Our Expert: Ken O'Brien

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Ken studied at Cal Arts with a double major in art and animation, and later worked in the video game industry as a level designer for companies like WayForward Games and Activision, where his credits include Jake Long the American Dragon and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, among others. O’Brien is a longtime Apple guru, working as a personal instructor of Apple software and products after his career in video games. In 2010 O’Brien started his own art blog, LunchBagDad, which features hand-drawn and painted lunch bags he initially created for his daughters.

Welcome to Mahalo's Draw the USA course! To make it easier to draw the entire United States, we've split the map into four quadrants: the Northwest, Southwest, Southeast and Northeast.

You can do these lessons in whichever order is most comfortable for you. The Northwest is the easiest, and the Northeast is the most difficult. In the final lesson, you'll be putting all of these together for the full map.

It's recommended that you spend at least an hour a day for 10 days practicing these lessons.

As you work, try filling in the states' names and abbreviations, located in the text of the lessons. This way, after you learn to draw the entire map, you'll also have learned how to spell and abbreviate the names of all 50 states.