Nikki May has always followed her curiosity, whether that meant diving into ceramics as a kid, building a decade-long corporate design career, or trading cubicles for life on the road in her Doodlebus. In this interview, she shares how drawing has been her constant thread, how art and design fuel each other, and why paying attention to the world around you can change everything about your work.
When did you first realise you wanted to be an artist/maker? As a child, were you always drawing, painting, collecting things? Was there a moment when you realised “this is what I want to do” rather than just “this is fun”?
I honestly can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel that I wanted to be an artist!
My favorite story about getting started was that my younger sister and I both took ceramics and gymnastics classes at the same time.I just went all in on the ceramics, and she went all in on gymnastics. That pretty much set the trajectory of our lives!
I took every art class I could in and out of school and spent every free minute drawing. I had all of those “How to draw…” activity books – how to draw horses, how to draw dogs, how to draw bunnies… I was just always drawing and never wanted to stop. I never really considered doing anything else!
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How did your design career begin?
While I was in high school, I attended a pre-college summer program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and focused on graphic design. This was in 1984, so everything was very analog and we did a lot of cutting and pasting paper shapes and I thought, nope, I don’t want to be a graphic designer!
I studied drawing and painting at University of Georgia, including spending six months at UGA’s studies abroad program in Italy. I then went to grad school at the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) and studied fibers – learning surface design and other ways of working with fabric, including creating a body of mixed media fabric collages for my thesis exhibition that almost approached quilting.
Between college, grad school, and a few jobs in between, I actually did a little bit of graphic design – designing invitations and posters for my exhibitions, doing a couple of logos for jobs I had. Then my first “real” job was designing t-shirts for conservation groups like National Audubon Socithe University, The Nature Conservancy, and Ducks Unlimited. It was in this position that I truly became a designer, combining my love of drawing with layout and typography using a computer.
Somewhere in the mid-90s, I needed a portfolio to share my art and design work, and the internet was just being born. So I taught myself HTML to build my own portfolio website. I listed my work on online job boards, and in addition to illustration and graphic design, I added that I knew HTML, having built exactly one website – my own! This landed me a 30-day temp job at IBM doing basic HTML. Thirty days turned into an accidental 10-year career as a Creative Director with IBM.
CI led massive interactive projects, built digital experiences for Fortune 500 companies, and sharpened my design brain every single day. Corporate life gave me a level of confidence that I’d never had before. Presenting work and defending design decisions to the New York Times and the Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games forces you to find (or at least fake) that confidence! It taught me to think strategically, communicate clearly, and deliver high-level professional work.
What made you move from corporate/agency life (or design jobs) into full-time art and studio work?
Ten years into cubicles and conference rooms, I realized that the only art I was making was doodles in the margins of legal pads during meetings and courses like negotiating skills. Not exactly why I spent my parents’ hard-earned money going to art school in Italy!
So I made a plan to get back to my art. I moved from Atlanta to Paducah through their Artist Relocation Program. A small river town in Kentucky that literally paid artists to move there and help revitalize their oldest downtown residential neighborhood.
I kept working remotely for IBM for another four years, all while building my art practice and creating a side hustle of designing websites for my own local and national clients. Somewhere between small-town life and not being in a conference room, I remembered that I actually knew how to make art!
Eventually I walked away from the corporate world completely and rebuilt my life as a self-employed artist and designer. It’s definitely a challenge piecing together a career of client design work, my own art and projects, and art commissions, but it’s still the best decision I ever made!
Describe your creative space.
The juggling and trying to find balance is even more challenging now that I sold my house with a big, beautiful studio in Paducah, Kentucky, and have now been living, working, creating, and traveling in a converted school bus (also known as a skoolie) I named the Doodlebus.
I designed every inch of it myself, making sure to allow myself plenty of space for the things that are most important to me: a full size-bathtub and tons of space to create.
As someone who once decided to forgo having a kitchen in order to have more studio space, I designed my bus with minimal cooking space, but large countertops that I can use to create on.
I have a desk where I do my design work on a laptop that can easily be tucked aside to give me space to make art. I have boxes and drawers and bins full of art supplies all within easy reach – and I even use an ottoman as my desk chair that has a ton of storage inside.
I also carry a huge folding wallpaper pasting table with me in the bus that I can pull out and work on outside when the weather is nice, which it usually is, because when it’s not, I just drive on until I find someplace that it is!
As someone who draws a lot of plants and flowers and insects and birds, being able to be outside in nature while I work is always inspiring!
What are the handful of “essential materials” you couldn’t live without?
I’ve done so many different kinds of art in my life: oil, acrylic, and watercolor paintings…jewelry made from silver, copper, wood, and bone… surface design and fabric work… encaustic mixed media… but my true love has always been drawing, and it’s drawing tools that I can never live without.
I mostly draw with black ink – preferably a Uniball Signo pen – in sketchbooks that are a variety of sizes and shapes. And most recently, I use Procreate on my iPad with an Apple Pencil. So there are really only four things I can’t live without – pens, paper, iPad, and Apple Pencil.
When you look at your sketchbooks or early drawings, what do you see has changed and what has stayed the same?
The one thing that has stayed consistent throughout my early days of drawing is my bold, organic line work. Although I’ve experimented with drawing in graphite, charcoal, and colored pencils over the years, as well as with all kinds of mixed media (fabric, collage, encaustic, jewelry), it always comes back to black and white drawings.
Bold line work with dramatic weight variation, organic flow, and a contrast of gestural freedom and controlled detail. Even my current digital drawing, which uses bright color has that same linework as its base.
How do you balance the “pretty pictures” side of your work with the “problem-solving/design” side?
I used to struggle with the dichotomy of those two sides, but I’ve actually grown to appreciate how they work together. They are no longer in competition, they are in a long, happy relationship.
The “pretty picture” is the spark that draws people in. But the design side is what makes the work actually work in the world. I don’t just want something to be beautiful. I want it to communicate, to guide, to solve a problem, to make someone’s life easier or better in some small way.
When I’m drawing, I’m thinking about rhythm, energy, and emotion. When I’m designing, I’m thinking about clarity, hierarchy, and usability. The magic happens when they overlap. A design that stops you in your tracks and tells you easily what you need to know. A website that feels like art but doesn’t make you hunt for the buy button. A product that’s highly functional, but makes the space it’s in more beautiful.
I used to think of it as switching from my art hat to my design hat. Now I don’t switch hats. I wear both at once. Art gives the work soul. Design gives it purpose. Art asks questions. Design answers questions.
Or back to the original quote that I’m paraphrasing: “Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem” – John Maeda, designer and former president of the Rhode Island School of Design.
Tell us about a recent piece: how did it begin, what materials did you choose, and how did it evolve?
The piece that I’m most excited about from recent years is the largest public art installation that I’ve completed to date. I had previously licensed the use of one of my flower and insect drawings for use on a three-story building in downtown Paducah as the first part of a mural project highlighting vacant buildings downtown that are for sale or lease – drawing attraction in a much more beautiful way than empty storefronts and boarded up windows every could.
The concept was pollination – bringing growth through flowers and insects to represent the growth of new businesses into empty storefronts.
That kickstarted the idea that I ran with when I became aware of a public call for art for a new terminal at the Barkley Regional Airport in Paducah. Drawing on the proof that my art works beautiful at a monumental scale, I responded to the RFP with a concept that started with the downtown building but expanded to include all sorts of plants, flowers, animals, and insects that can be found in and around the Paducah region.
I was up against approximately 75 other local and regional artists who responded to the RFP, was chosen as a finalist for two out of three of the commissioned art pieces, and ultimately chosen for this piece, which was the one I was most interested in!
The medium they specified was exactly the same as what was done in the downtown building – digital art printed on vinyl film and applied to windows. In this case, a wall of windows extending nearly the entire depth of the terminal building, separating the security area from the gate area and extending through the walkways that you travel both when entering and exiting the terminal.
In both pieces, the art was drawn using Procreate on my iPad – although some of the individual elements were first drawn in my sketchbook with ink on paper and brought into Procreate to complete. The elements were then brought into Illustrator and vectorized so that they would scale without losing resolution, and arranged in Illustrator into the final composition.
The piece was composed using a template I created by photographing, measuring, and redrawing the shape of the panes of glass to scale and creating each panel so that it could be printed on separate panels for installation.
This is the ideal project for me because it absolutely lets me wear both the artist hat, the designer hat, and even an airport hard hat when I went into the construction site to measure and check test prints!
I’m absolutely thrilled with how it turned out and and it’s so exciting to see it when I go to the airport, and see photos people post when they come across it during their travels!
How do you maintain originality in your work while also responding to commissions or design briefs?
Originality isn’t something that I tack on at the end of a project; it’s built into how I think, how I see, and how I work. Every commission or design brief comes with constraints, and I actually love that. Limits give the work shape. My job is to solve the problem without abandoning my voice in the process.
I start by listening deeply. What does this project really need to do? Who is it for? What matters most? Once I understand the core goal, I look for the overlap between that need and the way I naturally make things. That intersection is where it comes alive. I’m not trying to force my style onto every project, but I’m also not trying to disappear into someone else’s aesthetic. The goal is to adapt without diluting.
A good brief doesn’t replace my voice; it gives it something specific to push against. The work still needs to meet the client’s goals, but it carries my fingerprints. That balance is what keeps the work honest and what keeps me excited to make it.
How have the several years of living and working in your “skoolie” influenced your colour palette, lines, shapes, or subject matter?
Living and working in my skoolie stripped everything down to what actually matters. When your home is 200 square feet, and your studio is wherever you park, you become acutely aware of light, weather, landscape, and all the tiny details you might overlook when you’re ensconced in a hermetically sealed office!
I notice the way desert shadows slice across rock, the rich saturated greens after a rainstorm, waves crashing on an open beach, and iridescent shells catching the sun at my feet. All of that sneaks into my work.
My color palette has gotten bolder and more confident because nature is bold and confident.
Storm clouds don’t whisper. Wildflowers do not ask permission.
The road has cured me of anything left in me that was timid or reluctant. My lines have become more intentional and more expressive. I am not a minimalist, and I don’t shy away from detail.
Living this way has given me permission to linger. To notice more. To let drawings become dense with information and texture, the way landscapes are. The longer I look, the more there is to see, and my work reflects that impulse toward richness rather than reduction.
Looking back, what advice would you give to your younger self who was just getting started with art?
I would tell her that being quiet is not a flow but staying small is a choice. When I was young, I was shy and careful. I thought talent had to be perfect before it deserved space. I waited for permission that was never coming.
I’d tell her you don’t become confident before you share your work. You become confident because you share it. Put the messy thing out. Apply before you feel ready. Let people see you trying. The world doesn’t need another talented person hiding in the wings.
Where can people see your work?
You can see a wide variety of my art and design work on my website, nikkimay.com. You can purchase my art on products through my shop at shop.nikkimay.com. And you can see my art, bus travels and general life on Instagram at instagram.com/nikkimayart.
Interview posted January, 2026
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