Drawing Class Dropout No More

Credits

Creative Directors: Ellie Alexander and Joyclyn Goldade
Illustrators: Connor Blacksher, Hannah Murzyn, Amy Disselkamp, and Noah Langworthy

Background

I swear I’ve told this story to enough people that it might be getting old, but I’m going to keep going with it. I was a sophomore at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Trying to knock out my pre-requisites for the design program, normal things. I had signed up for intro to drawing with an unnamed professor (bc I’m salty, but not petty) and was mortified.

Turns out I was right to be mortified. It was a rough class. I wasn’t able to get as much instruction and guidance as I would have liked. Among other things, it was a booger of a semester and I was able to withdraw from that class. Phew.

Able to draw now, who dis?

Fast forward to 2020. Apparently, while the world takes a gigantic dookie, I suddenly become less fearful and apprehensive of drawing and doodling. While evaluating all the content that Life Time is producing for The Source, the idea of doing editorial illustrations came up. Up to this point I had done some random little one-off icons. Dinky stuff. The first one I got brought in for was for an article on Quercetin 🤷‍♂️. I still don’t fully know what it is tbh. After reading the article and doing some sketches I came back with this:

I’m still into this. It was a fun lil’ one to make.

It was met positively, but there was some ambiguity to it and why the fruits and veggies were there (they were in the article, I’m not that good at making stuff up). In a revision, we landed on the skeletal formula for simplicity and a nod to the knowledge we have of the chemical.

Never took chemistry, so here goes? 🤷‍♂️

Getting to do more?

Somehow I was able to stay on the draw squad and continue working on an illustration a week with my fellow illustrators? It feels like the universe is giving me a second crack at that drawing class in this exercise. An assignment on a Monday, talking to classmates (co-workers) throughout the week about their project, and crit on Friday. It’s a trip.

Like I said, it’s bonkers to have been able to work on such a wide variety of things like this.

“We get it, you use Procreate”

Somewhere around the time that we were painting our garage, I started lobbying to grab an iPad Pro. Half for fun, half for work and things like this. Also half because I watched too much Gal Shir and it looked like so much fun. Outside of work-related things I’ve been trying to just doodle more and more and take inspiration/learn from illustrators and styles that I like. Here are the fruits of that labor: