Scholar Stories: Malone Prefers Showing over Telling
9/14/2016 12:00:00 AM | Field Hockey
Every Wednesday during the 2016-17 academic year, MGoBlue.com will highlight a different student-athlete and their academic path. These are our Scholar Stories:
If given the choice, Morgan Malone would rather design than describe.
Always one to prefer a canvas over a piece of paper, she tells her stories using contrasting colors and shapes of varying sizes, not words.
"I like the creative process of thinking," she explains. "For me, it's like a puzzle. It's finding out what works, what colors go together. That's always been fun."
Talking to Malone, a junior majoring in art and design, it isn't difficult to see where she gets her passion from. Her father, Keith, is a graphic artist for Lego, and you best believe the Malone household was, at one point, filled with tiny cities and sculptures made entirely out of those little building blocks. She still uses them today.
In high school, Malone would find every excuse to create a visual aid in lieu of writing a paper. It allowed her to build up a portfolio packed with nearly every type of art -- drawings, paintings, photographs, animation and graphics (her favorite). That portfolio -- and her talents with a field hockey stick -- brought her to Michigan.
-- Art and design major Morgan Malone
When she's not at Ocker Field, Malone spends most of her time on North Campus. A typical day might see Malone attend four to six hours of class in the morning, go to practice in the afternoon and then head back up for another class in the evening. That's already a pretty packed day, and that's not including all the other responsibilities that are expected of a student-athlete, like strength and conditioning, watching film, and, of course, studying.
"When I get here, I don't think about school for four hours," she said. "That's the best part about this. Our team is happy to come to practice every day, and Marcia (Pankratz) is great at getting us all focused. 'Whatever happened in the day, forget about it for the next four hours,' she would say. It's so important to train yourself mentally to separate them. To have the opportunity to run around the field and play, I'm so fortunate."
Luckily for Malone, most of her "homework" is done inside the studio. It's not uncommon to work on projects for months at a time and to rarely attend lectures (Art History is the closest). But it's also a place to hone even the most basic of skills, like drawing. One of Malone's first collegiate exercises called for her and her classmates to sketch a fully-nude model in different poses over the course of a three-hour period. Talk about a shocking, welcome-to-college moment.
From her studies at the Stamps School, she's learned how to design a website, build flashy business cards and how to bring a character to life through digital animation. Through the years, Malone has found she's most comfortable in front of a computer with Adobe Photoshop on the screen, a program she was first introduced to at age 10.
"I think the aesthetic of a pencil-and-paper drawing is gone," she said. "Everyone wants to be a game designer and create characters that mimic real-life movement.
"I would love to be a graphic designer or animator. What my dad does, that would be ideal. Doing something educational, something with kids, would be great, too. To have a young kid interested in art and to be able to influence their mind while they're growing up would be very cool."
Malone Portfolio
Malone and the eighth-ranked Wolverines (4-1) open Big Ten play on Friday (Sept. 16) against Michigan State in East Lansing.
