We were lucky to catch up with Sarah Fuselier recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Sarah, thanks for joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I think the two most important parts of learning how to illustrate is passion and patience. Without passion, you aren’t motivated to take risks, try new things, and explore. Having things you love, and want to capture and express will make your world feel so much brighter. Without patience, you aren’t giving yourself the room to make mistakes and become better. Practice doesn’t make you perfect, but creativity relies on imperfection. Being patient with yourself allows opportunity. If you always get it right the first time you try, what are you even learning?

I don’t think that kind of mindset is designed to be sped up, it is something you have to find in yourself, and everyone is at a different starting line. For me, I found it in a stray gray cat that has been by my side for approximately 7 years now. Loving him taught me to be patient with myself, and allow myself to try new things. That’s when I allowed myself to enjoy cooking in my high school culinary class, which led me to food illustration, then animals and now full whimsy and fun!

I’m a firm believer in spending time learning traditional art practices, even if you’re primarily a digital artist. I began with traditional graphite drawings, then moved into a variety of paints, then digital art. There are so many sensitivities that traditional art trains your hands and eyes to recognize in all kinds of illustration. Now, you don’t have to get down and dirty with charcoal and oil paint if that’s not your thing, but even just a plain pencil or collaging paper can be fun! In addition to that, make it a habit or routine to make something creative everyday. I think of it like working out, you’re doing these smaller tricks to train yourself and over time you begin to build incredible creative muscles. Try putting a weird restriction on a sketchbook page. Say, you can only use the color blue, or you have to draw with your left hand! These things actually help you break open your mindset and allow more out-of-the-box thinking.

Something I will say, though, don’t compare yourself to others, comparison is the thief of joy. If you’re always worried about what someone else is doing, you might be missing the opportunities in front of you. And within that, don’t restrict yourself to things you see everyone else is doing. How can you spin this to be yours? What makes this art you? Where is your voice? Speaking of voice, make sure to listen to your own more than others’. I wasted a lot of time because I was listening to what everyone else wanted of me. I spent a year in culinary school before switching to illustration, because that’s what was asked of me by others. I love baking, don’t get me wrong, but it didn’t feel right to pursue for the rest of my life. I felt like if I didn’t pick baking, I was letting people in my life down. Ultimately, you need to make the choice to put yourself first.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Hi there! My name is Sarah, I’m an illustrator and print designer. I’m originally from Louisiana, but I’m a military brat, meaning I’ve spent my whole life growing up in different places. I love capturing experiences big and small, real and imaginary, so I became an illustrator! My work begins with food illustration but it doesn’t end with it, and I love the craft and process of making art the most. I have Cajun and Italian roots, so food is a big part of my cultural background, and my work expands from there with various expression of life. I earned my BFA at the Savannah College of Art and Design and I spent a preliminary year in the Baking and Pastry Program at Johnson and Wales University. I’m also a slow-life enthusiast, meaning I want to really stop to smell the roses! I believe it is worth capturing the little moments in life and integrating them into your imagination.

Illustration is such a broad term, but for me, illustration means I target art and design for advertisements, books, branding, packaging, print, clothing, and home goods designs. If you can hold that thing, I want to make art on it! A lot of my work features food, fun colors, and expressive texture. I love to take things from the real world and twist and stretch them to be dreamier, brighter, and more whimsical. I love to explore the applications of art and mix traditional and digital materials. I also love helping people, which is what everyone says, but I love being able to make people laugh and enjoy themselves, even if it’s only for a brief moment. The best way for me to do that is artistic expression. I yearn to create more visual and tactile experiences to connect people of all kinds. I believe human connection is something we need more of, everyday, and I’m proud to say I bring that to people!

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

As a military brat, my entire childhood was based on my ability to pivot, and to be frank, I wasn’t good at it for a really long time. I spent time in two elementary schools, an intermediate school (for 5-th and 6th grade students) two middle schools, and two high schools. I moved from Virginia to North Carolina in the spring of my junior year of high school, and because of that I spent my senior year playing catch up to graduate on time. I really struggled with the fact that my honors diploma was ripped away from me so close to graduation. In that year of catch up, I was required to take culinary arts and AP Studio Art classes. Both of these allowed me to express my frustrations and build something in my new environment. I ended up applying to three colleges, two art schools and one culinary school. One of those being SCAD, and another being JWU. I was given lots of support from my art teacher, and she even suggested on one of the last days of my senior year to look into being an illustrator. That was my first sign. Ultimately, in the decision to pick a school, I was pressured by several other voices in my life to pick JWU. I didn’t fully believe art was a realistic option for me at the time, so I spent my first year of college in Charlotte, North Carolina. I fell in love with the city, and really pushed myself academically, where I was considering becoming a chocolatier or a pastry chef. Something about it felt off, and it hit me square in the face during my introduction to viennoiserie class, where my chef asked who in the room wants to own their own baking business one day, and every single hand in the room shot up except mine. I hasn’t considered opening a brick and mortar store, only working under someone else. I bean to question what was driving me here, and the self-doubt became strong. Then COVID-19 hit the brakes on my pastries. You can’t exactly bake in large, industrial-sized ovens with a pandemic growing. At the time, we didn’t know how big it would be. I remember I made a joke to a friend the week we were sent home from Charlotte, saying “This is a sign I should’ve chose art school” which was hilariously followed by an email from a SCAD admissions officer as soon as I went home. They were advertising their growing online campus, and asking if I wanted to enroll. After some serious soul searching, I decided to take the jump. It felt really scary at first, considering this was exactly two years after I was ripped away from my high school, I briefly worried I was doomed to repeat this cycle, and wouldn’t find roots in Savannah. Four years later, I earned an Illustration degree from SCAD! I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I truly feel like I made the right choice, and that this is what I was meant to do.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I think one of the best examples of resilience of mine is a project I worked on last winter. Due to some agreements I can’t share the name of the project I was working on, but the premise was to build an advertising campaign for a digital creator. I was working in a large team, running back and forth from market research to the visual development to the advertising illustrations. in the background, the client began to fizzle on us and officially left the project due to external factors at the midpoint of the timeline. We were not the quickest on our feet for the first 48 hours, as we were spending that time scrubbing all of our designs of their intellectual property. The department asked us to pivot the project into something new, and we had to figure out, how can we take these assets we have already made and use them in a unique way? I remember a department lead coming into a weekend meeting we planned, everyone came in frustrated and half ready to give up. He asked us, “why are you here? What made you come back on a Saturday?” I can be stubborn about finishing things I’ve started, and I wanted to see the project to the end. We made some minor edits to the designs, and began to build an alternate reality game with them. I was back to the research team, and built a compelling argument about modern advertising methods don’t resonate with Gen Z, and we were able to create an ARG advertising campaign model for a video game. I built costume designs, digital ads, posters, and a functional scavenger hunt that takes the player throughout New York City, in about 5 weeks. It was so much fun in the end! Even though things don’t go the way you expect them to, you should never give up.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://fuselierillustration.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fuselier.doodles/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fuselierdoodles/
• Other: I have begun publishing my illustrations on They Draw and Cook! https://www.they-draw.com/artists/fuselier-doodles !!