A Brush with Design: 10 Designers Dish on Their First Design Encounter — Lindsay Yee
In the lead up to DA’s 10th birthday celebrations in March 2019, A Brush With Design asks 10 designers who have been involved with DA at various times to nostalgically recount their first memory of encountering design. In this fifth iteration we spoke with designer Lindsay Yee.
Rachelle George walked across the room, room 10 to be exact. The bottom of her navy blue CCC track pants sway — zips undone to the knee, above her white netball shoes. She stopped and hovered over my desk.
I panic, as for some reason one of the popular girls was near me.
She explains that as year eights, there was a responsibility to help organise things for Halswell Primary School, and that our Country Carnival was coming up.
As designated kid-who-could-draw — I was asked to illustrate up the poster for the event.
It would be put up at: the community noticeboard, the library, the haberdashery, swimming pool, video store/post shop, chip shop, and local New World.
“yeah” I think I mutter.
The thrill of seeing my work around the suburb, almost like that feeling when people watch you draw because they think you’re good at it.
So to begin on the job, I started to draw all the fair/carnival things I could think of. 2 main figures with loose influences from; Dragonball Z, Doug, and South Park were the centre of the design. Rides and farm animals littered the background. Hand drawn bubble letters were used at the top, that I remember using for almost every title of a new project.
As an avid drawer, and pencil purist (even though I got my pen license AGES ago) I was told that the pencil wouldn’t photocopy. Redrawing over all the lines in ink didn’t seem like a fun task.
I turned to my good friend Blake, who had a tractor — which we rode — and a regional rugby representative, but most importantly had an interest in ‘art’. I told Blake I’d half whatever we got in return for our services.
Blake, happily joined the job, and I had stumbled into a comic book penciler / inker situation.
Next week Miss Collins drops off a package, we sat proudly with our purple wrap blocks tucked safely in our lift up desks. Sitting smuggly like we had found some scam, doing drawings for chocolate.