We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Madeleine. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Madeleine below.

Madeleine, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

My parents have always wanted the best for my siblings and me, and we have their undying support regardless of which path we choose to follow. Having grown up in a very academically competitive area, I was fortunate that I never had/have to deal with any pressure from my parents with my grades or my career goals. My parents happen to be in the field of the arts as well; they are both professional classical musicians, so I know firsthand the struggles that comes with that career path. Even so, they in no way discourage me to pursue a creative – yet potentially unstable – career if I wanted to. I did thoroughly consider studying some kind of artistic field at university, but I am currently relenting to the ‘safe’ route and pursuing a degree in physics and French. I am at a bit of a standstill, though, in my academics, and constantly questioning whether I’m doing the right thing for myself. My parents are really pushing me to do something with my art at university even if I’m not necessarily studying it, and in a perfect world I will be able to balance all of my interests and maybe switch to art full-time once I have a good cushion with a bachelor’s degree.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My online name is Mado, which is a little nickname my close friends and family use for me. It’s a bit of a cliché answer, but I have been drawing for as long as I can remember: as a kid, I would trace/copy illustrations from my picture books, and once I had my own electronic device I perused tons of tutorials on YouTube to help me refine my skills. What has inspired me most are the slice-of-life graphic novels I used to read a lot, my favorite authors being Raina Telgemeier and Svetlana Chmakova, so I started drawing my own comics at age 9. For some stories I invented my own characters (my first ever original character being Laura Roberts!), but I also wrote stories based on these dolls I owned from the brand ‘Groovy Girls’ which featured my own interpretation of their personalities. As of right now I only post my stuff on social media as a side thing to my academics, and I still only have a very small following due to competitive algorithms. However, I have drawn inspiration from several different artists – big and small – to invent my own unique style, and I am pretty proud of what I’ve been able to develop these past few years.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I definitely think every artist needs some degree of resilience to keep going; the artistic field is so challenging in that everyone has varying opinions of your work, and it’s so easy to go down the rabbit-hole of comparing yourself to others. I don’t really have a specific story that illustrates my resilience; it has been an ongoing challenge to continue my journey as an artist, especially at the beginning. There is a famous quote by Chuck Jones, “every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them, and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out” – and, boy, it is such a slog to get through those bad drawings! I think most children/preteens have had a phase of drawing tirelessly, but it is so hard to have the patience to get through the initial phase of understanding hand-eye coordination and having little sense of anatomy that so many people quit. I vowed to quit drawing many times when I was a beginner, but some creative spark kept me going and I somehow made it to year 10! Even in other aspects of my life I am very headstrong and don’t give up easily, so that part of my personality played a huge role in how I made it this far in my journey.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I think simply seeing the end result of your long hours of work and burnout is immensely rewarding. For example, I am a huge fan of studio MDHR’s game ‘Cuphead’, and their creative team put their hearts and souls into paying homage to the animation style of the 1930’s. Slaving over 50,000 frames of hand-drawn animation, it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture, but I can only imagine the awe of playing that game for the first time after such arduous work. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to work with a studio/company on a big project, but for my own personal works I can get really down on myself in the middle of the process and sometimes scrap it altogether. That’s something I need to improve upon; I have been working on redrawing a comic I made in middle school, but it’s been tricky to make a lot of progress because of the overwhelming magnitude of the project. I have a lot of respect for solo story time animators who can commit all they can to their videos without quitting halfway through, even with the challenges that comes with YouTube animation.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @madosart518 https://www.instagram.com/madosart518/
• Twitter: @madosart518 https://x.com/madosart518