The Story of How I Became an Illustrator

When I was a little girl, my sister and I once had our portrait drawn by a caricaturist on the street. I remember looking at his markers and being amazed and envious. I was often frustrated with my Crayola markers because they only had two tones: full saturation and bleeding-through-the-page saturation. (I'm not sure if I'm using these art terms correctly; bear with me.) But I thought that this was just how markers were: inherently incapable of depicting muted colors (i.e. my skin tone) or blending well.

Then I saw this professional illustrator with his fancy markers getting all blendy and realistic looking and I was blown away. I. Wanted. Those. Markers. But I was pretty sure that you had to be a grown up to get markers like that. I don't know if I even asked my parents.

Flash forward 15 years and I'm at a yard sale in Jamaica Plain. The punk anarchist guy who is getting rid of his shit happens to be an art student. He has a whole bag of these fancy professional markers and even though half of them are the same tone of gray, my inner self is pleading with him, "HOW MUCH FOR THE WHOLE BAG?" He says a couple bucks and I am now the proud owner of real art markers. I even have enough colors to draw a convincing picture of my parents' house with a big, imagined "Happy birthday, Mom!" banner on the front of it for (you guessed it) my mom's birthday. I just have to use a highlighter for the lawn, which my dad, not knowing about my marker situation, notices has a different texture than all of the other colors. He tells me how impressed he is by the realistic looking grass-texture.

A couple months go by, and one day I'm strolling around Boomerangs (local thrift store) when I see what I now regard as one of my best thrift shop finds of all time: An unopened box of 20 art markers! And there are no grays! I would like to take this moment to thank whoever donated this box of markers.

Thank you.

Now that I have professional grade markers in every color, I am officially an illustrator! 8-year-old me has never been so proud.

Here are some things I've drawn since The Big Day at Boomerangs.

76 house portrait

Eric portrait (the original sketch was done with my eyes closed, and then I colored it in)

Rain cloud