Keegan Hall stood just outside the west end zone at Husky Stadium and flashed Washington’s trademark “Dubs Up!” salute as he waved to a cheering crowd of more than 65,000 fans.
Flanked by his wife, Ioana, and daughter, Payton, Hall then clasped his hands together and gestured toward the fans, as if trying to return their affection on a late September night in 2022.
Unlike most game-day honorees, Hall didn’t make it onto the field on Husky Fever Day through any sort of athletic prowess.
Sure, he was a proud University of Washington grad — twice when you add his MBA to the bachelor’s degree he earned in visual art in 2003 — and he bled purple, spending most of his fall Saturdays cheering on the Dawgs.
But Hall does his work with just a pencil — and it was at UW, of all places, where the hyperrealism artist first heard his skills didn’t qualify for “a real job.”
“Getting a degree in art, depending on which direction you want to go, it can be difficult to monetize that degree within that industry,” Hall said. “I had a lot of people telling me that coming out of school.
“I was graduating. I have debt now that I took out student loans. And the prospects of a job within the art world weren't immense. Then you add on the fact that you have a lot of people telling you, art's not a real career. You know, you're not that good anyways.”
So, the 43-year-old artist could be forgiven if he felt like saying, “I told you so,” to all his doubters from two decades ago when he basked in the cheers that night on the shores of Lake Washington.
And if he needed anyone to vouch he was “that good,” he could always call upon the 20,000 fans who were handed his detailed pencil drawing of Dubs, the school’s Alaskan Malamute mascot, as they entered the stadium for that 2022 game.
But Hall’s journey to that evening two years ago was anything but a straight line.
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Fueled by doubt
Before he defied his doubters, Keegan Hall listened to them.
Burdened by the reality of that college debt and staring down the stereotype of the “struggling artist,” Hall decided to start his career in the one area he loved almost as much as art: sports.
An avid basketball player and fan, Hall got a job after graduation with the Seattle SuperSonics, where he spent five years in sales and marketing.
However, everything changed for Hall — and every hoops fan in the Pacific Northwest — when Howard Schultz sold the team to Clay Bennett in 2006.
Less than two years later, the Sonics’ move to Oklahoma City was made official, and Hall decided not to follow the team south.
With his career at a crossroads, Hall worked briefly in sales for Live Nation before returning to UW, where he earned his MBA and decided to enter the startup world with Pirq, a mobile app that offered consumers restaurant discounts.
“We raised about $4 million, built out this company, ended up getting acquired," he said. "And, you know, I thought things were going really well, until I got that dreaded call one day.”
The call would change his life — and send him back to his first love.
Returning to art
As a kid growing up in a trailer park in the small town of Sumner, Washington, Hall started drawing in an attempt to “to find myself and where I fit in.”
Money was tight, but Hall would escape into his art or take a trip to the South Hill Mall in Puyallup to buy and trade sports cards and comic books.
His drawings were always a source of pride for his mother, Lisa.
“She was always my biggest fan, and her eyes lit up every time I showed her a new piece – even if that drawing wasn’t even particularly good,” Hall wrote on his website about their relationship.
"To her, it didn’t matter how ‘good’ it was; she supported me regardless.”
While art was a key component of his childhood and his bond with Lisa, Hall hadn’t picked up a pencil for almost a decade when he got the phone call in November 2014 that his mother “wasn't feeling very well.”
The cancer she had beaten two years before had returned.
“Now, we got the news that it came back worse than ever, and so she was just starting to prepare for this next battle,” Hall said. “I got that call on a Friday that she wasn't feeling well. She went in on a Saturday just to get checked out from the doctors and passed away on Sunday.”
Lisa's death at the age of 58 sent Hall into a period of deep reflection, thinking about the memories he had with his mother and how art was such a key part of his childhood.
“It happened so fast that it was almost hard to even react. My head was just spinning. And, you know, the months following that, I kind of spent a lot of time soul-searching, and (asking) what I wanted to do with my life, how I wanted to spend my time, kind of the impact I want to make.”
Eventually, he sat down and worked on a drawing of Michael Jordan, which he posted to social media, prompting responses from some friends saying, “I didn't even know you could draw.”
With the Seattle Seahawks in the midst of their streak of back-to-back Super Bowl appearances, Hall got a request to draw hard-hitting safety Kam Chancellor.
Chancellor saw the piece and shared it to social media, writing in caption, “By Far the Dopest Pic I've seen yet. This was all Pencil Drawing By hand. S/O to the man himself @keegan.hall … It's a blessing for me to have encountered your work."
Chancellor commissioned another piece from Hall, and soon one of his “Legion of Boom” teammates followed suit.
Hall saw a post saying Richard Sherman was hosting a charity softball game, so he sent a direct message to the All-Pro cornerback asking about creating a work for the charity. His idea was to produce 200 prints, have them signed by both the athlete and the artist and donate all the money to charity.
Sherman liked the concept, the prints sold out immediately, and the concept of the #Keegan200 was born.
Giving back
Since then, Hall has helped raise nearly $800,000 for a number of charities, working with athletes such as Gary Payton, Russell Wilson, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Michael Penix Jr. and Kelly Slater. A big music fan as well, Hall also has collaborated with Eddie Vedder, Dave Grohl and Macklemore.
The charitable aspect is extremely important to Hall, whose younger sister, Joanna, has cerebral palsy.
“It really came out of some of my childhood experience, growing up poor and with a disabled sister. … We gave back a lot when we could …” said Hall, who volunteered in his youth as a Special Olympics coach, alongside his mother.
“Charity and giving back has always been the key component of my artwork.”
As a lifelong Pearl Jam fan, Hall’s project with Vedder was “like dreaming” for the artist.
Hall used his pencil to capture a moment from a Danny Clinch photograph of the rocker holding a ukulele, and sold 200 autographed prints to benefit Vedder’s chosen charity, the EB Research Partnership, which is seeking a cure for Epidermolysis Bullosa, a rare skin disease.
The limited-edition prints sold for $500 — a price that gave Hall some trepidation as he has always wanted his work to sell out and be widely affordable.
Reaching that price point took a little prodding from Vedder’s wife, Jill, who told Hall, “We're gonna have plenty of buyers.”
“We ended up pricing it at like half of what she said,” the Seattle-based artist said. “And then, of course, she was spot on, because it sold out instantly.”
While music is also a passion, sports is the subject matter that Hall keeps returning to most often.
“I love trying to capture the dynamic poses, and I can appreciate the talent, you know, having played for so long myself, and just the nostalgia component,” he said. “There's just so many aspects of sports which just draw me in continually. ...
“I just think what would I want to own? What's something that I'd want to draw and own and put on my wall?”
Perhaps Hall’s biggest challenge came when he took on a drawing of Jordan’s jam from the free-throw line during the 1988 NBA Slam Dunk Contest in Chicago.
The project took more than 300 hours — which Hall captured in a time-lapse video to silence doubters who thought his work might have been created by a “photo filter” or some other technology.
Hall made the job even tougher when he decided to not blur the background, instead using his pencil to capture all the faces and details in the crowd at Chicago Stadium.
Those hours paid off when Jordan himself saw the print and invited Hall and his family to fly to MJ’s private golf course in Hobe Sound, Florida, to present it in person.
With more than 60 prints available on his website, art is now officially a full-time job for the small-town kid who grew up dreaming of becoming an animator at Disney and buying comic books to learn how to draw.
All the doubts along the way became “a motivator,” and Hall sums up his story with a simple line in his Instagram bio:
“Making magic with a pencil. Doing what they said I couldn’t.”
Kevin Jackson is the Chief Content Officer for cllct. He spent 25 years at ESPN Digital Media, where he was the founding editor of Page 2, and nearly four years as the Executive Director for Digital Content at FOX Sports.