Crafting Creativity: two instagram artists create for different reasons

Alex Manning’s lifelong love of art led her to start an art business on Instagram.

Sophomores Alex Manning and Maeve McGrath were hanging out late at night in Manning’s basement when McGrath mentioned that she’d love it if there were some butterflies and stars painted on her Nike Air Force Ones. 

Manning said that she’d always wanted to try painting Air Forces, but she didn’t want to draw one butterfly’s wing bigger than the other or get some bright red paint in the wrong spot and permanently mess up a friend’s favorite pair of shoes. 

“I really do not care if you mess them up,” McGrath remembers saying. “I know you’re super artistic and you won’t. Just do whatever you want.”

Manning used acrylic paint and Molotow paint pens to paint one small Monarch butterfly on each shoe, getting more comfortable with each brushstroke. Each time she and McGrath hung out she added another design until McGrath’s shoes were covered in stars, flames, polka dots, checkerboards, paint drips, suns and butterflies.

Soon after McGrath wore the sneakers to school, Manning was flooded with texts, snapchats and Instagram DM’s from people asking if she could paint their new pair of Air Forces or Toms. She made an Instagram account called @madebyal last May to continue to grow her business.

“She can do a lot because her art is so multifaceted, she can go so many different ways with it,” McGrath said. “She can’t just like paint shoes, you know, it translates to so many different things that she can do.”

Earlier this semester, Manning tried out a new medium by creating a sun design and then screen printing it onto a t-shirt for a Graphic Design class project. The Instagram DM’s flooded in asking to buy the t-shirts just like the shoes.

Manning is currently developing two new t-shirt designs and she hopes to sell more products like phone cases and stickers in the future.

“I try and base my products off of my customers, so I make designs that I know they’ll like like butterflies, suns, rainbows and that kind of thing,” Manning said.

Manning has gone from making Disney princesses out of clay to watercoloring on canvases — and she doesn’t plan on quitting anytime soon. Her dream is to one day have a profession that revolves around art.

“[Art] isn’t just something she does for school or to make money,” Alex’s mom Stephanie Manning said. “She loves it.”

To see Alex in action, watch this video by Lawder DeSantis.

Gretchen Raedle created an art Instagram account both for fun and as an asset to herself in the future.

Once a week for about a month last summer, you could only find senior Gretchen Raedle in one place — the watercolor paper section at the Paper Source in Leawood. The second she’d tried cream-colored absorbent watercolor paper, there was no going back to stationery paper.

“I don’t like painting with anything else [other than watercolor] because I feel like with watercolor you can make it dark or you can make it light,” Raedle said. “But like if I mess up, I can just paint over it with water and it’ll pretty much erase.”

Raedle decided to use her new love for watercolor to paint a picture of her friend Piper Noblit from Noblit’s Instagram.

“It might not be perfect or anything but I was like, ‘Oh I like the way it looks, I’ll send it to her.’” Raedle said. “She was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I love that it’s so good!’ So then I kind of just started doing it more after that.”

Since then, Raedle has painted many of her other friends and even some celebrities too. She posts the paintings on her art Instagram account: @gretchsketched. 

“I think her work is very meaningful because she’s always drawing subjects that she knows,” Raedle’s friend senior Chloe Sowden said. “She’s either in the picture or it’s her friends in the picture so she gives a lot of them away as gifts and that makes them even more special.”

Raedle was inspired to take her art to Instagram after a conversation with family friend Britttan Bates. Raedle was surprised when Bates told her that she had an Instagram baking account, until she learned that Bates uses it as a way to brand herself.

“In job interviews they’d say, ‘Tell me about something we couldn’t read on paper’ and she’d say, ‘Oh, I bake a lot. Here’s my baking account …’” Raedle said.

Although Raedle continues to paint with watercolors, she prefers to do it just for fun and has no interest in pursuing any sort of art as a career.

“[@gretchsketched] is both a way [for me to] brand myself so people can see the other more creative side that you might not get from just a social media account, but also to share fun pictures of me and my friends or someone else that I wanted to paint,” Raedle said.