Crista Forest was born in Southern California where she grew up and still lives to date. She’s been drawing animals since she was old enough to hold a crayon. Much to her mother’s chagrin, many of her earliest masterpieces were images of Bambi drawn on table tops, walls, and any other flat surface she could find. It's unfortunate that her parents discouraged the idea of art as a career path and, as she neared adulthood, she was strongly encouraged to seek a more "practical" subject to study in school. But she ended up being an artist. Bambi was her first love as a very young child and she spent a lot of time Bambi and other deer. Later she went through a phase in which she loved horses. There were stacks of paper piled high all over her room with images of horses. At the age of 13 Crista’s father bought her a horse. This helped tremendously to improve her art; watching the movements of the animals, working with them every day, and learning about their behaviors, taught her a lot about horses’ mannerisms and anatomy.
A lot of what she learned about horse movement and anatomy could be applied, to other ungulates such as antelope, deer, etc, with just a little modification. It was in her teens, while being around horses, that she first started experimenting with oil painting. At the beginning her paintings were fanciful such as unicorns and flying horses. But, although she grew up in the city, her father took her on frequent weekend camping trips, so her interest in nature grew stronger and gradually her paintings moved more towards realism and nature.
