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

Mellasenah , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I was eight years old watching Tarzan with my dad for the thousandth time and it was the scene in the beginning of the movie where the leopard is chasing after the baby. There is a moment where the leopard bursts up through the wooden floorboards and it’s a gorgeous bit of animation: the unique splintering of the wood coupled with the musculature of the leopard and all of it’s spots coming together in one shot. It’s magnificent. During this viewing, my dad said, “Amazing somebody made that.” And I had to get him to elaborate because I had never realized that the movies I loved were made by hand and that a grownup could draw all day and call it a job. It was the first time I had ever heard of art as a career and I knew immediately that I wanted to do that.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m Mellasenah Nicole Edwards. I am a 29 year old Baltimore native with a passion for books, fantasy, history, and sweets. I have been making art for as long as I can remember–my parents would paint and draw with me all the time. As early as five years old, I was attending art classes at Maryland Institute College of Art and going with my mom to museums. This early interaction with the arts laid the groundwork for my future career path as an illustrator.

For high school, I auditioned and got accepted to the Baltimore School for the Arts and the education I received there was unlike any other. My mornings were spent in academic classes while afternoons were devoted to rigorous artistic study. During my tenure there, I studied figure drawing, oil painting, both 2D and 3D design, ceramics, sculpture, printmaking and photography. Art History was a required subject for three years and was an incredible experience for young artists to learn about their forebears and help develop their artistic taste and language.

I graduated BSA and moved to New York to attend School of Visual Arts where I would receive my bachelor’s in Illustration in 2017. For the next five years, I found myself working in arts education teaching at Brooklyn Museum, Blue School, and My Little Village, to name a few. Working specifically in early childhood arts education informed my practice more than I ever could have imagined. My students taught me how to play again and how to bring joy and humor into my practice.

My work is steeped heavily in folklore, magic, history, and joy. I love working with narratives that center characters of color and the stories of marginalized folks. My work aims to show people of color experiencing joy, love, and liberation without the expectation of hardship or resilience. They are allowed to just be and experience the magic and beauty of the world in whatever way they see fit.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding thing is being able to make something from nothing. The process of having the idea to scribbling it out to sketching it to painting/sculpting/carving it is so gritty and delicious. I love to work traditionally, to get incredibly messy and tactile. Each time, no matter how often i have used a particular media, the result brings about some sort of curve ball or lesson that I didn’t know I needed to learn. Sometimes it can be so frustrating but it also keeps your brain whirring and problem-solving so that you can make the best image possible.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I think graduating from School of Visual Arts without a single job lined up felt like a real curve ball thrown at my life. In hindsight, I can’t remember what I thought I wanted to do once out in the world…I think I sort of expected the “illustration jobs” to just fall into my lap and then, surprise surprise! they didn’t. I had to move back with my parents for a few months to figure out what to do with my life and assess what sorts of skills I had that could be applied to a job–any job!

My pivot to education didn’t feel necessarily out of place or forced. In many ways, it just felt adjacent to what I wanted to do which was illustrate, but at the time I don’t think I really knew what sort of illustrator I wanted to be. The more time passed, the less I felt connected with my art practice. So, I began taking commissions on the side and finding other ways to incorporate drawing into my daily job. I made coloring pages and books for my students to keep myself making and that positive feedback led me to create an online store and a separate instagram account devoted just to my art practice.

Because working in education was so influential to my work, I don’t regret the pivot or see it as a derailment of any sort. Every teaching job and odd-job held inbetween brought me to where i am today. Without those experiences I do not believe my work would be what it is right now in this iteration.

Contact Info:

• Website: mellasenahnicole.com
• Instagram: @mellasenahnicole
• Other: yellomellasenah,bigcartel.com