Another class assignment! Here’s an illustration inspired by a New York Times essay by a woman whose online persona became a real-life façade.

If you spend eight years building a house (no matter how uncomfortable or ugly it may be, no matter how impractical or poorly lit), it becomes nearly impossible to knock it down. That is about how long I put into building my social media presence, into becoming the cool girl I showcase on Instagram and Facebook.

This week’s assignment: read this New York Times article from 1987 and come up with an illustration. It starts with jotting down your own short summary to wrap your mind around what the article is fundamentally about. My take on this article:

Walter Mitty is real: a small but significant portion of the population are happily spending more than half their lives in a fantasy world.

The next step is to fill a page or three with quick idea sketches. The idea is not to create a great drawing, but to come up with a concept or composition that tells a story.

I’m really enjoying the illustration class that I signed up for on a whim. The instructor is Steve Brodner, a very accomplished illustrator and caricaturist.

That first assignment morphed into a few more pages of thumbnail-sized doodles. Brodner really emphasizes the importance of figuring out all the potential problems of your drawing BEFORE you start working full-size, or with any sort of detail. Figure out which character is most important, and either through size, or contrast, or both, ensure that the viewer’s eye is drawn toward them. And most importantly, ensure that your drawing tells a story. The job of an illustrator is often to literally sum up a magazine or newspaper article in some way.

This may look like a rough comic strip, but it’s actually the first homework for my latest “continuing education” (i.e. old person) class at the School of Visual arts, which starts tomorrow. Here’s the prompt:

• Think about the moment something you saw, heard, experienced in some way changed your life. Write a paragraph telling that story. How you were before, how you were afterward, the moment of inflection.
• Fold a page into 1/8s.
• Fill all 8 compartments with sketches that express what is important about that story.

Here’s my paragraph, with a disclaimer:

Did Spring come late, or does it just take a while for my histamines to catch up? At any rate, g’bless me.

As is usually the case when I draw my stupid mug, this rare non-digital watercolor was homework for my never-ending Saturday art class. Oh wait, did I say never-ending? Apparently the school is closing in the Fall after a mere 192 years! Word on the street is that funds were colossally mismanaged by new management.