My Art School Experience (or lack there of)
I didn’t grow up dreaming of being an artist. The first time I considered going to art school was halfway through high school when we had to think about what kind of career we wanted. I was 14 or 15 at the time and I’d only been drawing for a couple of years at that point and didn’t know anything about the art world. But I didn’t know what else I wanted. We had to do some of those career choice quizzes that gave you a direction and the two answers that I always got was either education (for some reason) and art. I wanted illustration, because I didn’t feel like I had the patience for animation and I didn’t have any experience with animation at this point.
I went to a couple open days of schools. They seemed really cool. But at an opening speech, I heard applicants had a one in eight chance of getting in, right at the beginning of the day.
I enjoyed the rest of the visit, it was cool to look around and hear about the school. But mentally, I was already giving up. I didn’t believe I was going to get in,
I didn’t think I was good enough yet. Here’s an example of what my art looked like at the time:
I wouldn’t say it’s really up to an art school’s standard. They also wanted to see work of the past three years, but I didn’t have three years worth of work yet, I didn’t have enough experience.
Also, little side story. I went to two open days, one was the one I just talked about. Another one was one that was closer to me, but I did not like it. I didn’t like the vibe, it all seemed very commercial and corporate. But the last straw was when we were at a presentation for the illustration course and we (me and my parents) wanted to ask the teacher something afterwards. I wanted to do book illustrations and that kind of thing, but the presentation barely seemed to cover any regular 2D illustration, which I found odd, it was a lot of 3D or craft-like stuff, or even photography. So, we wanted to ask if that would be covered here, as well.
He was chatting with another set of parents and their child and we were patiently waiting for them to be done. But this dad was asking the most ridiculous, irrelevant shit. He was asking for this teacher’s whole life story! That’s not an exaggeration, he actually asked how he got to be a teacher here and where he started and stuff like that! As if we hadn’t been waiting right behind him for over five minutes. When the teacher actually started telling his life story and didn’t cut him off to give us the time of day, we were done with it and walked away.
A few minutes later, the teacher came up to us after all and was like, “you had a question too, right?” Then my mom asked for me (because I was a shy, autistic 15 year old) whether if I wanted to become a children’s book illustrator for example, if this would be the course for that. And his response was, “Well, we’re not a children’s book course,” in an obnoxious, snobby tone. They discussed it a bit further, but I’d clocked out of this whole school at that point. That was the last thing I needed to hear to decide. This teacher was already looking down on me for what I wanted and he didn’t even know me.
Was it fair to judge the whole school for this one teacher? Probably not. But I went back about 5 years later and I still didn’t like the place.
I had hoped this would be a one-time occurrence, but… not really.
I decided to do something else (education), which also didn’t work out. I quit after three months. Didn’t help that it was in the middle of the pandemic so I was barely at school anyway.
After that, I went back to wanting some kind of art education. But I still didn’t feel like I had a chance of getting in, even though this was 2 to 3 years later now. So instead, I applied to a ‘lower level’ design school where I did visual design. (There are different levels of education in the Netherlands, lower levels are mostly just more practical instead of theoretical.) For this school, I had to do some entrance assignments, but I never felt like I wouldn’t get in. Not sure why. Later, I heard that at that school, the odds were one in three to get in. Which is better than one in eight, but still not great.
I did get in and now I knew what I’d be doing for the next three years. My plan was to apply to art school after this, because this school also had a program to help with building your portfolio and such.
That program started in the third and thus last year. I went to school one day a week outside of internship to work on portfolio projects, we got feedback on the work itself and the portfolio as a whole, and got tips and tricks and help with entrance assignments. Even assessors from the schools came by to look at our portfolios. There was an assessor from the school I wanted to go to, one that I hadn’t been to before this year. He seemed positive about my portfolio.
I’d applied to two schools. The one that had the one in eight chance, and this new one. The new one was my first choice. I did an entrance assignment for both and only judging by those,
I wasn’t excited about the second school. They made me make an illustration about a paragraph from an article about the news and how it’s more about clicks than news these days. I don’t give a fuck about that.
In fact, I actively disliked it. But it had to be personal, how we felt about that article piece. So, I made something that showed my distaste for news and clickbait and such,
that it’s depressing and I’d rather stay in my bubble where I don’t have to think about huge world issues that I can’t do anything about anyway. This was the final result:
I got rejected right off the bat, no invitation for an interview or anything.
I also heard this school was quite a mess with applications. That some people were invited to come over, only to hear as soon as they arrived that they were actually rejected. And (massive hearsay, but still) a friend had heard someone say at or about that school that they did not only look at the work itself to see if applicants would be accepted, because she’d heard someone say about an applicant: "His work isn’t great, but oh well, at least we’ll have a guy in the class."
WHAT.
That school seemed so nice on the outside, but… jeez.
I had a lot more fun with the assignment of the other school, my first choice. The course I was going for was illustrated and animated storytelling. We could pick from several different assignments and I picked one about an impactful meeting.
Like a meeting between two characters that changes both of the characters in some way. I made a four page comic, with no dialogue, because I didn’t feel like dialogue was needed.
I thought it was better without it. This was the end result (also, they'd only given me like two weeks):
I did get invited for an interview this time. I didn’t know what to expect from it, but what it was actually like wasn’t at all what I thought it would be. We had to bring more material with us, like sketchbooks and such. We then had to display those on a table and assessors would look through them and later call you over for a chat. (Thinking back, I might’ve brought too much? I wanted to show I was capable of many different mediums but maybe that had not been the right thing to do, but who knows with these arbitrary ass assessments.)
While we all waited (it was a whole group at once) we had to make art on the walls, floor and windows with sticky notes. We were first paired up and we had to make portraits of each other. Then we switched partners and the subject matter of the art strayed further and further from portraits. While I was chatting with a girl, I was mindlessly making something and for some reason, it became some kind of weird frog creature. I don’t have a picture of it, sadly. Then later, we were instructed to make all the art we’d made around the room into one piece. How we ended up interpreting it was to connect them all with sticky notes somehow, mostly by making bridges between the parts. And of course the last part was to clean it all up. I swear, this part was only there to keep us busy while we waited for our interview. (Also, there was a girl there that I vaguely recognised but couldn’t place, and as we chatted a bit as we waited, we realised we were classmates, lmao.)
My interview didn’t go very well. I’m really bad at talking about my work face-to-face but I did my best. I don’t remember a lot from it, like I blocked it all out right after or I was on auto pilot while it was happening and I didn’t save any of it. I just remember being very uncomfortable. There was a younger guy and an older woman. I did not like the woman. I don’t know why, she just had a vibe to her that put me on edge, like she wasn’t just judging my work, but me as a person. The guy was pretty nice. Or so I thought. There’s one interaction from the interview that I remember vividly. I’d brought a book I’d written and designed and even bound all myself for a school project at the end of the previous school year. (It was an early version of Please, Go Home). He asked me which work I was the proudest of, and I said that book, because I was proud that I’d managed to make that whole thing from scratch by myself and I was very passionate about the subject matter. His response was, “Oh, you made the whole book? I thought you only designed the cover, because that seems like a typical design school assignment.”
...
So.
Let's unpack that.
This man saw an entire book lying on this table, a clearly handmade book (because I am not a professional bookbinder, it was just something that I wanted to try) with hundreds of pages of text and illustrations; and thought I’d only designed the cover and printed it out as a dust jacket, found some random, loose, wonky book to wrap it around that was somehow the perfect size for the dust jacket, with some random text in there and designs that just so happened to match the cover, and took this entire book with me instead of just the cover, which would have saved me like a kilo of weight in my backpack.
What? I get he didn’t have time to look through the book thoroughly, but who would assume that if an applicant brings an entire obviously handmade book with them that they only made the cover?
And then that last comment: “that seems like a typical design school assignment.” Ohhhghhh. That made me mad. He was looking down on me and my school so hard! It gave the whole school a stuck up vibe to me. And he said it so casually, like it was a fact that my school was beneath them!
I didn’t react to any of it in the moment, I think I just said something like, “yeah, I did make the whole thing.” But afterwards when I had time to process the whole experience, I was so pissed off.
A few weeks later, I heard if I got in or not. By the title of this essay, I’m sure you can guess the outcome. I did not get in. They failed me on every single assessment criteria except for writing. They didn’t even read my writing, they just said they were impressed by the fact that I’d written a book. While reading the feedback, I felt like they hadn’t even looked at my digital portfolio, because I felt like they said I didn’t show skill in things that I did show there. Like I didn’t show any skill in character design but I had several projects that featured that, including one that several character turnarounds, classic character design stuff. Okay, maybe they just weren’t good, but to say I didn’t show any skill in it?
I’d talked about this with my teachers at my current (at the time) school, the design school, and one of them reached out to the guy in charge of assessments, the same one who’d come by to look at my portfolio beforehand and seemed positive about it, to tell him about my complaint. A little later, I got an email saying the assessor had looked at my digital portfolio, very thoroughly, and still came to those conclusions. I don’t know if I believe her. (Pretty sure it was that judgy lady from the interview). And here's why I have a hard time believing that: in my digital portfolio, one of the biggest, most recent projects was that book, the handmade one that they had dismissed as "you only made the cover, right?" Now, this lady and the guy who said that were obviously two different people, but they were doing the assessments together. You'd think it would've come up, no? If it was so impressive that they decided I must be an amazing writer without having read my writing. In other words, if they'd really, actually, thoroughly, painstakingly looked through my portfolio like they claimed, they would have known exactly what that book was and that I did indeed not only design the cover.
It wasn’t the fact that I was rejected, I could deal with that, but the way it happened. I feel like they didn’t judge my work, they judged me as a person. They apparently thought I was good enough to invite for an interview, but suddenly when they’d spoken to me, no criteria was good enough except writing? Did they think I was going to talk my way into making them think I was amazing and deserved to be there? Was I supposed to? I’m here to make art, not perform the role of a hyper-confident, arrogant artist who thinks their work is the best ever. I wasn’t there to sell myself. It felt like they saw my work online and thought: "Oh, this is pretty cool, let’s meet the creator!" And then they met me (quiet, awkward, bad at talking about my work) and decided, "Actually, never mind. She doesn’t fit here."
Side note, I briefly had contact with another girl going for the same course as me, who also seemed like she was neurodivergent, and she was also rejected and angry about it. Make of that what you will.
I gave up after this. Around this time, I was also finishing up my internship and began to realise how much doing creative work for others burns me out. I didn’t know what kind of job I wanted after art school. I wanted to make my own things, like I am now, but I didn’t need school for that. In fact, it’d probably only get in the way of me doing that. The biggest reason I wanted to go there was to make connections so I had a bigger chance at success in the art world. But would that be worth four years of my life? It wasn’t worth it to me.
I chose a completely different school and course after all this. Of course I still want to make art and tell stories, and I still am, but it’s firmly in the hobby category now. I’m hoping to get a well-paying, not too draining job so I can live comfortably while I continue my creative projects on my own terms, with no one else getting to decide if it’s good enough or worth the time and effort. And yeah, of course I would love it if those projects could be the source of my living instead, so I can solely focus on that, but my brain cannot handle that kind of high-risk, uncertain lifestyle.
So, here I am, creating only for myself and whoever happens to find it and wants to enjoy what I make along with me.