I am retired now from a career primarily as a Technical Illustrator, and teaching Blender at Calhoun Community College in Decatur Alabama. I have a degree in Studio Art with a Minor in Advertising that I got from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 1977.
My first professional job was with Teledyne Brown Engineering in Huntsville. I started working on the Spacelab Payload Integration contract when Technical Illustrations were done by hand on the Drafting Board. As drafting moved to computers with the advent of AutoCAD, I rode that wave. I started teaching AutoCAD in 1986 and continued that until 2011 on a part-time basis.
In 1996 I changed employers when the Space Station was being built and Spacelabs were not being flown. My new company was a Defense Contractor. I spent 9 years doing Technical Illustrations of complex hardware and my last 5 there working on a team of Interactive Multimedia Developers. My main function was providing 3D models to our team and preparing them for Animation. In that role I learned basic techniques of several Animation Packages.
Blender is new to me & I am surprised at how robust it is. I was actually against using it because it is an open source package - I wanted to use one of the Autodesk products instead. Now I am a convert and working hard to master Blender while teaching it.