Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarah VanDam.
Hi Sarah, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I decided to become an illustrator in high school—I loved charcoal, watercolor and portraiture. In my junior year (2014-2015), my school’s police officer (David Gomez at Mountain View High School, Meridian, ID) asked if an interested art student would create a portrait of a meaningful interaction he’d had with a teenage girl arrested in handcuffs. That sounded like a job for me. The subsequent illustration has probably gotten more widespread public attention than any I’ve created since, haha (see https://www.idahopress.com/meridian-kuna/meridian-officers-compassion-highlights-needs-of-homeless-students/article_ee8106fd-21e8-5806-aff9-d5a35493bbf9.html).
I realized that I absolutely loved solving visual problems, not to mention that the reactions that I get from people for whom the work is meaningful can make my whole year. I chase that more than anything.
I got into the BYU illustration program in 2018. Unfortunately, my time there was a blur: I felt stretched too thin, burned out and fell into depression right around when COVID hit during my junior year. The highlights were a handful of friends and professors. My BFA show was a set of illustrations for a picture book about high school marching band. I hope that I can return to that particular subject matter in my work at some point.
Following graduation, I was briefly hired by Brooker’s Founding Flavors. You know, the colonial themed ice cream shop where workers dress up as waifs and musket men while serving you “Patrick Henry’s Give Me Chocolate or Give Me Death?” That lasted about a month before I was hired by Dowdle Folk Arts, a puzzle studio in Lindon. But this is still relevant; will come back later.
At the Dowdle puzzle company, I was one of 8 artists replicating the unique style of Eric Dowdle in acrylics. The puzzles are usually of city scapes and are insanely detailed. If you look closely at any object—tree, building, balloon, ocean—you’ll notice that they all fade from dark to light with carefully placed overlapping bands of color. There are no blended brush strokes. This was a painting technique we called puddling: Mixing between four to eight shades of a color from darkest to lightest in little plastic cups, watering the paint down until it was “melted ice cream consistency” and then carefully painting each layer of gradated texture, letting it dry flat before moving on to the next cup. We’d stack towers of color gradients all around our work stations, practically a cityscape itself. It was at that job that I first worked on a single painting for over 300 hours.
It quickly became clear that I couldn’t stay at Dowdle long-term. I had no extra time or energy to develop a portfolio of work that was mine, and Eric Dowdle’s style, while perfectly suited for puzzles, was not one that I wanted ingrained in me. Also, I like storytelling and a higher degree of creative control.
SO, I left with the intent of figuring out picture books next. I took an online class and finished a version of the story “Hansel and Gretel,” in which the kids knock the witch into the oven with a Rube Goldberg machine. And I went back to the ice cream place to stay financially floating.
I need to backtrack slightly, because there was another ongoing job that I’d taken on beginning in my last two months at BYU. A flyer in the Harris Fine Arts Center read:
“CREATE MAGIC—Looking for a part-time Illustrator/Design student to help create a magic curriculum for kids that will be used around the world.” The work specifically called for someone who “enjoys working in a notebook doodling style that is bright and colorful and kid-friendly.”
Frankly, I didn’t know if I enjoyed the style. But the proposition sounded strangely fantastic, so I reached out.
After about a month of trial work, it was decided that I would be a freelance hidden picture puzzle artist for Discover Magic’s junior program, Magic Explorers, which publishes activity packs for kids to assemble and color their own punch-out magic props and illusions. Since 2021, slowly throughout my time at Dowdle and in the years following, I’ve illustrated 29 puzzles. Discover Magic is based locally in Payson.
Because of this, a fair percentage of the people I now call friends are magicians. I love it. One of those friends, Joe Romano, a magician based in Virginia, asked to collaborate on another picture book. He does a crazy number of school and library magic shows, and he wanted to have his own book to craft a show around. He wanted to tell the story of how we got the smiley face, highlighting the life of Harvey Ball, a designer from Worcester, Massachusetts, told from the perspective of his then young daughter Jackie in 1963 (In the process, I got to actually talk to Jackie, and I’m incredibly grateful to her for her help, references and support). I did my best to do justice to the history as I understood it, while at the same time making it a fun, imaginative read for kids. The book has recently been acquired by Little Press Publishing, and will be released by them later this year in the fall (will be available for preorder on Amazon).
I kept exploring with products and styles. I kind of accidentally found my way back into watercolor, and most recently completed a 22×28 commission of bright pink Dutch tulips. I tried the farmers market. I illustrated a card game (“Dog Pile”) for the startup Good Apple Games. I designed stage backdrops for my magician friends. Versatility and trial and error are what I’m currently about.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I love what I’ve done with my career so far and I’m hopeful for where it could go. At the same time, it’s been tough. Depression and isolation have often compounded each other. I haven’t grown enough as a business yet to create a professional team around me. I’ve had to lean on my job serving ice cream. In a bonnet. Sometimes its hard to get a clear picture of what my work is worth, and given the presence of AI, I think the majority of artists are suddenly finding themselves weirdly fascinated with understanding the meaning of our lives and our crafts. While I feel like I’m constantly living out a cliff hanger these days, I am so not giving up.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
My greatest skillsets are in digital illustration and watercolor, and I tend toward making images high in detail. In my children’s illustration work, I aim to show inventiveness (sometimes with literal gears and cogs) and humor whenever possible; the exact style is dictated by the needs of the project more than anything. I also do a lot of my own graphic design and hand-lettering, showing up strongly in the cover art of “Dog Pile” and “My Dad Invented the Smile.”
My watercolor has been overwhelmingly floral. I’ve found myself in this niche mainly because of a daily painting challenge that I did a few years ago, and flowers are just what I naturally found myself doing.
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
As stated previously, a large amount of my freelance work over the past five years has been for performers and businesses in the magic industry (Discover Magic, Joe Romano Magic, John Reid/Trickybiz, Lucy Darling, Funky Monkey Magic, Tim Mason Magic, Scott Chamberlain Magic).
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sarahvandam.art
- Instagram: @sarahvandam.art
- Other: https://www.patreon.com/c/SarahVanDam
