{"id":2209,"date":"2016-08-02T10:46:45","date_gmt":"2016-08-02T10:46:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/?p=2209"},"modified":"2017-07-01T15:21:04","modified_gmt":"2017-07-01T15:21:04","slug":"wendy-macnaughton-on-using-drawings-and-words-to-convey-human-emotion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wendy-macnaughton-on-using-drawings-and-words-to-convey-human-emotion\/","title":{"rendered":"Wendy MacNaughton on using drawings and words to convey human emotion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wendy MacNaughton is a San Francisco based illustrator and graphic journalist who uses drawings and words to convey human emotion. With just watercolors on a white background, she adds empathy and compassion to her process of documenting the stories of people who don\u2019t usually get to tell them. In this interview<\/a> she says: \u201dI love that everyone holds such incredible stories, each one of us, and you can look at a mass of people and be excited about what that group means, or you can look at each individual. I do love looking at people.\u201d<\/p>\n

She got an undergraduate degree in Fine Art and Advertising at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. \u00a0As soon as she was in art school, she stopped drawing and painting, and focused on doing \u201dthe worst contemporary art anybody has ever seen\u201d.<\/p>\n

She was working in advertising when she got an offer to work in Rwanda on the national campaign for the first democratic elections. When she came back, she quit her job in advertising and went to graduate school where she studied Social Work. She rediscovered drawing while commuting from Oakland to San Francisco. In this Longform podcast<\/a>, she says: \u201dI noticed all the people sitting around on the subway and they were holding completely still. They were just like the models that I used to draw when I did figure drawing back in the day. So I started sketching them. Basically I hadn\u2019t drawn like that in ten years. As soon as I did there was something like a muscle memory thing, it just came back, and there was also this amazing charge. I loved doing it so much!\u201d.<\/p>\n

She started doing it every day. She would come home at the end of the day, where she would paint her drawings, scan them, and post them on a blog. The blog attracted a global following of readers and generated enough considerable attention to allow Wendy to make a living from illustration.<\/p>\n

Since then, she illustrated several charming books: Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation and GPS Technology<\/em> by Caroline Paul, Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them<\/em> by Isaac Fitzgerald, Meanwhile in San Francisco: The City in Its Own Words<\/em> and The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure<\/em>, her latest collaboration with her partner, Caroline Paul. Her work has appeared in publications like the New York Times, Pop-Up Magazine, GOOD Magazine, and Wall Street Journal.<\/p>\n

Wendy says that the goal of her work is to \u201dtake viewers out of their everyday life and context, and to get them to be able to walk into someone else\u2019s shoes, to start to empathize with a group that is not their own\u201d.<\/p>\n

We collected some of the advice she gives to people who want to do creative work:<\/p>\n

\u2022 Share your work.<\/strong> \u201dI like to work on something, finish it, and get it off my desk. And then go on to the next thing. By sharing, it\u2019s a way of me finalizing it and learning lessons from it and going through those thoughts and then moving on to the next project.\u201d Wendy shares all of her work online. As she explains in this interview<\/a>, for her, \u201dshowing the work is a big part of making the work\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Stop assuming you know the story. <\/strong>\u201dI think it\u2019s pretty incredible what happens when we stop assuming that we know what\u2019s going on, that we already know the story. It\u2019s easy to come up with a solution to a creative problem when we\u2019re talking to ourselves. But it\u2019s probably not very interesting, unique, and it\u2019s definitely not going to work. It\u2019s not effective. But if we start getting curious about other people\u2019s experiences in the world, and more than that, really listening to them, I promise you, all these totally inspiring unexpected stories will just unfold around you.\u201d In this talk she gave at the 99U Conference<\/a>, she explains how her experience at the San Francisco Library and on the corner of the 5th<\/sup> and 6th<\/sup> streets in San Francisco has changed the way she approaches her work.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Collaborate with the right people.<\/strong> \u201dIn my work, and in a lot of people\u2019s work, we collaborate with so many people at so many levels. And we have our job where we are sitting in a little room alone, but we\u2019re always in contact with other people. Who we work with has so much to do with the entire process, and the feeling of it, and the outcome, and quality and all that.\u201d In this podcast<\/a>, Wendy talks about the projects she gets involved in, and also about how saying no to something opens up the door to saying yes to the next thing that is going to be the right thing.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Make mistakes.<\/strong> \u201d My drawing is often quite loose. If I were to stop my drawing every time I thought I made a mistake, I would never finish a drawing. In a sense, my best drawings are a series of fortunate mistakes. If I trust that even though something might happen that\u2019s unexpected, I move through it, build off of it, and it takes me in a new direction that I wasn\u2019t anticipating, and that drawing ends up becoming good.\u201d In this interview<\/a> she goes on to encourage people to make mistakes because they are part of the learning process. They also lead to unforeseen amazing results. \u201dI think the same thing holds true in all areas. As long as it doesn\u2019t impact somebody else in a really negative way, the mistakes that we make end up driving us forward in really unexpected ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

Register\u00a0here\u00a0<\/a>for the 6th edition of The Power of Storytelling to be charmed by Wendy once again<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wendy MacNaughton is a San Francisco based illustrator and graphic journalist who uses drawings and words to convey human emotion. With just watercolors on a white background, she adds empathy and compassion to her process of documenting the stories of people who don\u2019t usually get to tell them. In this interview she says: \u201dI love … Continue reading Wendy MacNaughton on using drawings and words to convey human emotion<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2210,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[24],"tags":[60,112],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2209"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3068,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209\/revisions\/3068"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}