My personal history of art education has been mostly positive and encouraging. When I look back, the parts that I thought weren’t so great have only made me stronger and more determined to teach others what I think is right.
MY PERSONAL ART BACKGROUND
To begin with, I just want to say that I am so very lucky to have extremely supportive parents who have encouraged me all my life to do whatever makes me happy. I asked my parents about their families to try and find out if there was a history of any artists throughout the generations. There was no one who was interested in or pursued art on my mom’s side. My dad’s family, however, was rich with artists and handicraftsmen. My dad’s mom used oil paints to paint the beautiful landscapes and scenes of the ranches she grew up on and the places she had been. She painted on whatever she could find, mostly tree stumps and pieces of wood that had been smoothed down and lacquered (or something that produced a glossy finish). Her son, Doug and his daughter Tammy, painted and even sold some of their paintings on the side. My dad has done some woodcarving and leather tooling. To do this he used an old granite tombstone to lay the leather on and proceeded to tool (emboss the design on the leather). My dad also worked at a metal building company where he worked as a salesman and designed and drafted metal buildings.
According to my dad, I started making art around the age of 2 “as soon as I could pick up a pencil.” He said that I had every coloring book available in the stores and that I would draw on anything and everything with markers, pencils, and crayons. He chuckled when he recalled my “relationships” with my mediums. I treated all of my art supplies so good and took very good care of each of them as if they were my dolls. When I asked my dad if and when he knew I was going to grow up making art my living, he replied, “Gosh ever since you were little you could entertain yourself for half the day drawing and making stuff, I knew then.”
I grew up on a ranch, 30 minutes away from civilization in all directions. Because my dad worked in town and at the ranch, and my mom stayed home and raised us, we were a very bare-necessity kind of family. For the most part, the only time we received toys were on Christmas and our birthdays. I loved those days because I could restock all of my art supplies and kits, but in the meantime, my two sisters and I had to get creative with playtime. I remember one summer day, my sisters and I ran out of crayons, we went outside and gathered Mexican Hats, Indian Paintbrushes (wildflowers of all sorts and colors), and grasses and smeared them all over drawing paper to test out all the natural colors the petals and blades of grass would make. We experimented with a lot of natural resources – we tried to make “glue” out of milk thistle because we knew how sticky its sap was. We used branches and rust and any and everything under the sun to create and experiment and learn about art. These parts of my life, from the earliest of my days until I was 10, were the best art lessons I could ever receive.
When I hit junior high, my school started to offer art classes. We tried everything from painting to drawing to sculpting with clay. Although I don’t remember much about this time period, I do recall watching art videos on how to draw dimensional objects and how to make origami and many crafts.
High school art was great. My teacher, Mrs. Howell, was so wonderful – she did everything she could to provide her classrooms with a great art experience using very limited resources. Sure there were the some days that drug on for me, such as the technical (but necessary) side of art education and keeping up with our daily sketchbook homework assignments. One of the projects she had us do was pretty incredible. We took down all the windows on the inside of the classrooms and painted them in a stain glass effect to correspond with the subject that was taught in that classroom. When I talked to my mom who is an elementary school teacher at Junction, she said that it was so sad because they did some remodeling in the high school and replaced all the windows we had painted. Another fantastic project we worked on was making a drawing book from scratch. Mine took almost a whole year to complete because I hand drew the front and back cover, hand marbled (a technique we had learned earlier in the year) the pastedowns, hand sewn the pages together, and bound the whole thing. My teacher also took us on the most educational field trips to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, The Kimble Museum, a Tibetan sand blowing ritual (in San Angelo), and an art show in Snyder (at Western Texas College). It was this art show at Western Texas College that made me realize that I wasn’t even close to par with other art students, and even though I always wanted to create art for a living, I knew I would never be a successful studio artist. I was really fascinated by psychology, beautiful typefaces and symbols, color theory, images, and composition so it only seemed natural for me to explore graphic design.
HOW I WISH TO TEACH OTHERS ABOUT ART EDUCATION (GRAPHIC DESIGN/COMPUTER GRAPHICS)
College is definitely the most important years to a future career person’s life. I felt that my college did a fine job preparing me for the work force, however, I also felt that there were some lessons and/or courses that could have been added to make transitioning into the “real world” much more successful and easier. I believe this so much that it has inspired me to work toward getting a masters degree so that I may teach design communications at a higher education level. After learning the basics and principles of graphic design, I think that creating some classes that emulate the different place one could work with a design communications degree would ensure students more job opportunities. When studying design, I was under the impression that the only options I had was to work at a design firm or do freelance work. I didn’t know until I graduated that there were many other avenues to explore.
My first design job when I graduated was in a print shop. It was a complete shock when I worked there, even though I had trained in my field for 5 years, I could barely do any of the tasks and prepressing that was required of me. I learned more about design programs and printers working there than I did in my whole college career. My next job was working at Thrifty Nickel. That was also a shock because before working here and the print shop, I never knew how to work with bosses and clients and I figured out real quick there was more to a graphic design job than just designing. Because of these jobs, I want to teach college class(es) that teach students how to work in these type of conditions. One of the classes would be how to work in a print shop. This training would include teaching students how to pre-press for all types of printers, set up screen print work orders, design for every type of “real-life” client, understand how to work with bosses/supervisors, time management (print shops expect one to pre-press and design at least 20 work orders a day), how to read and understand work orders/requests, the math behind design (designing with multi-dimensions in mind such as car wraps, billboard wrapping, retainers, visual openings, etc.). I would include field trips to different types of large-scale and publication print shops and assign actual projects from these print shops.
Another class could be training on newspaper/tabloid jobs and would include training on paginating (laying out multiple, complex pages), photography, advertisement design, illustrating for newspapers, understanding all types of clients and supervisors, managing work flow, and prepressing pages for final print. Field trips could be organized to places such as Daily Toreador, Thrifty Nickel, and Lubbock Avalanche-Journal followed by completing actual work orders from these businesses.
Even though I was told I could do some freelance graphic design work to make a living, I was never told how to go about doing that. Another class that I think would be helpful for students is to create freelance courses that would include everything they need to know to be self-employed. This would cover things like website building, résumés, portfolios, how to build a client base, information regarding all types of clients, understanding how to outsource to printers, how to start up as a freelance designer (creating a business name, going to the Small Business Administration to register for a business license), legalities of freelancing (compensation, preventing lawsuits, taxes and accounting), quoting and pricing services, time management, etc.
CONCLUSION
I am very excited to help students be successful in graphic design, and I think I really could do this because I have a lot of beneficial experience that would ensure most of my students’ successes after graduation. Even with the economy on the fritz, I have seen that design communications isn’t going anywhere – in fact there are plenty of different types of graphic design jobs out there, you just have to know where to look.
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