Virgil Elliott was fortunate enough to have been the first son of Dollye McAlister Elliott, a schoolteacher and amateur artist, who began his art education in the second year of his life. The first lesson kindled a lifelong burning obsession with art, and his talents developed rapidly with constant practice drawing, and, later, painting. The excellent instruction of illustrators Robert Fawcett, Albert Dorne, Austin Briggs, Steven Dohanos, Harold Von Schmidt and others, via correspondence course, helped him tremendously,and by his late teens, he was an accomplished draftsman and competent oil painter.