I always knew exactly, what I wanted to do when I grew up: “Something related to art“. Well…

I took part in a water color class at age 12 and when I was 16 I got my first computer (a Pentium MMX it was, good old boy) with the Corel Suite installed. So I started to experiment with digital image manipulation.

…with my cat

Two years later, at age 18 I bought my first graphics tablet (a small wacom) and then it had me. It was 1997 in good old austria and nobody would have thought that drawing on the pc could be anything else but a hobby, if at all. For whatever one did with the aid of a PC wasn’t really creative in people’s minds. Yet I couldn’t stop being not creative with my wacom and still that same Pentium MMX.

I worked some years in customer care (copy shops, call centers), but always found a way to use my creative talents at the job and always pretty soon found my way to the company’s designers and graphic artists and learned, what and where I could. I always analyzed programms regarding usability (though that word back then didn’t exist), tried to think of new ways to make it fun to use a program, watched tutorial videos on youtube, practised painting and drawing, took part in digital image manipulation contests and did my first web sites.

At about 2006 I decided, I never wanted to work at a call center again and tried to start my own business doing web design. I wasn’t prepared, didn’t have the budget and will probably never be a decent sales woman, so I failed and back to call center it was, until my body pulled the emergency break. A couple of years and tears later I first did a short multi media-course (3D Studio Max), worked as a multimedia trainer for some months, started to paint (acrylics and water color, pastels and charcoal) and tried to sell some paintings but mostly gave them away to friends as birthday presents. I could finally afford a new PC and cried lucky tears when I suddenly didn’t  have to wait two seconds after a digital brush stroke for the PC to render it. 2012, I got the chance to get a proper education in IT. I took the chance and did two internships, where the second company finally hired me and here I am.

I did web developement (html, css, js, php) and -design, illustrations, mockups, story boards and customer care, now peeking into operations at pio

Here’s what I can offer you:
Colorations
Illustrations (in many different styles, digital and analog)
Storyboards
Gameart (creatures, characters, items)
Graphic Design (mostly screen design, but also print design)
Tattoo Designs
Wall paintings

My special interests are:

UI/UX Design
Modern Storytelling
Art
Animation