Mark Shaver was born in Los Angeles in 1952. His family moved to Europe when he was five, his father taking a job in the Geneva office of his company. Exposed to the museums of Europe in his formative years, he developed an interest in the great European modern artists, such as Picasso and Braque.
As an undergraduate at UCLA, he majored in art history. He then attended Otis Parsons in Los Angeles, where he graduated with an associates degree in illustration. In his decades long illustration career, he specialized in editorial art, freelancing for such entities as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, among others.
An early convert to digital illustration, Mark mastered his skills in such applications as Photoshop and Illustrator. Currently, he creates the majority of his work on an iPad, using a combination of Illustrator and Procreate to generate these images.
Mark is prominent on Twitter, where he posts illustrations commenting on issues of the day. Mark also post regularly on Instagram, where he has two portfolio collections. Mark’s childhood years in Europe, as well as his father’s interest in art, and more distantly, his grandfather’s career as an illustrator, shaped him to find creative fulfillment in the graphic arts.