How I began my life as an illustrator

Have you ever wondered how someone becomes an illustrator?  For me, it has been a circuitous path that started in fifth grade at St. Dominic School in Shaker Hts., Ohio.  That year, we actually had an honest-to-goodness art teacher.  She was a young sister - a large, friendly woman with dark, curly hair.  And, she taught us how to draw people!

Her technique was to draw loose loops and ovals for the hip, trunk, limbs and head.  A lightly drawn line was used to indicate the spine.

This picture shows what a drawing using this technique looks like:

Being able to draw people thrilled me.  I had been given a key to a new world, similar to gaining the key of reading.  I started annoying everyone in my family, making people pose for me so that I could draw them.  I copied Rembrandt and daVinci drawings.  I pestered an artist, Florian Lawton, who lived down the street, to guide me.  He did so with grace and patience.  I copied people out of magazines.  I drew constantly.

My mother enrolled me in Saturday life drawing classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art.  It was the first time in my life that I felt totally comfortable - I had found my people.

Years passed.  I took art classes in high school.  Then I stopped, because art was not a realistic career.

Happily, I took a watercolor class at a local community college when I was a young adult. Our teacher taught us how to draw in perspective, so that "things would look real".  He had given me another key.  Like that little kid I was so long ago, I started drawing everything in perspective until I understood the process.

From that point, I drew and painted with watercolors often.  One day, I told my ever-patient husband that I was going to do art for a living.  I assured him that I would quit if I didn't make any money in a year.  "But you have an M.B.A.!" he cried.  He gave me a year.  That was over thirty years ago.  He has only bugged me a few times about my promise.  (He is going straight to heaven.)

Next time, I will tell you the story of how writing and illustrating The Little Cleveland, my fictionalized family memoir, finally got me into the Illustration business.