Shannon Stirnweis Biography Continued:

...He completed his education with five years at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, winning a school scholarship and an American Institute of Graphic Design scholarship.

After graduation, he served two army years as an illustrator in Germany. This allowed him the opportunity to visit European museums to see and study their paintings.

Out of the Army and school in the late fifties, he found making a living painting for galleries was not a viable alternative. Illustration in the East was. In New York City he progressed from an agency sketch job through free lancing adventure pulps to slick magazines such as Argosy, Boy's Life, Show, Time and Field and Stream. He did covers for virtually all the New York paperback publishers and illustrated over thirty children's books. His advertising clients varied from pharmaceuticals, to industrials, to movies to stamps.

After serving two years as President of the Society of Illustrators in New York he followed the lead of many former illustrators and entered the field of gallery painting.

He and his wife Regina were married in 1958. They have three sons, Kevin, Kirk, and Eric all are into visual arts. Kirk is painting and sculpting the historical West from Colorado.

The discipline and systematic research skills developed as an illustrator serve him well when combined with a love of western subjects.

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