After Lockheed "downsized" me in 1993...
(along with 20,000 others), I was hired at SEGA of America (1994-95) as a digital animator. The man who hired me had been an art director at Disney Studios, and he was simply looking for people who could draw well, and had some computer graphics experience. He believed that he could teach me the software easier than he could teach someone to draw. He bragged to me that he was in a position to hire his childhood heros - legendary comic book artists! In the year that I was there Genesis, the SEGA 3D platform, eclipsed Nintendo, and the rush was on to transform the gaming industry from 2D to 3D. Mortal Combat and Jurassic Park were also released at that time, and raised the bar for digital artists everywhere. As a result, there were two distinct career paths open to artists in the mid 90's: 1.) 3D for the entertainment - film, animation & videogame industry, and 2.) the web for everything else. I didn't know anything about the web at the time, but I felt that it was an easier transition to make than 3D. Ten years later, I still wonder!
Photoshop, Illustrator, HTML
In '96 and '97 I worked on 2D animation projects for The Learning Company (1996) and Computer Curriculum Corporation (1997). They were doing the same thing that SEGA was: re-rendering existing products to make them look more 3D. I created both raster (Photoshop) and vector (Illustrator and Flash) digital art for software applications and games. For a time, I also did technical (vector) illustration again for the defense industry, contracts for Loral, Northrop Grummann, Westinghouse, and Lockheed.
But it was learning HTML in 1998 that changed everything...