I wasn’t very far into my research for the Port Angeles Fine Art Center’s “Obsessed: The Art of Nerd-Dom” exhibition when I realized that I had to do a piece inspired by the origins of the word “nerd”.

The first known English-language usage of the word “nerd” was in the 1950 Dr. Seuss children’s book If I Ran The Zoo. It had nothing to do with the definition we know today. A “nerd” was merely a creature that lived in the zoo. It resembles the Grinch (and predates him by seven years).

I chose to pair the nerd creature with a quote attributed to lifestyle blogger Mandy Hale. There was an extremely Seussian quality to a phrase she uses in one of her posts:

“Better to be a nerd than one of the herd”.

To complete this piece, I began with several drawings of the nerd creature in my sketchpad. This character was surprisingly difficult to draw, despite appearing quite simple. My final drawing was a bit clumsier than I would have liked, but I reasoned to myself that it didn’t have to look exactly like the original. It just had to look like a nerd.

Once completed, I cut out the drawing with an X-acto knife, traced it onto a piece of watercolor paper, and lightly penciled in an outline. I added the yellow portions in colored pencil, then followed it with the red parts. The black portions were drawn with a Micron Sakura ink pen. To make the white parts pop, I highlighted them carefully with a conté crayon.

The completed drawing was sprayed with a matte fixative to prevent smudging. Once dry, I rotated the paper and repeated the above quote, using a relatively uniform style of text to avoid clutter on the page. I continued until the page was full. In total, this piece took about two to three days to complete (while simultaneously working on other pieces for the show).

It was then framed, and shipped off to be displayed at the Port Angeles Main Library from January 11 to March 15, 2020.