13 Apr Scholar Update – Stephanie Halligan of Art to Self

“Damn, I wish I’d gone to art school!”

Last year, I found myself cursing under my breath a lot more than I’d like to admit. I had decided to make a big work pivot, shifting away from my consulting work and focusing more on my art. And the huge move left me feeling… inadequate.

I had grandiose aspirations for turning my artistic vision into a tangible reality, but I didn’t have any formal training to make it happen.

From Art To Self cartoon inspirations

So I did what anyone feeling like an imposter would do: I researched expensive degree programs. I looked up what it would take to go back to school for illustration, animation or design. I played into my fears that I needed some credential that I didn’t have in order to succeed.

After falling into the rabbit hole of higher education and exhausting my search for the perfect degree program that would set me up for success, it hit me. Maybe I didn’t need two or four years of continuing education. Maybe I just needed a few very specific classes related to the very specific things I wanted to do.

After all, I had been drawing all my life and blogging for the past six years. I wasn’t exactly green at this. I just needed someone to sit down and show me the ropes of a few digital programs that I’d been using or wanted to use more often.

Wow, that made things a lot easier!

Luckily, I stumbled across (and subsequently won) the Mini-Scholarship from SheSays and Boulder Digital Arts. And it’s the perfect solution to help me dip my toes into continuing education without signing my life (and money) away to a full-blown degree program.

For the mini scholarship, I took an in-person, day-long training for Adobe Illustrator and two virtual classes covering photoshop basics and user centered designed. Besides the hours of training on individual techniques and strategies for each topic, each class was taught by a professional in the industry that provided background on how to apply these tools in the real a world. It was helpful to be able to ask an instructor in person and in real time how he would apply what he just taught us in projects of his own.

From Art To Self cartoon inspirations

Admitting that you need to learn some new skills can be hard enough. Finding the right support for those skills can be even trickier. The Mini-Scholarship gave me the chance to learn new skills in a manageable, bite-sized way. And ironically, this scholarship and these classes has helped me realize just how much I do know and how far along I already am on this journey.

I just needed the boost for this part of the path.