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Melinda Beck

Melinda Beck is considered an illustrator and graphic designer who has done quite successfully for her young age. She started getting involved in the arts at an early age, taking life drawing classes at ten years old. At first she wanted to make everything that she drew as realistic as possible but gradually, as she got more into her creative side, she wanted to make things look the way they feel. At first I thought her illustrations were boring and they all looked the same, but as she put them up on the projector and started explaining what the requirements were and how she went about creating an illustration for the commission I began to understand and my opinion of her artwork changed in her favor.

I remember, one of her illustrations showed a person with their neck attached to the body with corset strings feeding cake to a little bee, and little bees and flowers around the person, and I thought, so what? What's so interesting about this? and she explained that it was something to do with french business or something boring like that (her words, not mine) and she immediately thought of marie antoinette, and how if marie antoinette had fed her little worker bees cake they might not have beheaded her. In the illustration, the whole corset string image was because the worker bees felt sorry so they were trying to sew her head back on because she had fed them cake. She also said that most of the articles that she drew pictures to were extremely boring, so she wanted to make non boring illustrations that related to the article, but maybe in not so obvious a way.

She also explained how her art went through transformations over the years, how she started in one style, but became interested in something and incorporated it into her illustrations, and how that gradually changed the look of her stuff. A particular example is when she became interested in silhouettes and started to do a lot of her commissioned stuff in silhouettes: Melinda Beck's Silhouettes

All this stuff that she explained about her ideas and inspiration was very helpful and interesting, but what I found most helpful was the information she gave on what having a job in the arts is really like. It isn't glamorous at all and doesn't really pay that much, and apparently insurance is very very expensive, and the time one puts into it is usually more than the average work week, and you can't party all night and get up the next morning thinking you can put in a full day's work at whatever you're doing, and if you have kids it's even worse because it's hard to take care of them and do your art at the same time. Yet, she also explained that she like her job because she got to do what she wanted in a way, creatively, whereas someone doing an office job would just be doing the same thing over and over every day, not really being able to do anything fun...

which I guess I already knew, but it's nice to see that there are actually people out there that do it, and enjoy it, and they don't seem to be starving...

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