When it comes to creativity, Kate McMcMillan’s interests range far and wide. She’s worked as a Visual Development Artist at DreamWorks TV on Madagascar: A Little Wild, Abominable and the Invisible City, and The Croods: Family Tree. She’s currently a Location Designer at Disney TVA on Big City Greens. Her first middle grade fiction series and a nonfiction book about sustainable architecture will come out next year. Then there’s her woodwork.
“I studied architecture in college and fell in love with the process of building models in the woodshop,” McMillan says. One of her teachers encouraged her to venture into furniture, so she started taking woodworking classes, and after college, she got a fellowship to study traditional Norwegian boatbuilding at the Hardanger Maritime Museum in Hardanger, Norway.
This experience pushed McMillan to understand how the tools and processes we use can inform our designs. “I love woodworking because the parameters serve as inspiration instead of barriers, which I think is true in visual development, as well,” she says. “Wood is messy—it has knots and unusual grain patterns and can act in funny ways against different tools—but this irregularity makes the final design interesting and purposeful. In animation, the story, budget, and style create all kinds of similar challenges that end up pushing the design somewhere new and specific that I could never have thought of if given a completely knot-free prompt.”
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ITEM: Salad Spoon and Fork
SIZE: 9 ¾” x 1 ½” x ⅜”DESCRIPTION: Black walnut and maple PRICE: $35
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ITEM: Earrings
SIZE: 2” x 1 ⅞” x ⅛”DESCRIPTION: Cedar, black walnut, pine, maple PRICE: $25
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ITEM: Earring Holder
SIZE: 6 ¾” x 5 ¼” x 3 ½”DESCRIPTION: Pine, balsa, cedar, maple PRICE: $50
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