To reintroduce myself, my name is Gretchen Burns and I am currently a student at Pittsburg State University. I'm a double major in biology with an emphasis in field biology and environment and art with an emphasis in jewelry design. Even though I am emphasizing in jewelry design, my goal in life is to attend an American Medical Association accredited school and obtain a Master's degree in Medical and Biological Illustration and continue on in a career of emphasis.

Currently, my work ranges all over the board, as I take new classes and experiment with new techniques and methods to drawing, inking, painting, and jewelry design. Hopefully, my work in the future will be illustrations that are featured in medical and biological journals, magazines, textbooks, etc. I'm hoping to learn how to make my art and illustrations more available toward other venues, but at the moment, I have not yet learned those.

As common as this sounds, I look to Leonardo da Vinci's illustrations from his journals for inspiration on illustration. He was extremely curious about how things worked, moved and changed and studied them. He kept notebooks and sketched everything out, in turn, teaching himself to become a better artist.

A goal of mine is to familiarize myself with more illustrators so I can learn different styles and techniques to perfect my own and find what I am comfortable with.