Walter Myers was born in 1958 in southern Indiana. For as long as he can remember Walter enjoyed drawing, especially pictures of dinosaurs and monsters. At age seven, Walter became enamored with astronomy after coming across a single volume from a children’s encyclopedia set (a family friend had found the book in the garage of a house they had just purchased). The book featured photo-realistic illustrations of the planets of the Solar System. They were like nothing he’d ever seen before.

Around that same time a friend had a book with fanciful illustration by space artist Chesley Bonestell of astronauts walking the surface of a moon of Saturn, with Saturn itself looming huge on the horizon. To Walter that was the most beautiful scenario he could imagine—to be walking the surface of a world with Saturn dominating the sky. Over the next few years he made hundreds of space art pencil drawings.

Walter became concerned about realism in space art, preferring objective and science-based photorealism to expressionism. In 1968 he had the good fortune to see Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when it was released in the original 3-projector Cinerama format. 2001 heightened his interest in space exploration and appreciation for the aesthetic of otherworldly wildernesses.

Walter’s sole medium today is computer graphics created on standard desktop computers. Prior to discovering computer graphics, he worked in pencil, then oil paints, water colors and acrylics. While some artists did—and still do—flourish in these traditional mediums, Walter personally never found them well-suited to the photorealistic space art he pursued. It wasn’t until high-end computer graphics software became available for the home computer in the latter 1990s that he finally found a medium that, by easily rendering straight lines and elegant circles, met his needs.

Currently residing in the Chicago area, Walter is an artist member of the International Association of Astronomical Artists (IAAA) and his work has been published in books, magazines, posters, websites, television, CDs/DVDs, and framed for gallery showings.