Featuring Harlow Manning

Photos by Zoe Alexander

My dad, Trent Manning, has been a big inspiration for me. Especially when I was little. I grew up around his work, and it influenced me to have a similar feel. I mostly just did sketches when I was little, and I wasn’t doing so much painting yet. I was, like, really young then, and I was just sticking to the basic colors, which in hindsight gave it that childlike quality. I didn't really know what I was doing then, but I kind of knew where I wanted to go.

Things really went to the next level for me when my dad helped me do my first show. So what happened was, I was about seven years old, and he took my old sketches from when I was very, very young, and we projected them onto these huge panels, and I traced, so it's exactly how my sketches were. After that, we painted the projected figures, and we kind of worked on that together. That was my first art show experience, and it was so fun! After I started at Art Crawl, I did the Winter Haven show, then Mayfair, and I'm gonna be doing Fine art at the Magnolia coming up.

Lately, I've been doing these fantasy "blob" animals, which are like a development of my early childhood art. I start out by drawing a random shape, I really don't know what kind of animal it is yet, and then and I look at it in different ways, and I'll think, "Okay, this could be like an ear or like part of the tail," maybe. Sometimes it doesn't even have to be a real animal at all. I'll just kind of take it as a starting point and see if I can get the colors down. Then I'll take my Posca markers and get the small details in there. I love my Posca markers, by the way, they're just really easy to work with, and I love them.

I feel I'm still, like, experimenting right now. I really want to try to get into watercolors and stuff, that would be really fun. I've done a little stuff with watercolor already, and I feel like I could take what I'm doing now and somehow work the watercolors into it. I'm going to try to figure out how to do that soon.

I've been volunteering to do lighting and sound for the theater. I'm a part of this group called Drama Time Live and we write our own scripts, and we go to different second grade classrooms to perform for the kids there. So, that's really fun. They asked me recently, "Hey, we can let you, like, paint the sets and do some set design if you want", but I haven't gotten a chance yet because I've been traveling a lot and I've got shows coming up. I definitely have that plan, though, I'm so excited for it.

I think I would enjoy animation. I feel like that would be really fun. My favorite cartoon right now, I think, is Steven Universe. The color choices are cool. I like experimenting with different colors, and I feel like that's another reason why I love acrylics for what I'm doing right now.

I'm so excited to hopefully go to the Harrison School and be surrounded by so many people who are all kind of my age and doing the same things. That'll really be a fun experience, I hope! I'm auditioning sometime this year.

However it all turns out, it just makes me so happy to look back at my old stuff and, like, see how it's changed since then into what I'm doing now. Sometimes stuff doesn't, like, turn out how I want it to. But that's just learning: you notice what you didn't like about it, and just try again and see if you can carry what you did like into another piece. One thing I learned from my dad is that you can always just try again.

Trying New Things, School, and Growing Up in an Art Family

Color, Teamwork, and Making it all Sing

Playing, Learning, and Becoming an Adult