UK student treats athletes by day, creates photo-realistic art of them by night
Hannah Clayton is incredibly familiar with the human anatomy. It’s her job to know it, after all.
Clayton is a certified athletic trainer and graduate student in the University of Kentucky’s post-professional master’s of athletic training program. The North Carolina transplant works for Scott County High School through a UK partnership with Bluegrass Orthopaedics, which places trainers at high schools around the area.
Her affinity for athletics training was cultivated while she was on the player side — she suffered a few injuries during her high school soccer days — and bloomed at Greensboro College.
“In high school I was like, ‘that’d be a really cool job, to be on the sidelines and evaluate, diagnose and treat injuries as they happen,’” Clayton said in a recent phone interview. “So once I got to college and got to experience athletic training a little bit more through clinical rotations I just fell in love with it. I love being around athletes and people who are just really motivated and really competitive. I just enjoy being part of that environment.”
It was during college that Clayton also honed a lifelong interest in drawing, a skill that has benefited from her studies of the body and all the mechanisms that help it do what it does.
“You have a better idea of where different muscles and different body structures are and what they’re supposed to look like,” she said.
The relationship between drawing and athletic training is symbiotic, it turns out.
“When I was studying for my athletic training board of certification exam, I was drawing anatomy and trying to figure out how the muscles and bones and everything combine to form a different structure,” she said. “…. I have whole sketch book filled up with anatomy drawings and anatomy notes, so I’ll be pulling that out for this semester for sure.”
Big time
Before college, Clayton actually hated drawing people. While at Greensboro she was commissioned for several portraits of fans’ favorite U.S. women’s soccer players and baseball players, and started enjoying the process enough that, by the time she got to UK last September, she was inspired to do a portrait of Cats linebacker Kash Daniel on her own time as a side project.
“I remember seeing the ‘Bring It,’ poster and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that looks really cool, I can probably draw something kind of like that,’” Clayton said. “That was the first (UK) one.”
That piece started in September but wasn’t completed until December (“I was super backed up with all my grad school work and everything”), but she didn’t rest on her laurels for long. Inspired by Lynn Bowden’s play during Kentucky’s 2019 season, Clayton drew a piece portraying UK’s Paul Hornung Award winner after the Belk Bowl.
She shared the finished work to an Instagram profile (hclaytonart) and tagged Bowden in it. He loved it, and direct messaged her about doing a similar commission, but larger — an 18-by-24 compared to her typical 9-by-12.
“That was really amazing,” Clayton said. “I hadn’t done anything really big like that before.”
Another notable client, Kentucky defensive end Josh Paschal, reached out for a commission during the summer that she was able to complete and give to him a week before classes began at Kentucky. She says there are several other UK football players, as well as some basketball players, on her wait list.
Because of how much she comes and goes from individual works, it’s hard for Clayton to guess how much time each piece takes. If art ever were to become a day job, it won’t be for quite a while; for now it’s a fun side hustle with the added benefit of offering a distraction from her other profession as needed.
“Growing up I always thought I wouldn’t be able to make a career out of art because I didn’t want to teach art and I didn’t really see myself doing that as a main career, I guess,” Clayton said. “That’s how I steered into athletic training, to be around something else that I loved. ... It’s a good mental break too, to be able to sit down, shrug everything off and just focus on the art that’s in front of me.”
This story was originally published August 28, 2020 at 7:47 AM.
