It had always been my understanding that half of what was taught in art classes was the technique of seeming as despondent and enigmatic as possible. There was definitely no room for smiles and Nike shorts in my art mental set. Yet, standing in front of me, junior Shaina Manuel challenged everything I thought I knew about “artists.”
Turns out, this wasn’t the first time Manuel’s broad grin and sporty attire didn’t quite compute with someone’s notion of an art major. Laughing, she told me that even her own roommates assumed they had the wrong room when the art major they’d heard they would be shacking up with didn’t have “green hair and [a] sense of style or something.”
When I heard there was a girl aspiring to be a sketch artist, I couldn’t help but test her skills. So, after we sat down and began talking, Manuel got to work sketching from a photo of my roommate and me. Then, she pulled a folder out of her bag and began removing completed sketches, laying them out one by one on the table. After seeing Michael Fassbender, Robert Pattinson and Anderson Cooper look back at me in perfect graphite form, I forgot previous notions of troubled, green-haired artists. Manuel admitted she wasn’t sure how she got into the habit of sketching heartthrobs. “I guess I just thought they were cute and stuck to it,” she giggled.
When I asked if she’d always planned to be an artist, Manuel shrugged. “I didn’t just grow up wanting to be a sketch artist. It was something that kind of developed over time,” she said. A self-described “awkward individual,” Manuel explained she always felt more relaxed with a pencil in her hand.
After a while, she developed an affinity for drawing portraits, mesmerized by the “stories and the emotions behind every face.” As the daughter of two parents in the federal justice department, eventually the idea of doing police sketches just made sense. Manuel explained that it’s a pretty behind-the-scenes jobbut one that can ultimately close cases.
Secretly, Manuel says she dreams of being the ultimate elusive artist and “doing some kind of Bansky thing.” So, basically, if graffiti of attractive male celebrities starts hitting major cities, we’ll know who to call.
When she’s not in class or sketching, Manuel likes to watch “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” and imagine her own drawings helping Olivia Benson catch the felon just in time for the next “In the criminal justice system…”
At the end of the interview, she humbly handed over the sketch she had been multitasking, and I saw my own face (and roommate’s) looking back with startling accuracy. Manuel’s sketches are likely to put bad guys behind bars one day. Until then, if you want to test out a new look and put her skills to the test, she does drawings for commission using the Instagram account @Shainasart.
