An Artist Takes Flight
As a child, Emma Nydam spent hours drawing and coloring. She remembers watching videos and reading books on how to draw horses, dogs, cattle, and more.
“Then, my parents enrolled me in art lessons. I kept drawing – mostly charcoal, some pen, and watercolor once I got into high school. I gravitated toward pictures of animals and of landscapes.”
Word spread around her hometown of Lynden, Washington, that Nydam was a talented artist; she began doing commission work of pets and idyllic scenes. She entered (and won) national art competitions in Western Horseman Magazine and with the National Rifle Association. She even started her own Etsy shop, Lewis the Dog Studio, named for the “sweetest Great Pyrenees guardian dog” that was her pet. The shop was recently renamed EmmaNydamArt.
As a junior in high school, Nydam found that she “had all this time on my hands during the Covid-19 pandemic.” She started to paint scenes from all the U.S. national parks to improve her landscape painting skills.
“I created these little watercolors and posted them on my Instagram,” she says. “They ended up going viral, essentially – one of my reels had 20,000 views in a matter of hours.”
In a matter of weeks, she saw a steady increase in subscribers and Etsy shop purchases. It was gratifying and a little overwhelming as an artist to see her hard work being recognized not only locally but internationally.
By the time Nydam’s work went viral, she had also decided she would attend Dordt.
“There’s a photo of my twin brother and me at six months of age, wearing little Dordt sweatshirts,” she says. “You could say that Dordt has always been on our radar, as our parents, uncles, aunts, and grandparents all attended Dordt for a semester or more.”
She chose to major in biology, in part because she wanted to learn “about God’s creation in a deep way.” During her freshman year, Nydam took a zoology class with Dr. Robbin Eppinga, and that’s where her love for art and curiosity for biology further intersected.
“We did dissections and had to identify body parts of different species for quizzes and tests,” she says. “I practiced by drawing the dissections and labeling them. I have a sketchbook full of drawings of a crawfish, a turtle, a rat, a cricket. I remember telling my science professors that I was thinking about getting a minor in art, and they said, ‘Oh, you should consider doing scientific illustration.’ I had no idea it existed.”
She picked up an art minor and set her sights on becoming a scientific illustrator. Since then, she’s taken courses in ecology, ornithology, entomology, botany, and more – all the while, painting and drawing what she sees.
“One of my favorite classes was Avian Biology. We had to memorize and identify 150 bird species by sight and sound, and I’ve painted almost all of them because that’s how I study best. I also found that I could pay attention to all the details when I put it to paper.”
Nydam has always liked birds, mostly because of her grandmother. “She had a ton of bird feeders, and she always knew what species were in her backyard. ‘Oh, the grosbeak popped by today,’ or she’d point out the snow geese on their migration path.”
Nydam’s knowledge and love of birds has grown since she became a Dordt student.
“Birds are so unique: there’s penguins and ostriches that can’t fly; there’s hummingbirds, whose hearts beat 1,200 times a minute. Birds are on every continent, and some have feathers with colors that the human eye can’t see. Birds migrate based on stars and constellations. Once I started learning this and more, it revealed so much of God’s creativity and sense of humor with His creation.”
She has appreciated the opportunities to go birding while at Dordt, including a field trip out to the Nebraska Sandhills to see the sandhill crane migration.
“That is one of the top animal spectacles in the world—people travel from all over the world to see it,” she says. “Birds are so commonly overlooked in creation, but now, I can never go outside again and think the same way. I wouldn’t trade the appreciation for nature and creation that I’ve developed while I’ve been at Dordt. It’s changed how I do art and how I live my life.”
At Dordt, Nydam has had a number of experiences to put her art and biology interests into practice. During the summer of her senior year, she helped design a board game based on prairie restoration. She was tasked with drawing more than 35 detailed illustrations of plant species such as Maximilian sunflowers and blue flag irises. This learning experience further solidified her interest in becoming a scientific illustrator.
Nydam has spent thousands of hours drawing, painting, and sketching birds, insects, and animals. “It’s something that I have put a lot of time into and that God gave me the passion to do,” she says. “It bothers me sometimes when people say, ‘God just gave you that talent.’ Yes, He gave me talent, but He also gave me resources, time, and drive to keep trying even after I failed 1,000 times.”
Some of her favorite paintings may have only taken her a couple weeks to complete, but that work is “built on countless hours of work that I’ve put in over the years to build this skill.”
Looking back, Nydam is grateful she chose to attend Dordt.
“Here, I can fully embrace a biology degree while also having time to take art classes. My professors in both programs know and appreciate each other, which might not have been the case at other universities. There have been so many ways that I’ve been encouraged to pursue what I love and see how God provides.”
