Jeri Eagan’s Creative Journey
It all started with wanting to learn to draw and create something of my own. After 45 years of working in various companies, large and small, I was ready for a change. Courses at NYU, Rice University, and especially Glassell at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts all helped me to develop some skills. Some of the assignments from those classes are included here. Proportions, line quality, values and shading, composition, negative space, and more were practiced in these courses.
I decided to try to creating cartoons, like the one-panel ones typical of the New Yorker. The ability to express emotions with just a few simple lines and to make people smile and think in such an abbreviated format was a fun challenge. In furtherance of this goal, I attended a week long cartooning workshop in Vermont. And I became proficient in the use of ProCreate on my iPad. After the rejection of two batches of my cartoons from the New Yorker I started to lose interest.
Next I explored illustrations, creating the book covers included in this site and designing a few greeting cards. I dabbled in watercolor, taking a class at Rice. Learning to control the water with the brush gave me a sense of efficacy.
This led me to explore graphic design. The live Zoom course offered by the School of Visual Arts was fascinating. It required learning the Adobe Cloud applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, and especially InDesign. I include some of my homework from that class here. It cemented my delight with design and led me to the idea of creating a magazine. My attempt at this is Singular, shown under a tab here.