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.”

A childhood dream of becoming an animator led painter Marcus Gannuscio to become interested in learning to draw the human form. “When I was 12, I saw ‘The Lion King’ and decided I wanted to be an animator,” he says. “My mother actually contacted someone at Disney to find out what I’d need to do to become one, and the person’s advice was to concentrate on learning to draw figures and anatomy.”

Issuing an artistic challenge to his industrial design students at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., metal artist and industrial design professor Arunas Oslapas took it up himself.  “I asked them to intercept garbage and make something from it—and I’d do the same,” he says.