love letters to storytellers: meet my illustrator!

This post was initially sent to newsletter subscribers April 1, 2022.

featured storyteller

I first met Amber Wallin, digital illustrator, designer, and small business owner, as Steve Noble the Nobleman.

In 2018, my brother and I had gathered a group of friends and friends-of-friends to play our first Dungeons and Dragons game. Amber, one of the friends-of-friends, had chosen to play the pre-written character of Steve Noble the Nobleman. Soon, we moved on to another campaign and I learned Amber again, this time as Nadar, the silver dragonborn fighter who was determined, impulsive, bold - and lacking a few brain cells. Because my only experience of Amber was through another character, and she’s an excellent role-player, it took me a while to realize the lack of intelligence was her character’s and not hers. However, Nadar’s confident “just do it” attitude is the way that Amber has approached both her life and her art.

One of the things that has always informed the way Amber does art is her dyslexia, which is a different way of processing the world that is much more visual than others, often resulting in difficulties with reading and writing. The more common process for artists is to work through an idea through sketches and many iterations before deciding to finish an idea through to completion. For Amber, she can picture exactly what she wants to create from step one. She often got in trouble in her art classes for not having a sketchbook to hand in, and would even fake sketchbooks to make the grade.
 

After struggling with a miserable school experience for years, exacerbated by terrible supports for what she now knows as her dyslexia, Amber eventually went to a high school with a well-developed art program. There, she learned critical thinking skills and the fundamentals of art, before moving on to study in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba.

Wherever Amber found herself, if the system did not suit her needs, she was going to carve out a space for herself. In high school, she reworked her education to take things like practical math and budgeting instead of calculus or history. In university, she did the same thing. She wanted to take digital illustration but it wasn’t offered, so instead, she built her own degree, taking every computer-related art course she could: graphic design, animation, photography, video. And in her last two semesters after she’d completed her art electives, she fought her way into the business school, taking marketing, small business management, and accounting. She had a reputation as “the artist” in her business classes. “See, I’m an artist…” she would begin, and then demand her professors explain to her so she, a non-business student, could understand.
 

Now, Amber has created her own career, a combination of working part-time at a library, working on a sticker-making business, and now working as the illustrator and designer for my book. Whenever I talk to storytellers about their work, I’m always interested in what kinds of themes they are interested in exploring, or why they do art. As I discovered while talking to her, Amber’s process and purpose for art is in the doing. One of the examples of this is her sticker business, an Etsy store where she sells cute stickers of cats, D&D, D&D cats, and astrology among other designs. Her business “doesn’t make bank”, as Amber put it, but it uses her skills of small business management, digital illustration, and her nerdy interests. When I asked Amber why she chose to create a life where she could prioritize her art, she said, “I don’t know, I just wanna do it.”

You can find Amber on Twitter @AMarieArtist, and Instagram ambermarie.artist, and her sticker store AmberMarieStore.

One of Amber's illustrations

updates

So, now you've finally met Amber, who I've been working with since last fall on illustrations for my book! The fun thing about self-publishing is that I can put this book together however I want. From the beginning, I had always imagined illustrations included. My biggest inspiration for the format of this book is dodie’s Secrets for the Mad, which include illustrations, although I knew I wanted something in a different direction than dodie’s pastel-coloured, cutesy aesthetic.

My book is about the messy and incongruent world of mental illness, so I knew I wanted illustrations that showcased that theme. I had a number of ideas, thinking something along the lines of a collage or a scrapbook. As soon as Amber was on board, she dived in and ran with it, immediately coming up with ideas for how to represent the themes of my book well. After many meetings hashing through ideas, we both decided on a more abstract approach, in Amber’s specialty of digital illustration.

I have loved working with Amber since the start. She has the confidence to know what is best for this project and say it, in-depth background in design and illustration, and her own first-hand experience with mental health and illness. We get each other and are both serious about the work we're doing. 

There are about twenty total illustrations that will be companion pieces to every four or so pieces. I spent a lot of time going through my book and pulling out themes and what would work with an illustration. Once I had an outline (typical me, creating an outline *after* I've edited the whole thing multiple times...), we divided the work into two-month cycles.

At the beginning of the cycle, we sit down and go through what visuals we think would work for the list of themes I have for that section. Amber is always quick to have ideas (going back to her style of 'immediately having a final vision'). Then, after we've decided on an initial direction for the visuals, Amber goes and works on them, and then through a series of meetings for me to provide feedback throughout the couple of months, we make sure she's going in the direction I want.  Most of the ideas stay the same from the beginning, but sometimes we scrap an idea that we began with and start again because it wasn't working.

I'm always of the opinion that you should use people's expertise, so I love leaning on Amber's extensive expertise to go a different direction than I had initially envisioned. I also love how in the end, there's another layer of meaning to the pieces I've written, in the illustrations. Images are like a poem all on their own, and together, the poem with the illustration is like an entirely new thing. I love it. 

So that's mainly what I've been working on lately regarding this is a love story. Besides that, just dealing with the everyday existential crisis of choosing to pursue a career in the arts, you know. See you next month!

Happy April (and National Poetry Month)!

Alyssa