They’re like, "eah, she’s not a classical girl.

Because the playlist I had on was, I think, called classical for 18th century villains, if that’s oh my gosh.

Dig deep there.

(Solemn classical music) I am ready to get into your life story, and certainly your art, a beautiful work you you’ve done.

were you an artist as a child?

So to speak, uh, I um would draw while I was supposed to be listening.

Well, I would be listening.

It’s easy for me to kind of hear things and draw at the same time, and to be honest, it kind of helped.

So yeah, I I actually ironically, I was a sculpture student when I was uh in school, and then when I got to college switched to two dimensional things and here we are now.

So you knew this was an art to follow academically.

Yeah, I had some stubbornness that I never let go from when I was a teenager where I knew at least the field that I wanted to go into, maybe not the specific niche one that I found.

but I knew it would be in the area of I get to make things for myself and for other people.

What was your college training?

I went to Western for a little while, started going for art education, but ended up starting to love drawing and illustrating So I transferred up to Kendall College up in Grand Rapids and went for medical illustration, which is why I’ve got a number of anatomical things in here and then graduated from there in 2016 and segueed from medical into more natural subject things.

So I’ve gotten to work with the nature center, different plant groups.

I’ve gotten to illustrate some scientific articles in journnals, publications, residencies and things like that.

Been very lucky so far.

Medical illustration to the plant and the animal.

What’s the what’s the segue there?

Accuracy?

The the middle vein of medical illustration is that it has to be vague enough to apply to everything, but uh specific enough to be accurate.

And so a lot of the natural subject things that I’ve gotten to do like this one or that one, they were for educational purposes or scientific purposes.

So accuracy was something critical to it.

and I mean, for me personally too, it is probably a cyclical thing.

I liked medical illustration because it demanded accuracy, so it just kept feeding itself.

Take us through the process of what we’re seeing right here with this uhanny?

nanny, yep, and a snowberry clear wing moth.

This piece is for a group called uh Kalamazoo wild ones, Wild ones is a national group, but they have a Kalamazoo chapter and they’re celebrating their 25th anniversary this year and they ask me to illustrate this to put on the garden signs that go into people’s gardens.

And so they picked two species.

This is a host plant for this species of moth.

so you would be able to see both of these if you waited long enough in in a yard in Michigan, and it’s g yeah, we’re handing out the signs next week.

this year is the 25th anniversary of the Kalamazoo chapter wild ones, so they’re a native plant, like resource and educator, so they provide seeds, they provide partially formed plants that you can put in your garden and they educate people on how to make more sustainable landscaping in uh domestic environments, like, you know, the most that a person can do with their own plot of land and their vice president um had attended a market that I was selling some of my prints and illustrations at, and me and her have been talking for the last year, and she really wanted me to do an illustration of a nannyberry bush and a snowberry clear wing moth, which to me looks like a little Pokémon.

I I teach colored pencil classes at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, just a few blocks from here.

and it’s, uh, like I said, it is one of the more like accessible materials.

like they’re they’re very easy to find.

They’re very easy to carry.

and uh, they’re somewhat easy to explain.

They kind of, you know, they are what they are.

It’s a pencil.

I have found that I favor certain grays, and I can show you when I do this leaf on this piece here, that to get all of the shadows in here, to make it look like a green leaf, I have to layer a bunch of colors underneath the green to make it look like a darker green or a brighter green or yellow green.

So, I have um a pretty set formula of which grays and which browns I put down to get these tones, and you can kind of see it consistently through most of these, is that there’s about, let’s see it.

there’s like nine to ten different pencils that get used in an area like this and I do that pretty consistently throughout all of them.

So I’ve found my favorite green palate.

I’m a very detailed oriented person when it comes to my illustrations, and there uh is a level of control that I can get with these very sharp pencils that, you know, cover space a square millimeter at a time that makes it so I can get in the level of detail that I want and find the kind of vibrancy that I want to in the colors with how much I can layer them.

that would be um a little more delayed with certain other materials, things that, you know, take more mixing or maintenance or patience, like, I don’t have to wait for my colored pencils to drive, so.

It’s detail oriented.

Kept my pencils very sharp for that one.

How often do you have to sharpen them?

Super often.

Yeah,look look at this.

This is these are all of the this is from this and like one other project.

full of f pencil shaving.

I have photo references for everything.

I can’t pull this out of my head necessarily.

I’ve drawn so many leaves that I probably could from scratch if I was given enough time.

But I work from multiple images and make a composite of them.

So this one is made of probably one, two, three, four, five, six, nine different photos, and it’s my job to, you know, make it look like one image, same with that one, that one’s made from tons of different photos.

Is it okay to, like, have a coloring book I see you have in your hand?

What’s going on here?

Yes, so here, you can look through this, if you would like.

Yes.

so me and the vice president of Kalamazoo Wild ones, you know, she’s plant enthusiast, insect enthusiast, art enthusiasts, and I met her at a show where I was showing my things and she asked me to do this, but we’ve gotten to collaborate on a couple of other things so far.

In August, I got to participate in Pleasant Peninsula up in Grand Rapids, which is art meets activism organized by Maddie Chaffer.

They’re fantastic.

And for that event, I designed this coloring book that features Michigan native plants.

So here are the original drawings for it.

Scanned them, turned them into a coloring book, handed out coloring pages to kids.

and uh the part that I was really excited about, which is where the collaboration with wild ones came in, is that each coloring book comes with packets of seeds to grow the plants that are in the coloring book, so you get something for yourself and then you get something that keeps producing as well.

So that was a really fun project to do.

And I think we’re gonna keep building on it.

I’ll keep doing more, I’ll keep making larger and larger books until it’s this thick, because you probably to get there, you probably should start by just coloring, right?

It’s good practice.

How does your art work?

Are we in a small studio with music in the background?

Yes, we are.. Or, uh the same movies that I’ve been watching over and over again or, um music playing.

I have a lot of other artist friends in the neighborhood as well, so we’ll do little coworking things too.

I’ve got two desks in here, so sometimes someone will be here and I’ll be here or someone will be on the floor.

The music, you know, in your background, rock and roll, calming music, uh what what moves Olivia?

It varies.

um while I was working on this one, I had a lot of the details to focus on.

I listened to a lot of classical music, which um was maybe because I was raised on Looney tunes and then, you know, and Mel Blanc was obsessed with classical music, so I loved it as a kid, I love it now.

and if I’m not listening to kind of calming music, um, I have a lot of movies that I watch over and over again.

I’ve watched the extended editions of Lord of the Rings probably 500 times because it’s 12 hours long, so it can accommodate how long I’m working on a piece for it.

It’s what we like to get right into the real you.

And how important is is it in camaraderie with artists?

Obviously, you know, it’s very encouraging.

Is it encouraging you more competitive?

I would say that I have not had a lot of competitive situations.

I think that there’s also such a variety of artists in Kalamazoo that we don’t really find ourselves, you know, like fighting for the same thing ever.

I’ve never I mean not in my experience.

I’ve never fought with anybody.

There have been multiple times where someone has asked me or someone has asked a friend if they could do something that felt a little out outside of their realm, but they knew another artist that it would be fitting for.

So it’s all very uplifting.

Like, if there’s something that someone tells me they need an artist for, but it’s not something I do.

I know a couple other artists that they could ask, and so we all kind of just trade these opportunities and gigs and things like that.

Reach behind you and bring out the dog.

Tell me about This is Frankie Partially finished.

I do a lot of pet portraits close to the holidays.

I’ve been teaching a pet portrait and animal illustration class at the Art Institute a couple times this year, so he’s been serving very well as an example of how to do certain things with fur or with the very odd shape of what a dog knows is.

It is an odd shape, I guess I’s like a mushroom kind of cross section.

What about uh the work you do outside of your studio?

I understand a wonderful mural in.

so there is a shop that just opened downtown Kalamazoo on the mall.

charters guitars.

I think it’s described as a Luthier.

He does a lot of woodworking, he refurbishes guitars, he makes them from scratch.

He’s a musician himself, and his space downtown, one wall is completely lined with guitars that he’s made, and the other wall across from that is a mural that is very close to being done, and the intercession that I found between what I typically do and what he does, the mural features trees that produce the wood that he makes the guitars out of.

So one part of it is mahogany, one part of it’s wild cherry, sugar maple, and black walnut.

And talk about the KIA and the mural and Kalamazoo and lots of opportunities for an artist.

More and more, I’m finding, and I don’t think it’s just because I’m, you know, trying harder and harder each year.

I think that the general attitude of artists in Kalamazoo has become we’ll make our own opportunities or will find more ways to give the rest of the community opportunities.

the arts Council in Kalamazoo is fantastic and they’re getting more and more accessible as time goes on.

The KIA constantly has programs and they offer scholarships too, so I’m I appreciate the accessibility there as well.

There’s a number of other, you know, groups, collectives in Kalamazoo that keep popping up over the years.

Starlight collective, uh recreation collective cloudhouse.

Those are all in the park trade center, which is a nice little hub for a bunch of creatives to all be under one roof.

Kalamazoo is a very dense place, and by that, I mean, it’s very close knit.

You can get from one side of town to the other pretty quickly, so it’s easy to find each other in that way.

Everybody knows each other, most of the people that I know I met just through proximity, either, you know, being at a show, being at and being in school, being in an artist event, and those friendships and um acquaint ships they really last a long time because we’re all so close together, which is nice.

Where’s the picture of the cat?

Oh, my cat?

your cat.

Not yet, not so far, but it would be a good idea, wouldn’t it?

now that we’ve redone the living room.

I should get one big one to have right next to the front door, so everybody knows whose house it is when they want.

You gotta have that buddy.

congratulations on what you’re doing.

Thank you.

(bright music) Thank you so much for watching.

There’s also more to explore with Kalamazoo lively arts on YouTube, Instagram and wgvu.org.

We’ll see you next time.

Support for Kalamazoo lively arts is provided by the Irvine S. Gilmore foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of greater Kalamazoo.