April Lee
April Lee grew up within sight of Disneyland's nightly fireworks, which might explain her early artistic inclinations. She can remember using poster paints and crayons to draw Bambi and Thumper in kindergarten. By Junior High, she had immersed herself in the worlds of Middle Earth, Narnia and Prydain, and was known for drawing pegasi and unicorns, for which she won the Art Award upon graduation.
Reading books was a passion (she is greatly intrigued by stories of myths and legends, romance and adventure, whether historical, present-day, set in the far future or in alternate realities), although drawing the characters and scenes in novels remained an amusing sideline. She majored in English Literature, with History and Theater as minors at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, graduating cum laude. In search of older and more historic things, April spent her Junior Year abroad, studying English Literature, History and Archaeology at Edinburgh University. She was a part of the Edinburgh University Theatre Company and was on stage for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. She toured Greece (making sure to visit the ruins of Delphi, Akrotiri, Knossos and Phaistos), and went on an archaeological dig at Crickley Hill, a Neolithic site in England.
After her graduation from Mount Holyoke, she went to Cape Cod to do summer theater, then spent the winter at Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where she skied and worked part-time as a radio deejay at KFMU. In the autumn she went to Oxford University in England for a degree in History.
While at Oxford, April drew the characters she ran during weekly sessions with the Oxford University Role-Playing Game Society. She contributed art to comic and game fanzines and went to her first Science Fiction convention in Cardiff, where she showed some of her art.
After she returned to California, she continued to contribute to fanzines and show art in SF convention shows. She took a wide variety of art classes at Orange Coast College (painting, printmaking, life drawing, children's book illustration, animation, computer graphics, and sculpture), then enrolled at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, as an Illustration major.
She started free-lancing, doing black and white interior art for computer game manuals and role-playing game books. Acquaintances from local conventions formed a small computer game company and asked for concept sketches. They also needed a 2D sprite animator and hired April, on contract, to work on a game. In the process, she learned Deluxe Paint IV on the Amiga. Around the same time, April went to her first GenCon, the largest game convention in the US. It is held annually in the Mid-west, and April shared a booth selling art and prints with another fantasy artist, NeNe Thomas, where she gained many useful role-playing and card game contacts.
April continued to create art and prints for conventions. She also continued to free-lance for many card games, including Magic: The Gathering, Legend of the Five Rings, Warlord, Warhammer 40K and the Middle Earth game, for which she happily created art based on J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. She has created hundreds of images for games, books, magazines and comics.
As for computer games, she continued with that and has credits on at least fourteen games. She worked full-time at the Dreamers Guild, a game developer, working on 2D character animation for several more games (Inherit the Earth, Faery Tale Adventure 2: Halls of the Dead) before moving to New World Computing, a division of 3DO, where she transitioned to 3D art and animation for fantasy role-playing and strategy games (Heroes of Might and Magic 2, 3, 4 plus expansions, Might and Magic 6, 7 and 8). She is currently at Liquid Entertainment working on War of the Ring, based on the Lord of the Rings books, a real-time strategy game.
