The opportunities are endless for teen-oriented legal information. Never thought I’d find myself drawing about sexting and statutory rape, but now it has happened! I’ve been making comics for FindLaw and animating them for @FindLaw on TikTok and it has been quite fun. Who says the law has to be staid and boring?
Full Comic: Is Sexting Legal for Minors?
Full comic: I'm 18 and Dating Someone Younger...
Full Comic: Can Teachers Take My Phone?
Full Comic: Is Bullying Legal?
I put up with the mosquitos and the winters for these. Love them.
You know those times where the bugs actually aren’t that and you pretend you’re safe and it’s just lovely? And then a few days later you discover they were there all along? Based on a true story.
Transcript:
Page 1: An exuberant woman stands in a collaged north woods environment, on the front page of a Minnesota-shaped book, as she proclaims “The Glorious North Woods!”
Page 2: The same woman happily slaps at a single bug that is shown buzzing around her arm, all while proclaiming with a simple “The Glorious North Woods!” She’s unperturbed.
Page 3: The same woman snoozes with a smile, dreaming “The Glorious North Woods.” She’s completely unaware of the the few bugs shown buzzing around her.
Page 4: The same woman, stands surprised and alert with an exclamation point over her had and “itch me, itch me, itch me” coming from a red bump on her leg.
Page 5: In five drawings, the same woman is shown discovering more and more mosquito bites all over. She gets increasingly angry.
Page 6: An enormous mosquito character is show flying above a collaged north woods environment saying happily “The glorious north woods!”
Page 7: By Maddy Buck 2022, amidst some collaged trees, a lake, and dotted lines indicating bugs.
As an analytical, creative person.
For much of 2021, I had no ideas. I knew I wanted to make things, but I never knew what to make. And some days I just needed to make SOMETHING to feel that satisfaction of having completed a project. So I started a sketchbook I called the “I need to make something” sketchbook, in which I made faces out of blobs and turned them into people.
When it came time to make my yearly book, I decided to use the blob faces, simply turning them into Mad(dy) Libs.
I love them. It’s so crazy where setting restraints and creativity can take you. I love it.
My local bar association did an issue all about “art, literature, and the law,” which just came out. It includes one of my “We will get through this” illustrations and some of my thoughts on being a lawyer who can speak are and law. I love how it turned out and it was so fun to be included!
It is fun to page through the issue and see so much creativity from members of a profession that is viewed as being anything but creative. I can’t quite put my finger on it yet, but it is weird to me how much law and art seem like total opposites but also very related. I think there may be a lot of creative people underneath the formal training and expectations of lawyers. That creative side just isn’t valued or encouraged unless it is in the form of making an innovative argument or, in the rare cases, writing a witty footnote.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Venn diagram of art and law and what it means to inhabit parts of both of those spaces. I have no answers, but I do find it interesting to explore…we’ll see where that thread goes!
“Opting for Health”
This summer, I saw that the University of Minnesota Women’s Center was seeking proposals for a zine they were creating about “Re-Imagining Feminist Futures.” I was intrigued but also disappointed with myself because I couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t just “not [current state of affairs in US].” That kind of approach is hardly reimagining anything. It would not have worked. So I asked some friends to think through it with me one weekend over a zoom call. It was late August when it seemed like the entire West was on fire, and the friends I was talking to were in Oregon and Colorado, all of them holed up in their houses hiding from the smoky, caustic air. As we talked about this and other injustices that felt especially salient at that moment, a friend noticed that it all kept coming back to health. And there it was. What if we weren’t making all our decisions based on “more money” but “more healthy”? I know it feels lofty, but what if that were our inherent metric behind everything? It’s at least worth imagining even if it’s not currently possible.
The MN Women’s Center released their Re-Imagining Feminist Futures Zine today and I’m very glad to say it includes this piece (albeit a vertical version)! You can go to their page and order one or download one if you want. There’s a variety of writing and art in there, all by folks affiliated with UMN. Can’t wait to get mine in the mail next month!
It’s COVID times, you just finished a series of collages that you want to share as a full unit, and you have a few white walls. What do you do? Put on your own at home, asynchronous, a little silly gallery show!
Well, that’s what I did, at least. Check out the Blob Party, where I introduced the collages I have been working on since Spring 2020.
The Blob Party is a great event for introverts! ;)
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an inspiring woman in so many ways. As a female lawyer, it’s hard not to look up to her and aspire to be like her in some way. But the most surprising way she has been inspiring to me is the way she’s popped up into my art. Her possible death has been a concern for me since November 8, 2016. A huge concern. As I said in this zine in early 2019, it was such a concerning thought that I couldn’t even think about it or the likely the ramifications of such an event.
And then it happened. And somehow, despite the urge to wallow in despair at the predictable consequences of her death, I started joyfully making things:
First it was the impromptu collar made the morning after I heard the news. Made with scraps of colored paper, and documented to the tune of the Marriage of Figaro.
The next day, not sure what to do, I started making her response to the “When will there be enough women on the Supreme Court” question.
And finally, I responded to a friend’s request to draw her by cutting, pasting, and playing. It turned into a wonky portrait that I adore to pieces and a lawn sign.
May her legacy be honored and may she keep inspiring us all to create and act in positive ways.
I just finished a collection of blob collages. I started these in early lockdown days, almost as a meditative practice. My goal was to complete thirty of them and here they are, in a glorious pile! If you want one, stay tuned!
Making rainbow collages kept me sane through the most nerve-wracking early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Artistic Antidote project by the UMN Office of Clinical Affairs featured this project (my own personal artistic antidote) in mid May.
Two of my illustrations from by little “Book of Anger” were chosen to be part of the online archive of American Illustration 39! They are available here with the other winning illustrations of 2019.
