If you had asked me growing up whether aviation and art would eventually become two of the biggest parts of my life—and somehow become intertwined—I probably would have said no.
Aviation was there first, though.
My interest in airplanes started at such a young age because of my ties to the Louisiana Air National Guard. I grew up going to more airshows in New Orleans than I can remember, and when I was around 11 years old, I even spent a weekend at NASA Space Camp. I had the flight suit and everything!
So airplanes were always there in the background.
Art came into focus a little later. I was always interested in it, but it wasn’t until middle school that I took an art elective and really started developing that side of myself. In high school, I continued taking art classes for all four years and became much more serious about it.
The funny thing is that airplanes really weren’t what I was drawing!
At the time, most of my artwork revolved around the other things I loved: music and sports. I drew soccer players, musicians and whatever else I was interested in at the moment. One of my favorite pieces from high school was actually a painting of Kid Cudi on a vinyl record.
Meanwhile, I was also heavily involved in sports myself. Soccer and track & field were a huge part of my life, and I was breaking school and state records during those years.
Basically, there were a lot of different interests competing for space in my brain: Aviation. Art. Sports. Music. They existed alongside one another, but I never really thought about connecting them.
Then I actually learned to fly.
After graduating college with my bachelor’s degree, I was offered a discovery flight.
Up until that point, aviation was something I loved, but becoming a pilot still didn’t completely feel like something I could actually do. Flying an airplane professionally seemed like one of those careers that belonged to some other group of people who had figured out the secret path into aviation.
That discovery flight changed that almost immediately.
I went into it thinking I would mostly be along for the ride. At one point, the instructor said something along the lines of, “Can you take the controls? I need to grab something from the back.” It was basically his way of tricking me into flying the airplane. Not that I needed much convincing!
From there, he started talking me through a few maneuvers, and I remember how surprisingly natural it felt... There was this very distinct realization: ‘I can actually do this!’
I had absolutely no idea what kind of flying job I wanted at that point. I didn’t have some perfectly mapped-out plan for where aviation would take me.
I just knew I needed to keep flying. I had caught what everyone in aviation likes to call “the flying bug,” and there was really no going back after that.
The art took a little longer to catch up.
Interestingly enough, I wasn’t creating much artwork during the period between graduating college and beginning flight training. For a while, flying took over.
I was learning an entirely new skill, working through ratings and trying to figure out this completely new direction for my life. The creative side of me was still there, but it wasn’t necessarily demanding much attention.
That changed during my instrument training.
By then, I had also started developing the style that would eventually become the foundation of Studio AMAC: what I call pointillism with words.
Instead of building an image with traditional dots, I create it entirely from tiny handwritten words, letters or numbers. From a distance, you see the complete subject. Get closer, and you start realizing what it’s actually made of.
And for my first aviation piece in that style, I knew exactly who I wanted to draw.
Amelia Earhart.
More specifically, I wanted to create Amelia entirely out of ‘99s’.
At the time, I was a newly minted private pilot and an active member of the Mississippi Chapter of The Ninety-Nines, the international organization of women pilots that Amelia Earhart helped establish.
Suddenly, these two previously separate parts of my life made sense together.
I wasn’t just drawing an aviation subject because airplanes looked interesting. I was drawing something I now felt personally connected to.
The Amelia piece ended up being incredibly well received within The Ninety-Nines. It was featured in their magazine, and some of the organization’s trustees even purchased notecards featuring the artwork.
Looking back, that was probably the first indication that my aviation world and my art world weren’t going to stay separate much longer.
That doesn’t mean Studio AMAC became only aviation. And even now, I wouldn’t describe myself strictly as an aviation artist.
I’ve always liked jumping between subject matter. You’ll find airplanes alongside athletes, musicians, architecture and all kinds of other things in my portfolio. Honestly, the variety keeps me from burning myself out creatively.
But aviation artwork has given me something the other subjects haven’t quite replicated. It connected my artwork to a community that I was already part of.
Over the years, aviation pieces have led to charity donations, organizations, collaborations and conversations with people throughout the industry. Sometimes someone knows me as a pilot first and then discovers the artwork. Other times, they find the artwork and only later realize that I actually fly the airplanes I’m drawing.
Being a pilot has also changed some of the little things I notice when I’m creating an aircraft.
Understanding how an airplane should look in different phases of flight helps when I’m working from a reference image or changing something about the original composition. There are details I can add because I’ve seen them from the cockpit or understand what the airplane is doing—everything from its attitude in flight to the colors of the navigation lights on the wingtips.
They’re tiny details.
But my work is basically built around tiny details.
And apparently that’s the surprising part.
One of the comments I’ve gotten from pilots over the years is that they don’t expect the work to be as precise as it is. I actually think the pilot side of my personality and the artist side work together better than people expect.
Aviation requires an almost obsessive attention to detail. My artwork does too.
Every one of those tiny words is placed by hand. There isn’t a filter generating them or a program filling in the airplane for me. I’m sitting there building the image piece by piece until thousands of individual marks eventually become one recognizable subject.
In hindsight, maybe aviation and this particular style of art were always going to fit together.
It just took me a while to figure that out.
For most of my life, art and aviation ran on separate tracks.
One started with airshows, the Louisiana Air National Guard and an 11-year-old wearing a NASA Space Camp flight suit.
The other grew through middle-school art electives and four years of high-school art classes, where I created entirely different subject matter in different styles.
Then one discovery flight changed the direction of my life.
And a few years later, Amelia Earhart made out of hundreds of tiny 99s finally brought the two worlds together.
They haven’t really separated since.