Adobe Max - Wendy MacNaughton

Wendy home draw one, socks, sticks, mark. Ow. Like this? Hello. Hello. Hello.

Hi. I'm Wendy McNaughton, aka Wendy Mac. I'm an illustrator and a graphic journalist and a social worker and most recently a kids show art educator on the Internet. Is that my good side? You got me?

So the day that school closures happened, because of the pandemic, my wife and I wanted to help, and my mother suggested, teaching drawing to kids.

And my wife and I started an online drawing class on Instagram the first day. And we thought there was gonna be, like, a hundred kids showing up, but there was more like twenty thousand. One, I totally fell in love with it.

And two, we realized that there was nothing else like this in the world. We stopped after three and a half months, but I saw what was possible, and we decided that we would keep going and turn it into what we knew it could be. So I thought this was gonna be no big deal. Right?

Because I had done this before. All you do is you just have a camera and maybe some sound. That's all you need. Right?

Right? Okay. So I was like, sure. We can do this. Turns out, there is this whole industry called Hollywood, and they do spend a lot of time making things.

It takes a long time to make a show. I didn't know that. As an artist, I didn't really understand why because I'm used to having idea and then figuring out just how to make it, make it together ourselves.

I I kinda got frustrated, to be quite honest, and said, I don't understand why we have to wait around for everybody to do this. So I just said we're gonna do it ourselves.

So we turned this into into this.

Welcome to the Draw Together studio. So we build this entire set completely by hand. It was a few adults and a bunch of kids. I can tell you all about how we did this, but maybe I should just show you. Hold on. On.

Watch.

People who are entrepreneurial, we're used to doing a lot ourselves.

It can be challenging to know what we shouldn't do ourselves because we're used to just figuring it out, we get it done, right? One way or another we get it done.

But when we're doing something that's bigger than ourselves, we have to know where our strengths and our challenges are so that we can bring people in and work really well with those folks. That's hard.

I don't have any tips for you because I'm still learning how to do it myself.

This is by far the hardest that I've ever worked on a project, and it was the steepest learning curve I've ever had on a project. And those two things really collide because, to be quite honest, I can put a lot of pressure on myself and I want things to be really, really good. Sometimes I can see, you know, how good they can be and when it's falling short, I get mad at myself. It's called perfectionism, and we try and deal with that intro together, but, you know, what is that, doctor heal thyself, that kind of thing? Some things don't change, though. Pencils up?

So on set, it's just Caroline and I, And, we have nobody else here, also because we didn't have any resources, but it's just her and I, and she's in charge of the camera and the sound, and I'm in charge of everything else. We also have a dog that we're wrangling the whole time. So she's, like, shooting with this iPhone and doing sound at the same time. I'm doing a clapper and then doing the white balance for her camera.

We didn't know how to do any of this. And then I'm running around, sitting behind the desk. She says, action. And I say, hello, and welcome to draw together.

It was nuts. And then I'd stumble on a word and then like, ah, stop, and then rewind. And we'd to do it all over again. It'd be like, take two.

So it was super stressful. And like I said, it was just Caroline and I on the set. We're married. Okay?

Maybe a takeaway from this is don't make a TV show with your partner exclusively alone during a pandemic. Maybe. So when we started, I was listening to a lot of folks with experience in Hollywood and asking them for tips.

And they said, You've got to keep it short. This is like the YouTube generation. It's got to be under six minutes. That's the only way you're going to keep their attention.

And I couldn't do six minutes, but I'm like, Maybe we can keep it like ten minutes or something like that. Because we were doing like thirty five or forty before. Right? So like, let's reel it back.

Let's do ten, make it snappy. Right? We did that. We put out the first one and the second one, and they were both under ten, and there was like an uprising.

Like we heard from parents saying that their kids started crying while watching, because we had done these cuts where it was like moving really fast. It turned out what the kids really loved was just hanging out in real time, like really actually just being there together, that we were in a shared space making something together. So when we introduced that quick pace, those fast cuts, it like broke that connection.

And it was like kind of heartbreaking. So we threw all that, we threw everything that all the tips we got from Hollywood, we said, screw that. We're gonna go back to what we know and follow our guts, slow it down, and then everybody was happy again.

Something we talk about in Draw Together is how very different everybody is and what a gift that is. How wonderful it is that we're all different and unique and that only you can make the things that you can make.

Together. And today, I am going to give you one. What is some big giant dream that you have? I know you have one. Everybody has one. You might think it's impossible. You might never think you'll achieve it, but something that you've wanted to create or envision or something like that, that seems out of reach.

Can you think of it? Yes? Okay. Do one thing, one little tiny piece of it this year.

Preferably, it's something you do by hand that you actually, like, make something that goes in that direction. Just one thing. And let's see at the end of the year how that big dream is still feeling to you. If it feels any different, maybe a little bit, probably it will because it's totally achievable.

One thing I found really useful was having a trusted group of friends who I respect and I love and I know who get like what I'm trying to do. They're a board of advisors, a creative board of advisors.

Create a creative board of advisors for yourself. Just name three people, maybe four, maybe five that are in your lives that you would like to check-in with every now and again about that big dream maybe, or about something else that you want to do, projects you're doing, something that really comes from the heart that's passion fueled.

They're your boarder advisors, check-in with them, they're your cheerleaders. Also, you are theirs.

I don't know if other people relate to this, but I really throw myself into projects a hundred and twenty percent.

That's I'm more than one hundred percent, sometimes it's too much, a little bit. And it's really strong. And it takes me a little while then to kind of get back on balance and realize that there's other parts of my life that I've dropped, like drawing, right?

Like spending more time with my wife, you know, things like that. So right now, we're instead of trying to have that big push at the beginning like we did with creating Draw Together, right now we're trying to do something where it's more sustainable.

And I'm trying to bring that sustainability back into my life too. And that means that I'm starting to draw again, which is really good. It's a practice, we go in and out of things, but it's a sustaining one for me. I think a lot of us have that thing. Maybe it's like I don't know. So for some people, it's an exercise or for some people, it's an artistic practice, but something that we have to keep for ourselves.

So, I'll be drawing more, but draw together is where it's at.