My name is Allene Schaff, although most know me as Allie. Over the summer I interned with Steel Wool Studios, a place I have grown very familiar with in the last couple of years. I first came upon them my Senior year of high school, as we had to participate in month long internships to graduate. I reached out to my family friends, and they reached out to their family friends, until my plea for help was read by a neighbor of ours. She works for Pixar, and put me in contact with Andrew Dayton, the cofounder of Steel Wool Studios. Though he could not help me with my high school internship- he was releasing his first game at the time -he did offer to have me for the following summer. I have been returning ever since.
Though this was not my first time interning with them, this was my first time receiving credit for the internship, and my first time creating portfolio worthy pieces on the job. Before last summer, I was playing the coffee jockey, ordering drinks during lunch, doing odd jobs around the office, and getting the occasional opportunity to help work on sketch ideas for far off concepts. This last summer however, I was able to push my artistic abilities to the limit when another one of the co-founders, Jason Topolski, asked me to work on the expansion art for his board game, Camp Grizzly. I agreed. Though I was unsure of my ability to properly emulate the original style, I managed to crank out a ton of work for him; over the course of a couple of months, we worked very closely together and I managed to create around eighty uncolored illustrations that will appear in the final game, or be used to model figurines of the playable campers. He taught me many lessons about the importance of time management and the usual workload and workflow of professionals in similar fields. He often likened my sketching process to storyboard artists, and always encouraged me to try and find my own shorthand, to work faster. These are skills that, while applicable across the board, are especially useful to illustrators like me who need to be able to convey and sort through visual ideas quickly.
Overall this internship helped better manage my time, and I am glad I learned these lessons before heading into my junior year at MICA, which is rumored to be one of the most challenging.
