aroline Carlson is a painter, designer and cartoonist whose work spans the full spectrum of visual arts, from fine oil portraiture to eye-catching commercial graphics and web design.

Caroline has served as art director for magazines including: I.G. Living, Ornament, and Décor & Style, supervising all aspects of production and design. She has produced cartoons and oil paintings under commission, programmed and designed commercial websites and created television storyboards.

Early in her career she honed her skills in the pressure cooker of East Coast ad agencies, where the creative energy and intense deadlines refined her talents and work ethic. She has shown her fine art at galleries in California and New York, and collaborated on SoHo exhibits with Art Party Pravda, a Russian art cooperative. As a service to military families, she donates her time to create posthumous oil portraits of fallen U.S. Service members.

The daughter of a craftsman and an artist, Caroline studied art formally from the age of six, taking courses in drawing, painting and sculpting at Hofstra University while in elementary school. Always on the lookout for opportunities to create, she discovered a palette of fresh cardboard along the roadside while walking home from third grade and dragged it home to sculpt a coffee table-sized cardboard elephant. While her fine art focus is now in painting, Caroline still loves sculpting and enjoyed learning to use an arc welder in college.

Caroline completed a bachelor’s degree in fine art and a minor in art history at SUNY Stony Brook, then studied illustration and graphic design at the Joe Kubert School in Dover, NJ, advertising and desktop publishing at the Morris County Vo-Tech in Denville, NJ, in and Website design and code at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, NJ and the AQUENT Springboard program in Boston, MA.

Caroline draws upon a broad range of art media for her assignments. Whether designing web material or painting a mural, she approaches each project with an artist’s eye. Weighing her clients’ needs, budgets and target audiences, she translates their visions into compelling images. Her keen organizational skills ensure that she realizes those creative goals while meeting clients’ aesthetic expectations and deadlines.

Her competitive instincts also find an outlet in sports. Caroline is an avid runner who has completed 10K runs and half-marathons in California. She finds that long-distance running provides a meditative space to tackle creative problems, and helps her to appreciate the process, as well as the results of her efforts.

She is also a certified SCUBA diver who explored North Atlantic wrecks and helped supervise diver training at Dutch Springs, PA. Caroline lives with her husband and two children in the mountains of Southern California.