Jack McRaven

Jack McRaven


I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember. The walls of the house, the back of a test, the dirt on a baseball field – if I could find a way to draw on it, I would. Throughout grade school I would fill my notebooks with doodles, to the point where it was difficult to find any notes from class at all. In my own time I began to create little comic strips (they were funny at the time, not so much anymore) and fill a sketchbook with drawings of the world around me. Towards the end of middle school I began to realize that I loved making art, and I wasn’t half bad at it either. During high school I really began to dedicate myself to becoming the best artist I could be, and I carried that with me through my first two years of college at Bowling Green State University.

Now my path has led me here, as a junior transfer student at Columbia College Chicago, and with it my interests have expanded to encompass a variety of different art forms. I’m majoring in traditional animation, and thus I spend the most time honing that particular skill, but I also work in illustration, music composition, screenwriting, and even fashion and photography when I get the chance. I believe that creativity is a wildfire – one that engulfs everything in my life, one that can’t possibly be contained to a single creative practice. At heart, I’m still the same kid doodling in his notebooks, and I’m grateful for it.