Stefan Chinof

Biography:

It all started late, quite late I must say, in my last year (1999) of highschool. My art teacher sent me to a very popular teacher, the problem was up until that point that I had only drawn in my notebook, small stuff to escape the dull classes, and when I visited the new teacher I was deeply depressed. I have to take an upper level class, because the other classes were all full. And, next thing you know, there I was sitting between (belive me) incredible talents! I was standing there with ball point pen and no idea of what I should do or where to start! But they other students were very helpfull and soon everyone started to give advice and ideas on how to improve my work. It was my first step in art.

Right after that started the homework and it was (at that time) very very hard, 500 drawings of my right and 500 of my left and many more things like that. At the same time I was finishing my last year of highschool and was working as a assisstant camera man. It was quite interesting and I was taking night classes for photography; which was also great but way too expensive, and I quit.

So I went to an art college (2001), where the carriculum was to study 1 year painting,1 year graphic art, 1 year sculptures, and the last year we choose one of them which to specify in. But I skipped the others specialities and focused all of my energy into graphics, where I began experimenting like crazy. Very often I was kicked out of class, because I used too much ink or other materials. The classes, to me were quite dull and I stayed in the atelier form morning till night. It was great!

There was a huge library and I started to pay more attention to the Polish, Japanese, Russian and German posters. I decide that what I wanted do is a poster. Which everyone at that time said was a mistake, due to the fact that I was doing only pieces,12 by 30 or 35 by 15 cm. Mostly exlibris and etching. The typical posters are 50 by 70 and bigger , it was quite big shock for me. I was very close to being kicked out of the school. And right then I made a sort of unofficial exhibition of what I have done. BIG sized posters 100 by 80 in different themes: jazz, movies, social, and others.The people liked them very much and I won another chance to stay in school, finally finishing collage succesfully.

But with the end of school, it became very clear that video is not the job for me, so I started working in a small advertsing company (2005). I used to work on signs and stuff like that, they were made on cutting machines and my job was to put them on the machine and then to take them out. I started to ask a lot of quiestions like what program they were using and what is the diference between vector and raster. I had never used the pc very oftern berfore that. They helped me to learn Corel,and few weeks after the dude who worked on Corel quit, the boss asked me to take his place.

After that, I started to became very interested in photoshop. That was 3-4 years ago. The photoshop man left and I then took his place. A year later, I was cutting signs and making t-shirts and other stuff like: flyers, posters, and experiment. I was on fire!!!

Won a few small national competitions for illustrtations and posters and decided to up my standards bar!I I started working for a small magazine (2008) and started to find my way into typography. I had always been interested but never knew the rules, and ways. Step by step with the help of a lot of books I started to improve my work.