Hi! I'm Aaron! I am Aaron Dietzen if you are a stickler for formality. I live in Longmont, Colorado with my wife (who also happens to be my muse and drives me to be a better person, every day) and I truly love being creative.

Creativity has been a life-long pursuit for me and I can remember making things, drawing, or writing about "what could be" as long as I have been alive. I love drawing and have been doing so since elementary school. I also spent time in my formative years painting and sculpting. In the past few decades I have spent a lot of time 3D modeling (big Sketchup guy, right here) and 3D printing, which is an amazing way to explore design and solve problems that I come across in my day-to-day.

Speaking of my day-to-day, I am lucky enough to be employed by Trimble as The SketchUp Guy and get to make videos helping people see the advantages of using SketchUp (check out our YouTube channel for some of my team's work... also, that line about being a "big SketchUp guy" was a little joke). 

I also like to write. My first book I wrote and pursued to publishing was a children's book thatI made with my cousin, the talented Travis Rueckert (check out his Instagram page here). We illustrated the whole thing with photographs of miniature characters, props, and sets. I got to work with one of my favorite artists in the world and I also got to leverage my creative and design skills. It took two years, but we finally built and photographed everything and produced an amazing book.

I also have another two books written for a publisher. Both books are about SketchUp (again, big into that software). I guess making videos about SketchUp was not enough for me, because I spent a few months writing each book before sending them to the publishers. 

Writing is a great conduit for me and let's me express what I cannot through other forms. That's part of the reason that I started my newsletter on Substack. Not only do I get to explore my own journey into creativity and inspiration, but I also get to hear what my subscribers think! 

My primary creative outlet nowadays is painting. Specifically painting abstracts. 

I have done my time painting realism (or as close as I could get to realism) and feel like I could do a decent enough job at it. Trying to paint things as real as possible left me wanting, though. My natural perfectionism prevents me from being truly happy with my creations, as I always feel like something is missing. No matter how good what I paint looks, I always feel like it could be better. To be honest, I would be most satisfied if I had the ability to perfectly reproduce anything I see as a painting... but... if I did that, wouldn't I just be a camera?

These were the thoughts I had in my head a few years ago when I set out to create my own style of painting. Eventually I created the style you can see in my Gallery. A combination of swirling, flowing colors and solid, black outlines. Together the paintings end up with a life of their own as viewers see movement and feel the paint beyond it's two dimensional reality. People have described images that they see within my paintings that I would never have imagined myself!

Painting and getting to share these creations with the world has been at the same time scary (as they are an expression of my true inner self) and exciting!

Hopefully you will enjoy what I am sharing here and might be interested in dropping me a message or supporting my creative efforts by purchasing a painting or a print through my gallery.

Thanks for reading all these words and I truly hope you have an amazing day!