I come from a long line of artists in my family and my passion for painting and doing anything creative is the life blood of who I am. I’m just not happy unless I’m creating something.
As a kid I grew up watching Star Wars, Battle Star Galactica, Planet of The Apes and having the wonderful privilege of owning some of those great toys of the late 70s and early 80s. My imagination really exploded around this time. I got into modeling sci-fi and military dioramas around age 9 and was developing my skills as a painter and sculptor as well. I knew I wanted to become an artist and nothing else.
I got into PC modding by accident; there wasn’t really one thing that set me on that path. I always enjoyed electronics and with my modeling and sculpting skills developing, I decided to take a shot at a different medium to express myself in. I did a lot of research on the topic and found a large community that was building and modding their own PCs into great works of art. I was hooked. One of the first mods I found that appealed to my style and interest was Paul Capello’s Doom 3 build, and Bill Owen’s Bio mechanical project, but since I knew nothing about how to build a PC so I decided to enroll into some courses and earned my Comp-Tia A+ certification.
With Paul’s and Bill’s projects in mind, I decided to build my very first custom PC and document it all on video, and share on my YouTube channel www.youtube.com/ronleec1. The design concept was to build a Resident Evil themed mod, and make it look nothing at all like a PC tower, so I decided a built-from-scratch project was going to be the plan.
After building most of the project to completion, I ran into some design conflicts with the hardware and watercooling loop, so I decided to rebuild rather than try to fix the mistakes. This which turned out to be the best choice, and after 3 years, the project was completed in January 2013.
The one lesson that I learned from this project is to stay true what you do best and don’t be afraid to take risks. I have a lot of people say that the types of builds I do are more “modeling” than modding. I say “If you put a definition on what modding is then you’re limiting what it can be.” Like any artist, we all have our own styles – every palette and canvas is unique to the artist and that is reflected in their work.