Jewelry maker Loren Peters has been making jewelry almost as long as she can remember. “When I was in third grade, the mom of a friend of mine started encouraging us to make jewelry,” she says. “Growing up, I used to make necklaces with plastic heads and small dolls and miniature plastic things.”

For glass artist Steven Cornett, function is an important aspect of the creative process. “I got interested in glass when I was a college freshman,” he says. “I was studying art and learning metalworking and sculpture. One day, a friend showed me a blown-glass pitcher that a professor had made. I liked that it was something you could use and that it was art, so I visited a glass class, and I was hooked on glass-blowing.”

For Mar Goman, art is what you make out of the materials you have at hand. “I call myself a multimedia artist,” she says. “The media itself isn’t as important as what you make out of it. I’ll use found objects, old paper, fabrics and rusty metal. I go to junk shops and antiques shops and even old garbage dumps.”

Most people see a shovel purely as a gardening implement, but when metalsculptor Joseph Warren looks at atool, he sees the beginnings of an animal. “A shovel makes a good chest piece,” he says. “A pickaxe can be a spine.”

In 1961, when she was 23, Margaret Thierry moved from her hometown of St. Louis, Mo., to New York City, where she discovered she could be an artist. “While waitressing, I made friends with a bunch of artists,” she says. “They were always talking about art, so I started going to museums to see what the big deal was and to be able to contribute to conversations. After a year, I was hooked on art.”

After graduating from college, most people try to find a job in their field. Furnituremaker Philip Culbertson took a different route. “I got a degree in behavioral zoology at the University of Michigan in the 1970s,” he says, “but I was tired of using my brain, so I got a job in a cabinet shop outside Washington, D.C., and I stayed there for six years.”