 Hello there. I'm Sandy Allnach. Welcome to my YouTube channel. And I am an artist celebrating her 10th anniversary. And an anniversary is celebrating a decade as an independent artist. And I love milestones, and this is a big one. So all month long, I'm celebrating by revisiting an old project of some kind. And today I'm going to be revisiting the Children's Illustrator series that I did a while ago, creating a piece that incorporates some aspect of a favorite children's illustrator. And this one is going to be about Gay Holland. She may not be a household name to a lot of you because she doesn't have a ton of books out there, but she was my graphic design and illustration professor in college. So she poured out a lot into me in a short period of time. And we lost touch after I graduated and things, but I really appreciate all that she gave me as an artist and made me a lot of who I am today. Spent a lot of time during the drawing that I'm doing, thinking about conversations we had and how much I appreciated her. This book is one that was written and illustrated by her. The others that I have here are ones that she just did the illustrations for. And this one is very much a Gay Holland book. It's about bugs and it's kind of written for boys because there's some creepy stuff about the bugs in there that is written for like totally to excite little boys who love bugs. So that was, you know, just a fun thing to revisit and thinking, yep, that's pretty much what what Gay would have written. I could totally see that happening. But she loved drawing any kind of nature and flowers and bugs and animals and things and did it in lovely fashion in colored pencil. But this book is the one that's inspiring partly what I'm going to be drawing today. I'm going to be doing a bee and she did all honey bees, which aren't the fuzzy bees, but I want to do a fuzzy bee. So I'm going to be doing a buff tailed bumble bee. Had to look that up because he has a white tail to him and hers are all honey bees though. And she has all these different layouts. She was a graphic design professor. So she has varying amounts of white space. I love the way she designs her pages stuff. Just beautiful, beautiful books. And you can look for her in used bookstores, especially. There's still some of her books out there. There's a little bit on Amazon at used bookstores that have Amazon pages. You can get some of her beautiful work. So this was a drawing that I did of a bee when I was in high school before I met gay. So that's what I used to use pencil like. I don't know what I did. I cut out that flower. I glued it on orange paper and then glued it on black paper. I don't know what I was doing, but we're going to see how I can update this and make it a better drawing today. Okay, let's do it. Gay Holland was hired at my university in, I believe it was my sophomore year. The school had just started their graphic design program at the time and the drawing teacher started by teaching the graphic design classes. And I love taking them from her. I loved anything she taught because we got along really great. She was an easy critiquer. She was very kind and gay got a reputation immediately by the students who took her classes for being tough. She had harder assignments. She had stricter deadlines. She was very direct in critiques like very, very direct and she also required a portfolio review before you could even get into her class. So being a self-respecting college student who was taking great pride in being lazy. I did not sign up for her classes right away. In my junior year, the art department changed policies and said if you were going to graduate with a degree in graphic design, you had to take classes from both teachers. Oh my gosh. So I spent my summer before my senior year getting my portfolio ready for this, only to find out when I sat down with her that she said I would never get a job in graphic design with that portfolio. I was a little bit crushed to say the least. I was in a panic. She probably saw that look on my face, but she did say she could see some talent. She would allow me in the class if I committed to really working hard because she wanted me to be successful and be able to get a job when I left the school. And I wanted that too, so I agreed to it. I said I would and her first couple assignments did not prove easy at all. She was tough, but I learned more from her even in those first few weeks than I had in multiple classes from the drawing teacher. So it was a good thing for me. It was good, hard medicine. In about November, I think it was in that first semester of my senior year, my roommates were getting on my nerves. They were just party animals and I couldn't get all my work done because it was just so loud all the time. And I mentioned that to Gay. Probably I think it was as an excuse for not getting my work done on time. And she said, well, I do have a room for rent. I have not found anybody yet. If you want to rent a room, you can come live here. So I did. I moved in with my professor. We had nice boundaries set between us so that she didn't feel like a school mom in my life and I didn't feel like I was living with my mom. But we did have a lot of art time together. We'd sit evening after evening at her dining room table, which had a fabulous light, a chandelier overhead that was excellent for doing art by. And Gay would work on her children's illustrations and I would work on whatever I was doing as an assignment for whatever class. But this was not tutoring time. She made it very clear. She did not get paid to teach me every single day. So I got very good at asking questions that would get to the heart of what I was struggling with but not be a very specific kind of question, if you know what I mean. For example, there was one day I remember I was working on trying to draw pairs. The assignment was to do some packaging and we had to make a mock-up where we'd wrap a piece of paper around the can with our design on it. And I wanted this to be something for pairs. So I was trying to draw the pairs and I just was struggling with trying to make them look realistic enough. I wanted it to be a photograph for the can of pairs but we didn't have computers. We didn't have, you know, color printers and that sort of thing to do any of this with. We had to illustrate them by hand. So I asked her for her perspective on the difference between illustration, photo illustration and photography. Like what did she see as the benefits and everything of each one? And one of the things she said in that conversation was to adapt from reality, don't replicate reality. And what she meant by that was as artists we have the ability to change reality. A photographer can only do so much of that. Some of that is done after they take their photograph and they can manipulate it. But as artists, we can choose whether or not that shadow is going to be as deep as it is in reality or deeper. We can choose whether there's going to be certain kinds of colors in a highlight that's going to add a different atmosphere to it. We can choose how to build up colors to create what we want as opposed to just waiting for the camera and figuring out the right settings to try to capture as much of what's in front of us as we can. That doesn't take away from people who do hyper realism either because she said people who do hyper realism can still make adaptations from that realistic thing. You're trying to do a hyper realistic portrait. Then you can bring in a color from elsewhere to put into the face shadows. If there's blue on a wall, you can put a little blue in the shadows that maybe a camera can't capture but is going to make the whole picture work better. Photographers have their place, artists have their place and she encouraged me not to really worry so much about hyper realism and trying to be that realistic. It's really freed me up from trying to be so perfect and trying to get everything exact. Another of my genius questions was what is your favorite aspect of color theory that you use all the time in your artwork? Her answer was just perfect. She said using complementary colors to make shadows and desaturated colors. And she got so excited about it. It turned into a little tutoring session because she grabbed a scrap of paper and started showing me how things like using purples to shade yellows makes a more natural kind of shadow color for a yellow. And I was like, oh my goodness, the things I can use this for. And I later discovered I could use the same complementary colors using my alcohol markers. I could do it with watercolor, both in glazing or in mixing colors that are complements. It's color theory and color theory works throughout all the mediums. And it's one reason why you'll hear about that a lot in my classes and here on my YouTube channel because it does amazing things. So give it a try if you haven't before. I remember another discussion we had about colored pencil in particular, but it applies to other things I've found over my lifetime because I just wanted to know why she was the only person that I knew that got the kind of texture that she got from colored pencils. Because I know a lot of people who use them and they were either very sketchy styles or they would use a blending pencil or a blending solution to try to get a smooth look. And I just wanted to know like, what are you doing? How did you come to this? And why do you spend all this time doing it? And she talked a lot about embracing your art supplies, embracing them for what they're naturally going to do for you. Instead of trying to make pencils look like a different medium by applying all these things to them, then why not just take advantage of the properties that the pencil has? Similar things can be said of other mediums. I know there's a ton of alcohol marker artists who absolutely obsess over getting every blend to be positively perfect. And by positively perfect, they're comparing their artwork made by hand to something that's maybe computer generated. It's that smooth because it's done on a machine. And in these days of AI, I hope art can get back to embracing the medium that we're using in all of its glory because that's the one thing AI is not going to be able to replicate. While I worked on this drawing, I was consciously trying to remember the conversations that I'd had with Gay all those years ago. I mean, it was so long ago. Some of it just kind of comes in little flits. But one lesson that I wish I had hung on to more over the years came back as I was thinking about this particular drawing that she was working on for what felt like weeks. I don't know if it was weeks, but it seemed like every time we sat down, the same drawing was in front of her and she was working on a full flood background. So it had color over the whole thing and you're seeing how long that can take with colored pencil just watching this one happening. And I remember asking her, aren't you sick of that yet? Aren't you ready to just throw it out the window? Because I just thought I could never do a drawing that large as large as she was working on it and that much of one color. Oh my goodness. I just thought she was crazy. And she just looked up at me and smiled and said, you know, art takes as long as it takes. I'm so glad that I had the length of time that this background took to get to the memory of this conversation because I have completely lost that in my art. A lot of things I avoid doing or I changed some parameters of them because it's going to take too long if I do that thing. If I make a drawing that's going to be that large, I'll shrink it down. If it's going to be in one medium but it's going to take too long, I'll change the medium just because I have that social media schedule. Gotta get something done or I have a schedule for classes. I got to pay some bills. I got to go launch a class. I'm going to do this quick thing instead of just doing art in the time that it takes to get the art done. There's some things that just take a little longer and that's okay. And I got to remember that. Before we take a look at the finished drawing, I want to remind you that there is a Zoom party coming up this weekend and all the date, time, links, everything you need to know is in ArtVenture. So go to ArtVenture and go to the Events tab on the left-hand side. There should be an event there that has all the information inside of it for how you can come to the party and maybe win a prize. So here is Gay's book and my high school illustration compared now with my grown-up illustration. And I think I've grown over the years. The really distant leaves in the background that are out of focus make that be, really come into focus and he becomes like the main thing. I just love how this one came out. It was just an honor to do this and think about Gay. Thank you to her for all she poured into me and hopefully a little bit of that got spilled out onto you. And this is available for purchase either the original on my website or you can also get it on Society Six so you can go buy print. So that's about it for me for today. I will see you guys this weekend at the big party. See you then.