Author: Deborah Brannon

Welcome to Ellen Million Graphics’ Featured Artist of the Week! Each week (or so), we select an EMG artist and share their work and history. We hope you enjoy getting to see incredible artists this way.

This week, our spotlight picks out that artist of colorful characters and fantastical folk, Madison Stuart! She joins us from Massachusetts by way of Indiana by way of her birth state North Dakota. Madison’s been drawing as long as she can remember, benefiting from generous parents who bought her art supplies whenever she asked for them. She cycles through visually creative periods where she draws most days, and fallow periods when she doesn’t – and finds herself most inspired by the science fiction and fantasy worlds she’s read about throughout her life, along with all the fandom and webcomics she’s encountered in her years wandering the Internet. She took a few art classes in high school – and did chalk portraits of many of her teachers! – but is largely self-taught.

While she’s worked with colored pencils and acrylics and even extensively with felt-tip pens, Madison is currently focusing on creating digitally. ” I’m still not sure whether I like digital art or not,” she confessed, “but I can work really quickly digitally and these days I lack patience; if something isn’t mostly done in an hour or two I put it aside and never touch it again.” She may be focusing on digital art, but she also said she’ll use any type of media that’s in front of her – even if it’s ketchup! She went on to add: “Perhaps some day I will be patient again; making lots of tiny lines is rather soothing, and I miss how easy it is to blend colors when using physical media.”

When she’s not doing art, you can find her reading (over 300 books a year!), knitting shawls (from her own patterns), and collecting weird accessories from pins to necklaces. She claims these are for one-day cosplays, but she might just be a dragon building her hoard.

Madison has been a contributing Portrait Adoption artist with EMG since 2009, and has created more than a dozen portraits for the site. She credits fan art with getting her into drawing portraits, and noted that her most frequently doodled subject are disembodied faces. She’s drawn characters from a freckled fawn-girl to finely-dressed elves and a blue-hued tiefling to characters of a dozen attitudes. Her portraits are also always stunning deals, so browse her Portrait Adoption gallery here!