Today we’d like to introduce you to Vivien Mildenberger.
Hi Vivien, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
My love for drawing started when I was very little. I remember reading stories and brimming with so much excitement and energy from being transported to worlds fantastical and tantalizing. I wanted to hold on to and cherish that feeling long after all the pages were turned.
The only way my child’s brain knew how to release this built-up energy was to draw! I wanted to visualize what these amazing, far-away places looked like. I would try so hard but somehow I never felt I could capture what was so vivid in my head. Thus began the long journey that I’m still on now: To get better and better at bringing life and color to the words that I find so mesmerizing.
The drive to be worthy of the challenge to bring a good story to life propelled me through school and college, reminding me over and over again that my path was to become an illustrator.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I’m very thankful that I was able to jump into illustration full-time right out of college, but there have definitely been plenty of ups and downs. As with any creative industry, it’s difficult to break into. There are a lot of moments that require you to persevere and when things seem like they’ll never work out.
But illustration always felt like the only option for me, so I did everything I could to make it work. I think art as a career also poses some unique difficulties. Artists are so wrapped up in their art and it’s often very personal, that it’s difficult to separate yourself from your work. Especially when there are lulls between jobs, or you deal with the inevitable rejection letter or job that falls through.
Something I’ve had to learn is to treat it more like a job and give myself space to unwind from it. When you’re self-employed and work from home it’s so easy to work 24/7 and never take a break! Creative burnouts are real and it’s important to take care of your mental health.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m primarily a children’s book illustrator and I specialize in children’s biographies. So far, I’ve done almost exclusively nonfiction work and I’d really love to get to do a project with some world-building. Publishing one of my own fiction stories is my resolution for this year so I’m hard at work on various manuscripts I want to share. Hopefully, I’ll get to work on one of those with the publisher soon!
A good example of my work and process came to me when I was flipping through an old photo album. On one page next to photos of 4-year-old me was a business card my father made for me when he saw I was jealous of him. He had included our address, a little picture, and most prominently he had asked me to sign my name. I looked at my current signature then, at that time I was just graduating from art school, and it was almost identical.
I believe that the art you make as a child is more authentic than anything you can hope to make later. As a child you generate work without the pressures of being marketable, fitting into trends, or any other “shoulds”. I went through art school learning all sorts of “shoulds” and specific ways of making art. I graduated and tried to unlearn most of them.
Drawing from memory rather than reference helps me access that sort of childlike imagination as no two people remember things the same way and my memories are unique to only me. My studio is a place of play and experimentation instead of a place of work, and that way I’m always excited to continue exploring.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
When I was little I found myself constantly wishing that I would discover a fantastical world in the back of my wardrobe or be chosen by a mysterious old wizard to go on a quest.
I wished so hard and imagined so much. I used art and crafts as a way to channel all these emotions since my letter from Hogwarts never came. You would most likely find little me squirreled away in a corner crafting something. I read a lot of books and tried to write my own stories.
I lived in a fantasy world of my own making!
Contact Info:
- Email: vivien@mildenberger.com
- Website: vivien.mildenberger.com
- Instagram: @vvberger
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vvberger
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/vvmildenberger
