Along with her other endeavors, Jan has been an artist as long as she can remember. She started with "pet portraits" and cartooning in NY at the local Long Island Art Shows and ended up designing consumer products for Disney. In between there was illustration for Hanna Barbera, designing brochures for Toyota, embroidery and embellishment design for Drapers and Damons, and package design for Mattel!
Her mom, Iris Whitby, was a well known water colorist on the East Coast. Jan chose graphite and pastel as her personal creative tools and started fine tuning her work at an early age. With her Mother's encouragement she was able to develop her ever present passion for drawing. When computers came along Jan couldn't learn the software fast enough and happily went into the field of Computer Graphics.