Maddie’s Art Journey
From a young age, I always enjoyed creating. Whether it was coloring, doodling, or painting, I loved a creative project. A lot of my childhood was spent exploring different creative avenues. My elementary school ran summer camps, so I did a bunch of their art focused classes, learning drawing basics, like shading, and drawing from life. To continue this exploration year round, we found a local place offering classes for kids of all ages and abilities. At Art Lab, I played around with new mediums and canvases, including sculpting with clay, creating mixed medium work, and painting on my first canvas. I developed my art skills more and learned how to clean up and take care of supplies for each medium. These Art Lab classes helped me gain more confidence in my work, even at such a young age.
Outside of traditional art mediums, I also enjoyed creating jewelry and beading. A local beading place also offered summer camps where we created our own pieces of jewelry from earrings, bracelets, necklaces, and anklets. I loved curating jewelry sets and picking out the perfect bead combination for the person I was making each piece for.
These camps and classes slowly faded out of my schedule as swimming took over, but I never truly left creating behind.
Freshman year of high school, I took my first dedicated drawing classes. Every Friday, we laid out our sketchbooks across a table and shared one page of our work from the week with the class. Other school work and swim practice kept me pretty busy, so I often only had one sketch to share, but I’m glad this forced me to practice sketching each week.
One of my favorite art pieces I’ve ever made was from one of my drawing classes. We were tasked with bringing in a portrait photo to reference, so I chose to bring a photo of young Leo DiCaprio (I’m not even a big fan, he was just the first person that came to mind and honestly had a great reference photo). For this project, we drew a grid on both our reference photo and our paper. Grids are typically very helpful to place everything and proportion things out, especially when working on a larger canvas or paper, so this wasn’t an unusual concept, but for this specific project, we were asked to focus on each individual box on its own. There were a few styles my teacher suggested to us to tackle this. I chose to do more of a shaded, sketched style instead of line work for the majority of the portrait. I loved seeing the portrait come together, even though I was focused on the full picture; it was almost like magic. This piece gave me a lot of confidence in my art and is still a technique I use today.
I took several more classes throughout high school and enjoyed all of them. My teacher was very encouraging and let us take a lot of creative liberty with the projects he assigned. I’ve never been a fan of drawing from life (I enjoy using my creative mind to make things up), so anytime we had a project that made us do it from life, he would let me mix in some creativity. He encouraged me to test out different styles and mediums and was super helpful figuring out how to move through bigger projects and learn about my own creative process. Overall, my high school art experience was extremely positive and something I look back on very fondly.
When it came to college, I stepped away from my creativity. I occasionally sketched as a stress reliever, but course work kept me busier and busier. Art classes were difficult to get into since they had limited seats and rarely worked out with my major class schedule, so I never ended up taking one.
After grad school while working my first full time corporate job, I got back into coloring as a way to calm my stress and anxiety. A friend had recommended some alcohol markers and I fell in love with them. I slowly started drawing again and the popsicle drawings were the first to come to life. My new markers felt perfect for these fun drawings, and made me want to keep creating. After leaving that job a few months later, I spent a lot more time exploring my creativity again and began sharing some of my sketches online.
Through sharing my work on instagram and Tik Tok, I was able to land a creative assistant role with a small business and spent 8 months designing graphics for their apparel. Working this job opened my eyes to life in a creative career. After leaving, it only felt fitting to give life as a fine artist a go.
The first year of Maddie Bebout Designs brought a lot of exploration. I took a few classes to learn more styles, like design sketching, new technology (I’m pretty much self taught in Illustrator but this helped fill some gaps), and color theory. I spent most days playing around with different mediums (texture was one of my favorites at the time) and getting used to creating on a regular basis again. It had been quite awhile since I had taken art seriously, so it definitely took some time to get back into my groove.
Spending so much time creating helped me hone in on my style and made me feel even more secure in my decision to pursue an art career. While my inspirations and goals have adjusted over time (and likely will continue to evolve), I feel like I’ve found what makes my work unique to me.
Below are some of my pieces from high school classes and some of my first sketches back after leaving my corporate job. And, of course, I had to include some photos of little Maddie for your entertainment.
