STARKVILLE — Usually after practice, college football players are quick to leave campus. After class all morning and a trek across campus to hours of football obligations, most of Mississippi State’s players file out of the building — some of them with dinner in hand — quick to get off campus.
Often, Bennie Braswell III is not among them. When he leaves the football complex, sometimes he crosses campus again to his senior studio. Such is the life of a fine arts major at MSU.
Braswell, a walk-on senior running back, has turned a talent from his childhood into a prospective career and a niche on the team as its unofficial art provider for players that want it.
“You see a lot of kinesiology majors on this team, but I wanted to be different to get my talent out there,” Braswell told The Dispatch.
“It’s very time-consuming. In my major we have a lot of work outside of class and football takes up most of my day, so it’s a lot of late nights doing projects and homework.”
When Braswell spoke to The Dispatch last week, he was about to go back to campus to his on-campus senior studio to get to work on some projects for the art department’s show in April.
Of course, Braswell never minds the extra time on his artistic endeavors — it’s even turned into a bit of a side job for him. He said almost all of his teammates that know he is an artist have asked him to do things for them, be it portraits of them playing or other decoration for the apartments. Over his career he’s done work for former players such as Josh Robinson and current players including Nick Gibson and Deion Calhoun.
“It just depends on what I’m doing and if somebody wants it on commission,” Braswell said on how much time he spends per project. “I might spend four or five hours on just a simple drawing, black and white, but if it’s color, it’s going to take even longer.”
Braswell’s artistic interests remain wide — from illustrations to comic book art to a recent interest in photography spurred by a class. He hopes to get experience in each area before he retires while working his way up to bigger design studio such as Dreamworks, Cartoon Network or Disney.
For now, he’s perfectly fine with his growing stature in Starkville.
“I do work specifically for people who see my work on social media,” he said.
Follow Dispatch sports writer Brett Hudson on Twitter, @Brett_Hudson
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