Justin Bernardy
Ettie Wahl was perhaps one of the most engaging guest speakers we have had thus far; she had an inspiring story about her current success. In that story, she spoke about her creative process and implored all of us to explore a moment in the natural world that sparks Our creativity. My mind immediately gravitated towards abandoned or very old buildings/towns etc. that you may come across in certain parts of the city or on a countryside.
There’s something about them that almost feels nostalgic, maybe because you can see the building’s age and it makes us think back to our own past. Seeing abandoned places makes you think about what the building was once used for, the kind of people who came and went within it, and how old it is, or maybe even why it was abandoned in the first place. That nostalgic feeling tends to spark our imaginations and we create stories to fill in the blanks about this unfamiliar place. For me, it inspires illustration, even if it’s just a quick and messy iteration of whatever thoughts were stirred in me. I’ve included an example of a building I saw in Bellevue and quickly drew in the past. Something I noticed much later after drawing the image was that maybe I captured the wrong mood. In the image, the building looks bright and peaceful, but in my iteration it’s almost dystopian looking, maybe because of the more dreary colors and also the angle of the building. Which in a sense, lends itself to the idea that we generate our own stories to fill in these gaps of information about abandoned places.
