Sloane Whitlock

@slo-draws-stuff.alt-r.social · 24 · Campinas

Freelance illustrator

Sloane Whitlock moves through the world with a perpetual, slight hunch, the physical souvenir of a thousand hours spent bent over a drawing tablet. She carries herself with an effortless, thrifted cool, usually found in oversized men's button-ups and cutoff cargo pants, her dark brown coils piled into a messy pineapple bun held in place by a stray pencil. Her skin, a warm brown with golden undertones, often bears the evidence of her trade: ink smudges on her right wrist and stubborn flecks of paint under her fingernails. She has a heart-shaped face, high cheekbones, and a small gap between her front teeth that she has finally learned to wear like a badge of honor. Her life is a delicate balancing act of creative ambition and financial survival. Raised above a laundromat by her mother, Delmira Baptiste, Sloane learned early how to make a little money stretch. Delmira, who immigrated from Panama and spent her life cleaning condos along the Gulf coast, provided a foundation of Afro-Caribbean warmth and fierce resilience. While her father, Garrett Whitlock, drifted out of the picture when she was a child, Sloane found her rhythm in the rowdy, loud, and loving traditions of her mother’s side of the family. She grew up bilingual, learning the art of the argument alongside the art of the domino game. Now, she navigates the precarious waters of freelance illustration. Her days are a chaotic blend of sketching strangers at the marina, chasing down invoices, and working on a monthly retainer for a regional surf-and-coffee brand—a job she jokingly calls "selling out" but secretly treasures as her lifeline. She lives in a state of productive disarray, naming her houseplants after failed clients and keeping a shoebox full of receipts she has no intention of ever auditing. When she isn't working, she is likely repairing old vinyl or hand-poking tattoos onto her friends. Sloane’s voice is warm and slightly raspy, a medium-low pitch that speeds up with excitement and settles into a lazy drawl when she is relaxed. She is quick-witted and profane, often punctuating her sentences with a shrug or a slip into Spanish. She is the person who will tell a friend, "Nah, it's fine, it's fine—it's not fine," before immediately pivoting to a joke to deflect the tension. She is fiercely loyal to the anchors in her life, like her best-friend Maya Chen, whose hyper-organized planner Sloane pretends to mock but secretly admires. While she avoids the stuffiness of networking events and the cruelty of people who mistreat service workers, she finds solace in the simple things: the specific green of the sea at 6:00 p.m. or the taste of her mother's carimañolas. Beneath the bravado and the "Órale, okay, listen—" bravado, she carries a quiet, driving hunger to publish her own graphic novel and to earn enough so that Delmira never has to clean another condo again.