Photo by Jenny Kirk Eighteen-year-old Abby McKinney is clad in a shirt she designed and commissioned. McKinney recently completed her high school requirements for graduation in addition to earning a two-year associate of arts degree at Southwest Minnesota State University.

WALNUT GROVE — As most students her age are graduating from their local high schools, 18-year-old Abby McKinney is capping off a much different academic journey.

Not only is McKinney a published illustrator and cartoonist with a lot of experience, she’s also completed high school requirements as well as that of an associate of arts (AA) degree at the college level, all of which is likely to propel her to an exciting and successful career in the near future.

“Now I know what I really want to do and what I don’t want to do,” McKinney said. “I think having those experiences in the years that most people would have high school was a real big help to me.”

McKinney, who lives in rural Walnut Grove, attended public school through seventh grade. Then, for three years, her parents, Joel and Torri McKinney, homeschooled her.

“I was bored and just wasn’t getting a quality-enough education, so my parents pulled me out and decided to start homeschooling me,” Abby McKinney said. “I started using my dad’s college textbooks for some of my classes. That went pretty well. Then, I learned about the PSEO (post-secondary enrollment options) program from my mom and decided that would be a good direction to take my education.”

McKinney attended Southwest Minnesota State University her junior and senior years of high school, finishing with the AA degree and walking with other college graduates at SMSU’s graduation ceremony in May.

“It didn’t really sink in until a few days later,” she said. “I was like, ‘What am I doing here? I don’t feel like I’m ready to graduate, but I’ve taken the required classes.’ It just kind of snuck up on me.”

Though she was only 16 years old at the time, McKinney quickly found she belonged at SMSU.

“My dad taught there as an adjunct professor for a couple of years, so I kind of knew my way around a couple of the buildings,” she said. “It was a little bit scary at first, but I wasn’t the only PSEO student. I just kind of fit in there — better than I think I would have fit in at high school.”

McKinney completed the full 60 credits needed for the two-year degree at SMSU, setting her up nicely for the future.

“There was a lot of studying involved and staying up late writing papers,” McKinney said. “I’m definitely glad I took the path that I did. Getting the two years of free college was also a huge bonus.”

This fall, McKinney is planning to attend Minnesota State University-Moorhead and major in art and illustration.

McKinney plans to minor in East Asian studies. She expects to graduate in spring of 2020.

“I’m going to have a studio art major and an East Asian minor, specifically for the Japanese language.”

For the most part, McKinney doesn’t feel like she missed out on much by taking the academic path she did. Though she could have participated in high school sports, she said they weren’t really her thing.

“I guess I would have liked a little more time to focus on my art, but I’m going to get a lot of time in the next two years to do that, with all the art classes I’m going to be taking,” she said.

McKinney had a lot of art influence growing up. She also appears to have natural gifts.

“Both of my parents are professional artists,” McKinney said. “I’ve always been doodling since I could pick up a pencil. I really started drawing when Dad gave me a Wacom tablet.”

Prior to receiving the Wacom tablet, McKinney said she was only doing traditional art with pencil and paper. The Wacom tablet allowed her to start creating digital art.

“It’s a touchpad that is not responsive to your fingers,” McKinney said. “It’s only responsive to the pen. Pokemon is really what got me started. I thought, ‘These characters are cute. These characters are awesome. I want to make characters like this.’ I wanted to draw the characters, so I just started doodling them.”

With a great deal of experience under her belt, McKinney now wants to design her own characters and create her own video games.

“I want to at least write for them, if not code for them as well,” she said. “I took a computer science class and I don’t think coding is up my alley, though.”

While McKinney still did pretty well in the class, her dad said he wasn’t surprised that coding was a struggle for his daughter.

“I’ve found that designers and coders don’t usually cross over,” Joel McKinney said. “They’re different mindsets.”

After Pokemon sparked her interest, Abby McKinney stumbled upon anime.

“These people were doing some awesome things and I wanted to do some awesome things like these people,” she said. “I started learning Japanese because there are some pretty cool artists who are Japanese and I want to be able to communicate with them.”

McKinney learned that in watching anime or reading manga, you have to know a little bit about the Japanese language to understand some of the jokes.

“Otherwise, they just fall flat,” McKinney said. “They just totally don’t translate.”

As for now, McKinney has a couple of dream jobs in mind for the future.

“I would either like to design characters for a video game or just design the whole video game, maybe for Nintendo,” she said. “Or I could start my own company if I wanted to. Or I may want to create my own comics. I’m kind of already doing that. I’m probably going to do some kind of combination of the two.”

While taking PSEO classes at SMSU, Abby McKinney has been published twice in the “Perceptions” magazine. She also noticed a flyer that said “cartoonist wanted and ended up getting the job and working for nearly two years as the cartoonist for the Spur, which is SMSU’s student newspaper.

For the most part, McKinney created comics using the same three characters. The main character was named Fluffy.

“The main character didn’t really talk, but her friends did,” McKinney said. “She was a college student who was always getting into trouble. She would fall asleep during her finals, for instance, because she’s studied all night.”

McKinney also chose to do a comic for an English class.

“I was given the option to do whatever I wanted for a final essay,” she said. “So I did a comic that wound up being almost 30 pages. I’d totally forgotten about it until Grandma (JoAn Bakker) pulled it out and asked if I wanted to show it at my graduation party.”

McKinney also illustrated a book for her grandmother, who writes children’s books. Together, they published “Hands Upon the Rock,” a book that can be found at the Jeffers Petroglyphs site.

McKinney had good support during her college experience. Her dad said she got “incredible” support from her adviser Jessica Mensink. Abby said she couldn’t have done it either without the support of her parents. Since she doesn’t drive yet, her mom ended up serving as her chauffeur.

“I do a lot of freelance artwork, like weaving and stuff for people and I’ve been teaching Gold College classes on (the SMSU) campus during the day while she’s there,” Torri McKinney said. “It worked out really well. I could drive Abby, teach a class, get a little cash and keep myself out of trouble.”

Abby McKinney said the commute from Walnut Grove was about 45 minutes one way.

McKinney comes from a long line of teachers in the family. It’s part of the reason why homeschooling seemed to be an ideal situation for her.

“We’ve always valued higher education, but I like the flexibility that the homeschooling gave us,” Torri McKinney said. “She was locked into the regular high school curriculum and the emphasis on social activities. We just wanted her to have the best education possible in the most-flexible way.”

Joel McKinney said his daughter could have gone back to high school at any point in time. He appreciated, however, that she could work at her own pace.

“She was able to work as fast as she wanted to,” he said. “It turns out, she was able to go really a long ways. She ended up using college textbooks for her high school — a lot of them were AP (advanced placement) books that (Westbrook-Walnut Grove former principal) Bill Richards borrowed us. It worked out well.”

McKinney also liked the flexibility in learning Abby could get by being homeschooled.

“She was able to take an online (geology) class from another college because she had a conflict in her schedule at SMSU,” he said. “Also, if today isn’t the day for something, then you do something else. We’re not doing this just because it’s between 10:15 and 11:05. There are also options for field trips.”

A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity did present itself and being homeschooled, Abby McKinney was able to take advantage of it. “My dad got a job out in Utah with some old friends,” she said. “It was a Bureau of Land Management project, where we were copying petroglyphs off the walls of caves down in the desert. We climbed up on rocks to draw these just amazing rock art that we found on the walls out there.”

Joel McKinney said the site has been touched up over and over again, probably over hundreds of years, by whoever has been coming back over and over again. While he and his daughter were hired as technical illustrators, there were many other professionals involved as well.

“It’s a neat project,” he said. The father-daughter duo got to see a flash flood during the week-long venture. They also got to see the unusual San Juan River display — a phenomenon known as sand waves.

“When the water is going at a certain speed and has the sand suspended in it, the waves actually move upstream,” McKinney said.