Dropping out of college, roughing it in motels, working up a mountain: the US artist tells Gary evans about the high and lows of a roller-coaster career.
Sachin Teng hadn’t been to bed for six days straight. She was busy preparing for a show – Pratt Institute’s notorious end-of-semester exhibition known as Survey. Everybody from the college was going to be there and, more importantly, so were the people from the Society of Illustrators. Sachin was flagging. She decided to have a power nap, another of the hour-long snoozes that kept her going this past week. She finds an empty classroom, makes a bed out of a couple of drawing benches, and closes her eyes.
Before Pratt, Sachin worked mainly in monochrome, pen or pencil drawings, still-life, line art. In 2007, she enrolled in communication design, focusing on illustration, but during her first year she almost failed a couple of classes. The New York college made her realise she wasn’t as advanced as some of her peers.
In the past, teachers preached lofty ideas about art: what art was, what art did. They said all the stuff Sachin was into – comics, movies, video games – that wasn’t real art.
Pratt believed otherwise. Communication design was a fancy way of saying commercial art – art for money. Here teachers taught Sachin how to get clients, run a business, market herself. They showed her how to do the one thing every working artist must learn to do: pay the rent. They set tight deadlines because tight deadlines are the reality of art for money. The Survey event was Sachin’s chance to put this into practice.
The artist woke up from her hourlong power nap and saw the classroom was now full. A group of sophomores were in the middle of critique session. The students left Sachin to sleep because they were all in the same position: busy preparing for Pratt’s end-of-semester exhibition.
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Denne historien er fra April 2019-utgaven av ImagineFX.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
Jan Wessbecher
Dominic Carter talks to the visual artist about creating his own comic and why sketchbooks are great for creative experiments
Kyounghwan Kim
The Korean character concept artist speaks to Dominic Carter about staying open to ideas and the value of drawing regularly
Slawek Fedorczuk
Dominic Carter talks to the concept artist about what keeps him motivated and the advantages of using physical sketchbooks.
Raquel M. Varela
Raquel is inspired by magic, fantasy and fairy tales. She loves designing female characters from distant worlds. \"My greatest reference is Loish's art, thanks to her I learned to draw the movement and fluidity I like to convey.\"
Estrela Lourenço
Estrela is a children's book author and illustrator. Her work is influenced by her background in character animation and storyboards for clients such as Cartoon Network, and she channels comic strips like Calvin and Hobbes.
Daria Widermanska
Daria, also known as Anako, has been drawing for as long as she can remember. Inspired by Disney and classic anime, she loves creating new characters and often finds that a single sketch can spark a unique story.
Allen Douglas
Allen has been painting professionally since 1994 for the publishing and gaming industries. Inspired by folklore, he distorts the size, relationships and environments of animals, and calls his paintings 'unusual wildlife'.
Thaddeus Robeck
Thaddeus has been drawing from the moment he could hold a pencil, but it was the 2020 lockdowns that gave him the time to focus on honing his skills.
DRAW FASCINATING SYMBOLIC ARTWORK
Learn how JULIÁN DE LA MOTA creates a composition from his imagination with a focus on crafting figures, volumetric modelling, and light and shadow
First Impressions
The artist talks about his journey into the mythological world