Sally Tilton sketches artistic pursuits

Sally Tilton, a junior, discovered their passion for digital art during high school. “I started off with a tablet and tried to do digital painting," they said to the Daily via Facebook message. "Then I went digging around for open source drawing software and found Inkscape, so then [I] moved into vectors a bit more. It's not an amazing program or anything, but part of the fun is working within constraints."

According to its website, Inkscape is a "professional quality vector graphics software." Vector graphics are commonly used in illustration and digital art to store images because they allow images to scale without pixelation.

Tilton’s friend Lindsay McCormick, who Tilton describes as their "high school muse," encouraged their artistic pursuits since Tilton first began working in digital art.

“[She had] the most interesting and absurd interpretations of my artworks, and I loved it," Tilton said. "She gave me instant gratification.”

McCormick’s encouragement changed Tilton’s thinking about sharing their art. Tilton now posts their work to the art-sharing website Deviant Art and has produced cover art for the band The VaGinas' song “Biggest Penis in Rock” (2015). According to Tilton, without McCormick, they would have continued to produce art but would not have shared it.

“[McCormick] made it worth sharing my artworks," they said. "I would have probably kept them to myself otherwise.”

Tilton is unsure of where their artistic interests will take them next but doesn’t think that creating art professionally or semi-professionally would fit with their personality or artistic motivations.

“I think my art will mainly stay a hobby, since it's pretty personal for me," they said. "I like to keep it as a little record of what I was up to at certain points in my life. I try to keep them simple and playful, more like a child's artwork, so I don't think I could use them in a more serious application. It would sort of go against the whole point of why I do it. It's self-indulgent most of the time with me.”