BROOKFIELD, Wis. — Art is Brookfield Academy sophomore Brook Ihlenfeld’s favorite pastime. 

“I took a while to find my hobby,” Ihlenfeld said. “I tried a bunch of different sports, ice skating, and one day I just, I’ve always liked drawing, and one day I decided to make it my hobby, and it clicked for me.”

On Friday, she and other students were told to draw the first thing that came to their minds when they heard the word “pet.”

She drew her dog, Luke, three times. There was a time limit for each drawing. The first one took three and a half minutes, and the last one, just 30 seconds.  

Despite not having time to add a lot of detail, Ihlenfeld said she liked the fast draw the best. 

“It seems the dog has more character, and I like the little face I made out of it,” Ihlenfeld said. 

These drawings were part of a workshop led by Paul Noth. He’s a cartoonist and writer from Milwaukee who has worked a variety of interesting jobs.

“I’ve been a cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine for 17 years. I’ve created animated shows for television, for Conan O’Brien, for Nickelodeon,” Noth noted. “I’ve had three middle school novels, and I’ve made educational comic books.”

This is his second visit to the Brookfield Academy this year as part of the school’s artist series. The first visit was more of an assembly, but this one was a hands-on style workshop, where the students were able to create and work with Noth. 

And Noth said he had one message he was really trying to convey. 

“I’m trying to break them from the idea that they need to overthink every drawing, that they need to make every drawing perfect, and show them the object is really to express themselves and articulate a feeling or something they want to say, more than it is necessarily — in this form at least — to make a pretty or perfect drawings,” Noth said. 

That’s what Ihlenfeld said she ended up liking too — that fast, less thought out type of drawing. 

She ended up drawing a single panel comic, one that tells a story. 

“I kind of wanted to do a sweet one, and less of funny,” Ihlenfeld said. “So it’s going to be the girl and the dog running through a field of flowers, and below it, it’s going to say, ‘some days, you just need to run.’”

Regardless of artistic ability, students at Brookfield Academy are learning a way to tell a story and express themselves in a visual way.