Get ready.

‘Cuz it’s about to get cute up in here.

My first job in a creative industry was as an illustrator at The Mailbox Magazine, which published an diverse suite of educational children’s activity books servicing multiple grades and age ranges. As far as first design jobs go, I hit the jackpot. This gig was fun, eclectic, adorable, and weird.

And, come to think of it, it’s kind of a weird little story of how I ended up there.

Drink and Draw

“To alcohol! the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.”

— Homer Simpson

Before I was ruler of the rainbow glitter critter kingdom , I was hanging out in shady bars with shady pencils.

If you’re not familiar, Drink and Draw is a worldwide grassroots movement of artists and non-artists who get together at bars, hang out with each other, and (you guessed it) drink and draw. The whole set up is refreshingly un-pretentious and charmingly anarchistic - no fees, no leaders, no artistic background required. Just pull up a chair, pop a squat, and make some marks on paper.

At the time I lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, and to my knowledge this was the city’s first ever introduction to the phenomenon of Drink and Draw (though many groups have come and gone since.) My strange foray into dive bar en studio sketchmanship happened after a friend and I stumbled across a neighboring state’s Drink and Draw group on MySpace (remember?!). We thought it was a damn novel idea and surely a terrific way to meet other artists, so one day we up and bought a bunch of communal art supplies, eeny-meeny-miny-moed a nearby college pizza bar to serve as homebase, plopped down at a table with a blending stump and a dream, and waited to see what happened next.

*Photo Credit:* *Drink and Draw, Shoreditch, UK.*

What happened next is that it totally blew up.

Kabloowey!

Within just a few weeks of going live, word began to travel fast. It wasn’t long before we caught the attention of Yes! Weekly, one of Greensboro’s preeminent and much-loved local news rags. A very nice little guy dropped by the bar one day to interview my friend and I, and there in the paper’s very next issue was a spicy little write-up, just for us.

By the time the next Drink and Draw meeting rolled around, our humble little group of drunken drawers made like the Grinch’s heart and grew three sizes that day. Overnight we’d gone from an obscure local curiosity to one of the elusive “Things to Do in Greensboro.”

Now things were getting interesting. Every week we were meeting more local artists, illustrators, designers, and curious bystanders who would inevitably wander over, pick up a pencil, and stay a while. One curious bystander who found his way to us from the Yes! Weekly article was the man who would soon introduce me to the Mailbox.

This guy was bulky, buff, good looking, and a little intense. More noticeable than any of that, however, was his drawing ability. Dude was a beast. He drew the kinda stuff you’d normally expect to see on high-end book covers, à la Scholastic Press. He was so skilled, in fact, and so very good, that I couldn’t help but ask if he drew professionally. He said that he did, and so I asked him where. He said, “The Mailbox" Magazine,” and I said, “The mail what who huh?” And the he told me all about it, and then I thought, “Hmmmm.”

And then he said, oh by the way:

“We’re hiring. You should apply.”

My horrible secret.

Full discloser: I do not have a college degree. (GASP!)

I completed all my college curriculum courses, and even attended our penultimate “Portfolio Day”, the graphic design equivalent of the Westminster Kennel Dog Show which usually denotes the successful completion of one’s collegiate career.

I’ve heard it said that the best way to make life laugh is to tell it your plans, and this was especially true in my case. Without boring you or me with all the details, let’s just say that life got in the way and I had to work for a living. Alas, I never got that magical piece of paper proving that I can do what I’ve been doing now for nearly two decades.

What I know now, of course, is that - while a diploma certainly makes it easier to get your foot in the door - it is neither an indicator of one’s talent nor a magic bullet to success. However, I didn’t know that at the time of our story, and as such I was very, very insecure about my lackluster resume.

As it turn out, I had every right to be.

I’ve created a monster.

I was flattered and empowered by my talented new friend’s invitation to apply at The Mailbox. If he thought my work was good enough to get an interview, I figured it might also be good enough to distract people from my gross underqualification.

I didn’t have much of a portfolio at the time, so I spent several days (and long, lonely nights) creating one from scratch. I researched The Mailbox, learned about its mission, studied its art style, and deliriously spanked together a fever dream patchwork of illustrations in a chunky multimedia puke of mismatched styles.

Even though the whole package was held together with staples and duct tape, I submitted my weird little Frankenstein monster of a portfolio, wiped my hands clean, rocked back and forth in the tub for a little while, and left the outcomes up to the capricious mechinations of fate.

Midpoint twist: I got an interview.

And it didn’t go well.

I don’t have many memories that make me physically cringe. That’s not to say I don’t do cringy things. All I mean is that, for the most part, I’ve become so accustomed to my natural talent for cringe that I’ve made peace with it. I’ve gone numb to it. I’ve accepted it.

Kind of.

However. This one still gets to me.

You ever have one of those ideas that seemed good at the time, but then when you look back on it you start to wonder if maybe you had metal poisoning from lead pipes? That’s kind of what this idea was like.

For some reason, I thought the best way to make a good first impression was to attend my introductory interview dressed up in a pinstriped navy blue 1930'‘s-businessman-style three piece suit and tie combo.

At the time I’d been going through a Victorian dandy phase, which frequently found me chilling at the bar dressed like Quentin Crisp and doing my best Daniel Plainview impersonation. It was a weird and glorious fashion experiment which was not at all a good fit for the local-public-library aesthetic of the Mailbox corporate headquarters.

I was interviewed by a pair of very nice but visibly unimpressed tenured art directors. Sitting there in my Mr. Fancy Pants pinstriped suit with my janky teakwood briefcase full of still-drying watercolors, it was hard not to be a nervous wreck. They asked me several technical questions whose answers I fumbled and tripped over, and I could feel their dissatisfaction bearing down on me like a chubby succubus.

As if to add gas to the fire, my lack of diploma did come up. Did I have one? Would I get one? Did I know where I was right now? All I could say in response was something along the lines of, “Uhhhhh, I finished all my design classes!” and then shake my sweaty jazz hands in their faces. Sure, it was true, but would it even matter?

Even though I blew it in the personality department, my lukewarm interrogators still sent me home with an assessment test.

The test was basically a real-world project from a real-world publication. The assignment was to illustrate a cartoony underwater scene featuring cartoony sea creatures arranged around some preset blocks of copy. And that was it. I was given no instructions other than to “be creative.”

So, like, let’s get real. I knew I wasn’t going to get this job. It was nice that my bar friend thought I had what it takes, but I walked out of that interview with the vague but unmistakable feeling that I’d just wasted everyone’s time (especially mine.)

Despite my dejection and undeserved self-pity, something inside urged me to see it through to the end. So, pushing past my doom and gloom crybaby poopy party, I gathered my resolve, buckled down, gave up, walked away, went to the bar, and then buckled down again and took the stupid fish test.

I spent many hours on this little project, and, despite my doubts, I still tried my best to make it resemble something my own little-kid eyeballs would liked looking at in preschool. A little later on I submitted my work and then went about my business as usual, quite certain that I’d never hear from these people again.

And I didn’t.

Until about a week later, when I got the call.

Huh?

I was hired. Hired! Wait…hired? As in, hired hired?! It just didn’t make any sense.

And it almost didn’t happen. Those nice gals who interviewed me later told me point-blank that I was not qualified for my position and was hired only on the strength of my illustration. At the time that made me feel pretty good, but looking back on it now, it was actually kind of an asshole thing to say. Still, none of that mattered anymore. My foot was in the door, my butt was in the chair, and I was officially in the industry. This was going to be a cool job.

And yes, this was a COOL job. During my time at The Mailbox Magazine, I created hundreds and hundreds (maybe even thousands) of illustrations of just about everything you can imagine. Our publications were segmented into various age groups - pre-k, kindergarten, middle school, and high school - and each publication had its own design standards based on the latest in child science.

*I felt just like that little yellow dude.*

How to draw eyeballs that don’t traumatize babies.

Because our various art styles were informed by child science and child psychology, we had to follow certain rules.

For example, what I didn’t know before working here was that very young children (preschool -pre-K) don’t like cartoon characters with really BIG eyeballs. Research indicates (or so I was told) that big eyes frighten and confuse children below the age of about 4.

Additionally, very young children don’t yet understand perspective or foreshortening, so illustrations for our preschool-pre-K audiences had to be very plain and rudimentary, made of simple shapes and mostly flat perspectives.

Inversely, older kids (10-13) prefer lankier character designs, larger eyes, sharper angles, and exaggerated perspectives. Who knew?

*This illustration is appropriate for kindergarten-aged children*

*This one is better suited for middle-schoolers.*

There were many rules when it came to child-friendly artwork, and most of them made a lot of sense. There were other rules, however, that were a little harder to wrap my head around.

The problem was the parents.

Although our materials were primarily utilized by school teachers, they were also frequently used by parents as supplemental after-school resources. And these parents, man, let me tell you - they had way too much time on their hands. They’d get pissed off about everything: typos (real or imaginary), inaccurate facts (usually imaginary), hidden political messages (always imaginary), and, quite commonly, whatever they perceived to be words or images that in any way ran contrary to their personal religious affiliations.

Yes indeed, it didn’t take much to make these fuddy duddies blow a gasket, but there was one dreaded phenomenon which, more than any other, always elicited the absolute maximum amount of shock, outrage, horror, indignation, and angry letters.

Beware of the sneaky leg penis.

What is a sneaky leg penis? I’m glad you asked.

It’s very simple, you see. A sneaky leg penis is what happens when a cartoon character’s leg is drawn a just a llliiitttllleee too close to its crotch, making it resemble a big ol’ dick.

This usually happened to characters drawn in quarter profile, but any critter at any angle could potentially become a victim of the forbidden leg wang.

*Captain Wally sails the seven seas in search of leg dicks.*

Obviously, no one on our team was vindictively sneaking cartoon shlongs into a children’s book.

Be that as it may, reality is often incompatible with one’s psychotic personal beliefs, so, to many of our less stable readers, we may as well have been the PornHub version of DeviantArt.

(Which, come to think of it, DeviantArt is already the PornHub version of DeviantArt. Huh.)

Another weird rule we had was about floating animal heads.

The simple art of giving children nightmares.

Kids don’t understand reality. It’s part of what makes them so endearing. It’s also what makes them so easy to scare.

You see, every so often one of our critter characters would be drawn standing behind an object, with just its head popping up from behind in a delightful manner.

Did I say delightful? What I meant was TRAUMATIZING.

At least, according to the parents.

And this one - okay, I kind of get It.

Apparently, some young children don’t yet understand that, when an animal is standing behind an object, its body remains intact, even though it’s hidden.

In other words, to their still-developing little brains, these particular illustrations just looked like pictures of a happy-go-lucky decapitated animal head floating lifelessly in the air; an eerie, dead smile frozen on its face.

“All right, who wants to get DECAPITATED?”

When I wasn’t terrifying kindergarten children with decapitated giraffes, I liked taking on special projects around the office.

For example, everyone knew that, as a recovering goth kid, I’m a big fan of all things spooky wooky wooky. As such, I always got first dibs on the Halloween magazines (yuss!) The teams also decided that I was pretty good at drawing kitties and bunnies, so I got to draw lots and lots of kitties and bunnies (double yuss!)

*You’re checking to see if it has a leg penis, aren’t you?*

One of the larger, long-term projects I took on was to expand our library of original clip art.

“Clip art” is what we called it at the time, but it wasn’t that Microsoft Word crap Susan uses for the office emails. Our clipart was a sprawling library of reusable, re-scalable, fully editable vector illustrations of hundreds of items, objects, animals, and people.

These assets were used on every project to populate the composition and speed up the illustration process. And let me tell you, we had a clip art image of EVERYTHING - every conceivable household item, every type of vehicle, every type of weather, every type of plant, every occupational tool, every bird, snake, mammal, fish, reptile, and insect, and people of every age doing every type of thing that people do.

Imagine your phone’s emoji library, then multiply it by a thousand and create it all by hand. One thing’s for sure: by the time the Mailbox and I parted ways, I knew how to use every arcane function of Adobe Illustrator.

More fun than you can shake a headless bunny at.

The Mailbox Magazine was my first creative job, and it’s still one of my favorites.

It gave me an in-depth understanding of the design tools I still use every day, it introduced me to a real-world production workflow, and it allowed me the space to take ownership of the projects I cared about.

And, to this day, whenever I look at a cartoon character - whether in print or on TV, online or in movies - no matter where it is or what it’s doing, I still always find myself slowing down, pausing, squinting, analyzing, and ever-so-carefully checking to see if it has a sneaky little leg penis.

And for that, I am forever grateful.

How the Mailbox Magazine taught me to scare little children