First, Sarah shared a bit about herself: “I’m Sarah, I’m a Libra and I'm from the outer banks of North Carolina. Like… where the Wright brothers took off, you know- first in-flight type s**t. My entire working career was spent behind a bar until the pandemic- where I finally had the space and time to think about what I really wanted my life to look like.”
When asked what initially drew Sarah to the world of artistry, she wrote: “When I would bartend, my managers would ask me to do the specials signs 'cause I had pretty good handwriting. I remember getting pissed at customers when they needed something cause they would interrupt my flow, lol. My dad is a painter in his retirement but I never wanted to paint until he said, ‘If you work for yourself you’ll never lose your job.’ And realized that my job could be that I get to color all day so I decided to take a swing at it and here we are- four years later.”
Though Sarah has been drawing for four years already, she doesn’t like being asked to describe the essence or theme behind her illustrations.
She wrote: "I get embarrassed when people ask me what I do for work because the answer I can think to give is, ‘I overthink and draw frogs about it’… but I guess I'm an illustrator?
I usually just say I'm an artist and then try to leave it at that. If someone asks what kind of art I make I get real factual and say, ‘I watched a YouTube video once that said the best way to find my personal creativity was to draw one thing every day for a year so I just decided on a frog. I think the thought process is, that once I get bored enough with drawing that one thing I start to interject things that make it interesting to me to draw- whether it be the frog in different settings, little jokes, or stuff I've been thinking about with the frog to animate the point. So yeah. I draw frogs for a living’ which is a sentence I will never get used to saying.”
When it comes to her creative process, Sarah commented: “I think my creative process spawns from a place of uncertainty, perfectionism, anxiety, and depression. What it feels like to deal with all that and how to be in the SOLUTION of those incredibly human ‘problems’. I get inspiration on how to be in the solution from yoga, meditation, being outside, and (this is artsy fartsy) a lot of it is ‘downloaded’ like just … pops into my head as a shift in perspective from my incredibly human problems and then also just keeping some levity with some dumb jokes thrown in there every once and a while.”
Sarah also shared her point of view regarding the audience's takeaway: ”To be honest, my work is incredibly selfish. I don't really consider my audience, as most of the stuff I make is processing my own humanity and, essentially, journaling about it. I do it because it makes me feel better or makes me laugh. So, I guess to answer the question, I hope that if I can offer those same feelings to the reader then that’s a job well done. Not to toot my own horn, but I feel like it’s important to share these feelings in a space as toxic as social media can be - because it helps change the landscape of these apps… even if it’s a drop in a bucket I think it’s important to share. (toot toot).”
Lastly, Sarah added: “If you have the means- support your favorite artists on Instagram!!! It helps us continue to do this work.”
