Sam Day was born July 22, 1964, the second of six children, in the agricultural desert of the Columbia Basin, Washington State. His father, Terence L. Day, was raised on a farm and became a self educated journalist. The elder Mr. Day became well respected in the field of agricultural journalism in the 1970s, and was offered a position on the faculty of Washington State University in Pullman. As the young artist was developing, his father's connections with newspapers provided early opportunities. At the age of 11, Sam began illustrating his father's articles on Pacific Northwest history. During his teen age years, his political cartoons accompanied his father's editorial column for local newspapers. He also cartooned for the student newspaper of the university, although he was still a student of the local high school.

Mr. Day moved to Seattle to study fine art at Cornish College of the Arts. But concern for the difficulties of earning a living as a painter persuaded him to transfer to The Art Institute of Seattle, where he studied illustration and graphic design, taking a degree in Visual Communications. He worked briefly as an assistant art director at the seattle Weekly, and then set out forever to be a freelance illustrator and artist.

Over the years, hundreds of diverse assignments have come from clients all over North America, and some of his work has been published in Europe, Australia, and Asia. For many years he has worked with advertising agencies, creating story boards for television commercials for the Seattle Mariners, Coca-Cola, and Starbucks. His cartoons have appeared in national magazines such as Reader's Digest, and he has illustrated print ads for international companies such as Microsoft, Siemens, and AT&T. He has illustrated instruction manuals for Nintendo, textbooks for Harcourt Brace and Oxford University Press, and corporate publications for Mazda and Boeing. During guest appearances at special events, he has drawn caricatures of thousands of people, as many as 400 in a day. People sometimes have waited in queue for over an hour, to have their likeness drawn in 60 seconds.

For ten years Mr. Day worked almost exclusively in a whimsical, cartoony style. But when a slow period in the economy afforded him him some spare time, he rediscovered painting. He is now developing a second, parallel career as a realistic portrait painter, and his first solo gallery show opens in June, 2002.