McClain Allen

Hi! I’m McClain Allen, a graphic design student at the University of Georgia. Other than being the typical student and sorority girl, I’m also a painter, through and through. I attended a visual and performing art school for about 8 years. My dad is why art piqued my interest at such a young age. My parents used to buy me small pottery kits, the colorful ones usually involving unicorns and mythological creatures. In the afternoons, I spent hours painting these magnificent figurines, coming up with imaginative stories about the world they would live in. The time my dad would get off of work early, he would spend showing my brother and me his collections of cartoon character drawings he used to sketch in high school. We’d flip through his copy of Spy vs Spy 2: The Joke and Dagger Files with loose papers of character replicas. My dad showed me what a world full of color was like and how to think differently. He taught me how to think creatively.

Of course, this is the same person who told me that paying $67,000 a year to attend a private art university was useless. So here I am, attending the University of Georgia, the 47th-ranked school out of 439 National Universities. Am I ungrateful? Absolutely not. One of the first outfits my parents ever bought for me was a small pink onesie with a UGA “G” right on the front. Getting into the University of Georgia is one of my biggest accomplishments, alongside my acceptance into the graphic design program last spring.

Learning about a whole new area in the arts is like walking into a candy shop hungry. You try to grab as much candy as possible until you're overwhelmed by a sugar rush. If you asked me what I wanted to do with my life a year ago, I would say I wanted to be a painter. Now I can confidently say, I have no freaking clue. Art inspires me the same way it did when I was a kid, but being exposed to the different career paths I can take shifts the playing field completely. I know that I will find a career in graphic design that will fulfill the ambitions I have always held towards artistic endeavors. Coming to the University of Georgia and pursuing a graphic design degree was primarily inspired by my dad’s creativity and support, as he was always the one to push me towards my creative success.