When I was about 16 I sent a bunch of drawings into Seventeen Magazine in the US and this one was published!
As part of the Artists in Business course I’m currently doing I’ve been revisiting my journey of making art and this memory came up. I was wondering how I’d be able to track it down as I couldn’t remember which issue it had been in and knew that my old magazine collection had been cleared out of my mom’s house long ago.
Well perhaps a week later this picture arrived in my facebook inbox! It was from a woman I didn’t know. As a teen, she had collected these drawings from the magazine that people had sent in, and had recently come across them in a notebook. She was curious to look up the names and she found me on facebook! So crazy!
I used to draw dozens of these fashion girl characters only a couple centimeters tall. It was about the outfits, the hairstyles, the colours, the hobbies and how they all fit together. This girl was a futuristic, flying saucer riding, jumpsuit (and glove) wearing, badass red-head and reminds me of the Prodigy song ‘Firestarter’ which was in heavy rotation in my CD player at the time.
20 plus years later and I’m still compelled to create images of strong women and their outfits.
What is your teenage connection to what you’re doing now?