 All right, and then I think we should be good to go. Yeah, that's exactly what all of my slides are here to begin with is my name is Stan Yan. I'm author and illustrator in my introduction, I title a portrait of fear for a reason that you will find out soon. I'm the author of There's a Zombie in the Basement, which is my first children's picture book. I'll pass that around as well as a bunch of different comics books. I'll go this one here. They're all three letters, so they're all zombie related here. But let's see here. And so, and, and I do caricatures as well. So, I don't know, you guys are all familiar with what a caricature is, right? I just happened to do zombie versions of them at places like Denver Pop Culture Con. I don't know if I'm going to be there this year or not. San Diego Comic Con. Oh, yes. Oh, great. So anyway, but I didn't just get there all of a sudden. I mean, it was kind of a long road and it actually started right around the picture of the time that this picture was taken actually a couple of years before this. But this was probably my most embarrassing school photo so I clearly had to use that. I found the time that, if you were am I. Oh, actually, because I'm not using our presenters notes, I'm like oh where am I in this presentation. So anyway, as I was growing around the time of this picture I was drawing the same characters over and over again doing different things in these boxes that I later found out were called comic panels. So I was doing comics before I realized that that's what I was doing to clearly that's been my muse since I was a little child. And those were my earliest memories. But I didn't really take a lot of pride in my artwork. In fact, my art looked a little bit like this at the time. I had, for me, the most important thing was to tell a story. You know, if I took too much time to draw a picture that I was never going to get through the story to finish it before dinner so I could show my parents. And fortunately for me, my dad worked as a company that threw away reams and reams of computer printouts. So he just brings some of those home so I always had something to write on or draw on. Probably with, you know, company secrets on the other side that I didn't care. All I cared about was if I was going to do anything else, I'd be drawing. And so I got a lot of practice. Whoops, I didn't want to get to the Casa Benita thing yet. So, around the time of the picture in the previous slide, my aunt came into town on her wedding honeymoon. And, you know, if you've got out of town, yes, you got to take him to Casa Benita and hopefully we'll be able to do that again here very soon. Yes, exactly. Hopefully. And so how many of you have you all been to Casa Benita in your lives? Okay. I saw one nod, no. So, so those of you that haven't been there. It's like an amusement park in a restaurant. And one of the things that you have an amusement parks often as the character should be right. And even at that age, I was about seven years old. I'd been watching character artists intently, you know, I had already figured out that character artists had their, what do you call it, kind of their signature style. It was built around their inability to draw a certain part of your facial anatomy, so they'd like draw everyone's nose is the same or something. But, or it was something that they thought was funny. So they draw every drawing the same way. So this particular character artist drew everyone with their eyes touching in the middle, and they drew everyone with buck teeth. And so when my aunt got us all caricatures, you know, she didn't really appreciate the fact that she was drawn with buck teeth. She thought it was an awful racial stereotype. Now, my new uncle, he is a creative type as well. He was a musician. And we creative types tend to back each other, but this was not the time to defend the character artists. I thought they were going to get divorced on their honeymoon over the caricatures. So even at that young age, I felt like I wanted to do characters I could do characters but at that point, I was afraid of doing characters because I thought all my customers were like my aunt, I definitely don't want to do caricatures. So hence the torture that's here. But my love affair with art continued. In fact, I continued to draw all the way through high school. This is a picture that was in our yearbook that I drew and staged for our science department. But I didn't really consider art to be a viable career path. So I didn't really even think about going to art school, didn't research it. So I actually believe it or not went to the University of Colorado and studied accounting of all things. But I continued to draw my comics on the side. I did editorial comics, as well as comic strips for the school paper up at the CU. And I actually ended up spending a whole summer in New York City doing an internship as an art director for an ad agency, which is cool because I got to work with the people that created Schoolhouse Rock. And one of the, well, I found out after the fact that he is a, I think a Silver Age comic book artist, but he also wrote for Sesame Street. He was working as a copywriter in our department as well. So that was pretty cool. Anyway, after I graduated, I actually didn't start working in art. I actually was a stockbroker for about 13 years. But during that time, I published my first three comic books and my first graphic novel and started taking around the comic book conventions to promote them back in 2001. So in fact, my second comic book convention I ever went to to promote myself was the big San Diego Comic Con. I actually had a table there ever since other than the last two years where I had a virtual table there. They had a virtual convention. Oops, I'm getting ahead of my help solve here. So anyway, around 2007, I got laid off for my brokerage career. And with the blessing of my wife, I decided I'm going to go ahead and do this full time for a living. But I had to actually figure out how to make money at these conventions because up until then I was just worried about building a following. But I'd seen some of my friends doing commissions, little sketches for fans to make a few extra bucks. I'm like, well, maybe I can do some fan based characters, but I was still afraid of what people might think of how I drew them. You know, if they're going to be like my aunt or not. I was like, well, maybe I should draw zombie versions of them and they'll expect to look awful, right? And that was a lot of pressure off of me. And so fortunately for me, the zombie thing started getting really big at that time. And I started to get known for that. Well, that my little pony caricatures. My booth assistant convinced me I needed to do something for the kids. And then I actually ended up working in an event with someone and we split our first Denver County fair. And so I split a table because I had a book that was about geek culture. And this one right here, here I'll pass it around. And she she had all these like a polyhedral dice earrings and necklaces. And I had drawn some of the characters in the book with her jewelry on them. And like, oh, here, you know, I don't know how this is going to go. Would you like to it was the geek pavilion? It's like, would you like to share a booth? So they go, right? And not realizing that like 90% of her stuff at that point was my little pony stuff like cutie mark buttons and things. I had all the zombie stuff up and she had all the pony stuff up. And my first commission was to do a my little pony zombie of Twilight Sparkle based on a customer's request. And then my booth mate, she said, could you draw me as a pony, not a zombie pony, but just a pony. I'm like, all right. And so she she was the one that was like helping me out and she's promoting that I will all draw a zombie or a pony of you. I did a pony characters of Frank Romero. I don't know. Do you know him? He's one of the co-founders of the original Denver Comic Con and with Charlie LaGreka. So anyway, then it started going viral there too. Yep. So that's how this started. So one day, everything was going well until my son was not quite four years old. And he wouldn't come down to my basement studio for some reason. And his mom asked him, well, what's wrong? And she said, I'm scared. And she's like, what are you scared of? And he started pointing at all the zombie artwork hanging in my basement. And I got me, I told you so look for my wife who'd been trying to get me to rotate my decor ever since she was pregnant with him. I'm like, nah, if he's exposed to it, he won't be scared of it. And then I found out that I was wrong. But that inspired me to write this book. It's called The Basement, my first children's book. And I'm still writing for children to this day, but they're all children's graphic novels. I'm doing this comic strip that appears weekly and a virtual comic page for kids called The Sunday Ha Ha, called Peter Cadaver that borrows the characters from my children's books. And I kind of rebaked the zombie girl from my picture book a little younger. And even the fake one that's in the book is a character as well. So anyway, that is what I do right now. And I'm going to just talk to you a little bit about how I got to this, because I kind of sped through the last part of this just because I created this slideshow quite some time ago. But once I wrote There's a Zombie in the Basement, I ended up joining an organization called the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, just to figure out what I was doing was right. And the nice thing about it was I ended up joining a local critique group of other author illustrators. And that helped me to fine tune my book. But I also was able to go to a local conference as well as a lot of local meetups and illustrators meetups. I had a lot of fantastic information about the industry. The conference itself had kind of like workshops on how to get an agent, which I found out that you don't just all of a sudden get published by Scholastic or Penguin or Random House Graphic. Most of those large trade publishers don't take unsolicited submissions, so you need to actually get a literary agent that will then submit your work and get it through the front door at those publishers. So they're kind of like the gatekeeper, the keymaster, they're the gatekeepers. So anyway, that was kind of interesting. And one of the other things that they do is at the regional conference, they normally have these intentsives on Sunday. So the conference goes until like Sunday at lunch. And then after lunch, you have two and a half to three hour intentsives where they really dig in deep into a particular topic. A lot of times it's really hands on. So that year we had a creator by the name of Selena Yoon, who is author and illustrator of like hundreds of books, Penguin and Pinecone, Be A Friend, I think is the name of her first actual picture book. She did a lot of board books for early readers. And anyway, so she taught us how to make our own dummy books that look like real books. So, you know, because how she broke in the industry is she did wrote board books and then actually assembled them with foam core and board, because a lot of those books have, you know, moving dials and flaps. So she'd actually engineer them so that it wasn't that she was just submitting a proposal that had, well, this is what it's going to look like. She actually submitted something that you could open and interact with that would act just like the finished published product. And so she's going to teach us how to make those, but she also taught us how to make a dummy picture book that looked like a real hardcover book. And so I made one of these for there's a zombie in the basement. And I sent a couple of them out to you because at that time you could actually physically send a submission to agents and some publishers as well. And that's one of the benefit of going to the conference is a lot of these agents and publishers that are not open to unsolicited submissions. Well, kind of they're, you know, they get paid to speak but in exchange they have to accept submissions by conference attendees for at least a limited amount of time, you know, like a couple of months or something like that. So I went ahead and sent a few of these out. But then I kept one. And over the next year, while I was waiting to hear back on all my rejections from all these publishers and agents, I would take this one dummy book around to different conventions and when I was drawing people live in my booth as zombies they could read this book. And inevitably, you know, most of the people like how do I buy this or didn't she realize there's only like three color pages in there and all the rest of them are just black and white pencil sketches. Like, well, is that available yet? And I'm still, you know, shopping around. But if you'd like to know when it comes out or if I end up self publishing it, you know, sign up on the mailing list. By the end of the year, I had 2000 new people on my mailing list. And people were bad during me about this book. Like, when is it kind of going to come out? When is it going to come out? And actually, I mentioned scholastic before. But the funny story was that I was drawing, I don't know if you know Jason Heller. Yeah, he was he was at the, well, maybe I shouldn't say this, because I don't know, because he ghost wrote something for a big scholastic title. But anyway, like, have you submitted this to scholastic? And I'm like, no, unfortunately, I don't take on solicit submission. So like, well, just between you and me, I'm ghost writing a particular title. And I can show this to my editor if you want with him, like, oh, yeah. So I got it in with scholastic. And that was the last one I was waiting for. And they finally sent me the rejection letter. And most of them are really good because normally you expect to just get form letters. But I would say three quarters of them actually had very specific critique notes on it. And, you know, that's when you know you're on the right track. You actually, they spent time to tell you things about how, what they're looking for, why it doesn't work, maybe things that you can do to make things better. And, but anyway, I was ready to go. I ended up kick starting. There's a zombie in the basement. And ended up being a really good thing because I think, like, based on all the information that I learned. It helped me. And then when I actually ran the campaign, I was going to go with a Chinese printer. I don't know if any of you are familiar with Kickstarter or not, but if you run a campaign, inevitably, once you launch your campaign, all of these people come out of the woodwork and try to sell you stuff. And that will make your campaign better. You know, and one of the people that reached out that I actually bothered to open the message and read was a printer here in the US that said, you know, we'll give you a quote if you want. Why not? That hurt. And they came in only about $400 above Chinese printers, but they actually works as a distributor for self publishers to put your book into Ingram, which, you know, bookstores order out of which was probably the best decision I ever made. I was like, oh, sure, you can do that. And they do they do all a lot of other marketing stuff for free just for using them as a printer. And so, long story short, I was able to sell my books through Ingram and get my books into places like the tattered cover, who ended up helping be the conduit for pre orders for school visits, which I'd been already doing as a part of like all the teaching that I'd been doing up until that point. The summer camps turned into school visits through organizations like the Jewish Community Center, which would send me out to promote their summer camp as well as some of the other things they were doing. And so I already had like all these contacts within all these different schools. And so not only could I go and, you know, teach students to do a character designer a comic strip. But now I can say, hey, I've got this new book, you know, I can come do a reading for you if you pre order 25 copies of my book through the tattered cover, and I'll come for free, you know, and as a self publisher that actually the 25 books made, you know, a decent difference to my pocket book whereas if I was traditionally published, and you're only getting like a share of the royal of like 10% of the cover. And then you got to split that with your agent. Yeah, selling 25 books isn't really anything. But that helps me quite a bit. And, and then I, the other thing at conference that came up, you know, I mentioned this is the first picture book well the reason there's a reason for that. I was never really inspired to do stuff for kids until my son came around. But as he got older, I wanted to write stuff that was geared towards him, you know, he's the one that inspires me. And one of these conferences I had a critique portfolio critique with Daniel Carino, who did a keynote at our conference about how every opportunity he got was from saying yes, even if he knew, didn't know if he could deliver, he would say yes, and then he get opportunities and, you know, whether it be picture books, or animation or film, or whatever. He always said yes. So when he was doing my portfolio critique, he ran up and upon some pages that I just used to fill in because I didn't have enough picture book art. I had some art from a graphic novel I was working on and he just stopped he's like, What do you see yourself doing in five years? I'm like, well, this is this is the last graphic novel that I'm working on. I'm just going to transition to doing all picture books because I'd like to get published by a trade publisher. And like I'll tell you what, all the children's book trade publishers that have published picture books have published graphic novels at this point as well. The only difference is that they're getting inundated with submissions for picture books, but there's not as many for graphic novels because of how much work goes into it. And so I got me thinking, and I talked to him about my whole career and that I was teaching comics. And he's like, well, clearly this this is something that you were born to do. Like, you know what, he's right. Because when I think of stories, I always think of them in panels. And I'm like, okay, that's it. I'm going to start doing some comic or some graphic novels for kids. Then he gets up and does his keynote. And he's like, he said, he said yes to everything, except graphic novels, because he would have to be crazy to do that amount of work. Oh, great. So he gave me career advice to do exactly the one thing that he wouldn't do in his career. The one thing he wouldn't say yes to. So anyway, long story short, I was able to, through the teachings of STBW, I figure out how to finally sign with an agent, then with the encouragement of my critique, fire that agent for not doing his job. And then again, fortunately, I signed with another agent, and which my first agent was was like very hands off. He's like, oh yeah, this is good. And then he just send it out. But I was like, well, something's not right. And granted, I wasn't happy with how few editors he sent my book to, but also I wasn't really getting any meaningful response. And so I was like, well, maybe I need an agent that's a little more editorial and a lot of my critique group were sharing stories about how awesome an editorial their agents were to make their submission packets better. And so I wanted to show you some of the things that my new agent, we just finished this pitch packet for this project that's called four four, which I originally put it as a horror genre but she made me change it because I think that may scare some editors off. An early Chinese girl sees visions of her impending death and must break the curse or die on her 13th birthday. And then comp titles. I'm aiming for a style that's artfully cartoony like this was our pact is a story would have magical realism of Kashmina, but a darker, slightly darker vibe like goosebumps or Coraline and cultural family interactions and Asian protagonists such as stargazing. A 12 year old eugenia genie was hit in the head with a sneaker during PE. She starts getting unnerving visions of her impending death and the death of everyone she cares about by her upcoming birthday on April 4 eugenia has never celebrated on her actual birthday for four because of mom's belief that in the weird. I should have put quotes there, Chinese superstition that four is an unlucky number. Eugenia doesn't believe in such things until visions get worse. And then she might have to do something that she really hates admit mom is right. An unseen force is sending eugenia messages through her comic artwork. And she needs to figure out what is happening in fast. Her birthday is just nine days away. And if it's cursed after all, everyone's life depends on it. And then. So one of the things that the children in the children's book industry is a little bit different. Because that you don't actually finish your pages. Because if you've like completed a 300 page graphic novel and it's fully done, then they don't know that you're not going to be willing to go back and change anything. These are probably a little bit tighter than most of the dummy pages I've seen. This is what you actually submit to. It would be neat for you guys to kind of see the back end of and then any, you know, these are the few finished pages. So I did like four finished spreads. Yeah. Well, and I wanted to make sure to color them fully at the point that she has our first vision. So this is like when she finally, she gets hit in the head. And I did about not quite 30 pages. This comes out to about 26 pages. Kind of give you a good idea of, you know, half of my narrative style character consistency character interactions and what their voices are like. And I did all this on procreate because I know you guys are doing procreate so you can lob procreate questions at me, but I just don't have it connected. So those of you at home, I'm sorry, I won't be able to show anything live on procreate iPad. Yeah. Anyway, and great to know that you don't have to have a final product. Right. Well, and that was something I didn't know. And I think why this first go around took so long because if you look at all the different projects I have. So this is actually this story started off as a story called old factory memory. And then I did a manuscript critique with an editor who asked for a full manuscript. And then when I sent it to her, she said that, you know, this is great, but it's like so many different stories together. You should take out, you know, I don't think it should be a 1981. This originally was like the visions were triggered by my character sense of smell. And so I threw all that out and basically focused on the heart of the story, which she she felt like was really timely because it was basically the heart of the story is well it's actually in the pitch back and so I don't have to paraphrase it. It's where did I take it out. Maybe I took it out. Anyway, it's about basically not caring for other people instead of yourself in cases where, you know, people's lives depend on it. And that was that's the lesson that she learns through the course of my story is that she can't ever change the outcome of her visions. And then when it actually happens, she is able to change her actions to be a little bit more helpful than selfish. And that changes like the outcome of what she thinks is her fate, you know, and yes. Well, and it's something that, you know, this this editors, you know, because the pandemic had already started. It felt like was an important message is that, you know, people need to just stop thinking of themselves and, you know, what they want. And when it's for the larger good in this case it's her family, you know, and her friends too. So, but so this. So this project I rewrote three times. The first few times, I wrote like the complete graphic novel and both times it was about 160 pages long, or maybe a little longer than that. And then, but then my agent had, you know, too many panels on each of these pages and I'm still thinking like a self publisher, you know, I got a print a shorter book to save myself money. And so as I started stretching it out. I didn't I didn't totally rewrite it this last time but I rewrote the synopsis. And which is also in my pitch packet at the end there. But I didn't bother to completely rewrite everything I just rewrote like, More than the pages that I drew. But the other project that I've been soliciting around that I showed you some art from was a Salem Charter Academy, which is a, I completely wrote as well. This one is 100 and did I take away the page count on this one. I think it was like 167 pages. I started writing the evil twins, which are characters in Salem Charter Academy. So this ended up being a prequel about a student election that they accidentally got cursed into being in. And then they agree to be in it, but then they end up running against each other and they're conjoined twins. That's great. Let's get Thomas Jackson. If you want to just give you a little bit. Hi, I'm Thomas. Nice to meet you too. All right, so first of all, in your time as an artist, how have you seen the culture of comics sort of evolve and how do you see that continuing to evolve in the future. I've seen it evolve quite a bit actually. You know, when I started getting involved in comics in the late 80s comic books. You know, the things that I was inspired by were, you know, alternative and underground comics like, you know, our Chrome Harvey P car Bob fingerman. And, you know, most of, you know, that part of the industry as well as the mainstream part of the comic industry, the superheroes, they seem to be all very male centric, you know, and and then and then of course, as I got into maybe my early 20s or so that you'd started to see a lot of reprinted and translated collections of manga at your borders and Barnes and obels. And the funny thing about that is like for years and years, mainstream comic book industries, why don't you do comics for, you know, female readers are like, Well, you know, we've already tried it and it just doesn't work, you know, take a look at it 80% of our readers are male 20% or female. And then when the manga hit the shelves, the demographic of the readers were 60% female 40% male, like, okay. So you really didn't do your research, you didn't really try. So that's one thing that's definitely changed is there's a lot more comics, even within the mainstream publisher, the comic adult comic publishers for for females but but then you're also seeing a lot of more kids comics as well. And that actually kind of started because of one of my con friends, Raina Teligamire, way back in the day, Smile used to be, I used to buy new issues from her at San Diego Comic Con. She was like photographing them and saddle stitching them. And then I, you know, walk to the other end of the small press pavilion and buy my issues of Smile that I didn't have yet. And little did I know that eventually, after she got the contract to illustrate the graphic novel version of the babysitters club, that they were going to publish Smile that was going to be this big ground moving thing that actually caused all of these trade publishers to consider doing graphic novels for kids. And it's still pretty early and, you know, I think that publisher as well as McMillan's for second imprint have been doing this for a while. Have been doing graphic novels for kids for a while. But now you're starting to see all the other imprints over the past five years or so open up their graphic novel imprints as well so that's something that's changed quite a bit as well. Awesome. What kind of advice would you give to someone who is looking to sort of become a part of that kind of culture would you recommend like conventions or is there anything else? I think conventions are good just to see what other people are doing for sure. I mean, the one thing that I've kind of gotten out of the habit of doing over these last 20 years now. Is networking with other creators, you know, you know, in my presentation I talked about having to figure out a way of making money at the convention and then that doing commission zombie characters got to be so lucrative that I was just chained to the table. I couldn't I couldn't network anymore. I was just sitting there trying to finish drawings and then inevitably taking them home and doing them at home and mailing them out to the people I couldn't finish them for. And so, yeah, I mean the next time actually physically go to a convention again my presence may be very different than the last time. The last time I was at a convention I was telling zombie characters and drawing them at the table. And, you know, sadly it's like something that is fun for me but it's also physically difficult like drawing. Like I think at my second Walker stalker, which is walking dead convention. I ended up and this was like a year where it was like five below zero. We're in Chicago, and the first there's only a two day convention. The first day I wasn't even there. My sales assistant was running the booth and taking commissions and taking photographs of people. And when I finally showed up, because I was at my grandma's funeral, unfortunately, it was like five hours into the convention, and she already had like 50 commissions waiting for me. So, yeah, as great as those are as lucrative as those are. I just feel like, yeah, I need to kind of pivot focus to something that's not not so physically demanding on me. And something that has the ability to make money beyond what the convention, you know, that has a chance of giving me residuals. And then, you know, I was describing to people that getting my stuff published is a lot like winning the lotto, you know, it's difficult. It probably isn't going to happen. There's a lot of investment into it that I might not see back. But, you know, being a stockbroker, I think of it this way. So you have to diversify your income streams. So if you put all of your eggs in speculative training your own graphic novel and trying to get published basket, then you might end up bankrupt and starve to death. So you need to have something that's making you money on the other end. So right now, I've been able to do that with teaching and with caricature gigs, birthday party, corporate events, things like that. So just, you know, if you're doing art, I would recommend that number one, figure out what you really like about it. So for me, you know, it was clear to me that being a storyteller is what I want to do. There's just too much time and effort that goes into it to just trying to chase what's hot in the market right now. Because for me, even if I spent all this time and effort illustrating a graphic novel that didn't really sell. So the process of making it is still rewarding to me. And so if I was depending on it for money, that could kill me. And I feel like no matter what you do for your creative energy, if that's your passion, don't lose your passion no matter what. So don't lose your passion at the expense of trying to make it your career. So, I mean, I always use this analogy. You know, how many of your parents are passionate about golf? How many of them are on the PGA tour? Well, they don't play golf because they're making money out of playing golf because they're passionate about it. And they're making time in their lives to make sure that they keep happy. And I think that's kind of the way that everyone should look at their art. So by doing it as a career, you take away the happiness of doing your passion. And maybe that's not what you should do for your career. All right, that's super interesting. Kind of jumping back to what you said about storytelling being like your main thing. Would you see storytelling and visual art as sort of like inherently inclined, or would you consider them kind of separate things? And have you ever struggled sort of bridge? In my own mind, yeah. But I also see, understand that storytelling happens in different ways for different people. And they're all unique media. And I think every time that you see like a book that got made into a movie, or a book that got made into a comic or comic that got made into the movie, you always have people say, well, the original, the sources faster, whatever. So that's just an example of how stories don't necessarily have the capacity to occupy more than one media sometimes. They were made for a particular medium, and you can tell. And they were, they tried to make a version of it. So my favorite example is the book that became Blade Runner was the Android stream of electric sheep, which honestly, I like Blade Runner better. But one of the comic book publishers felt like, you know, what we really need to do is to honor Philip K. Dick's original vision. So they did a comic book series that was word for word, due to Android stream of electric sheep and put all the text in these comics and made a comic. It was the most unreadable thing. Yeah, that sounds great. But that was their constraint, you know, we want to make sure that you don't lose any of the original story. But then, if you've ever read any of this stuff, he jumps around a lot. There's not a lot of chronology. And so half of the time the illustrations were just very loosely related to the text. And that made it very difficult for me to read. All right. Oh, goodness. Oh, okay. What? What surprised you most about becoming a full time artist after working at such like a very traditional job as a stockbroker? The thing that surprised me the most was that it was my income stream was more steady. So as a stockbroker, I was fully commissioned. So I never knew what I was going to make the month to month. But the only difference is that, and I took a lot of good things out of that industry, you know, I was a salesperson, I was dealing with clients. I had to read lots of contracts because it's a highly litigious industry. And those are all things that I used as an artist. So, you know, when I, when I had a new client as an artist, you know, I tried to put myself in their shoes to figure out how I could address their needs and put them, you know, make them confident that they can do business with me. And one of the things was preparing an artist contract. So if I was competing for a job, I always had, I would ask them, you know, do you have a contract or I can send you what I typically have, even if I've never done it before. I just use like a contract template and then Jerry Reagan for the specific situation that I was dealing with, just so that they knew what their expectations were. I knew what my expectations were and everything was spelled out because one of the things that I hear from every artist friend is they've, without fail, they've all been stiffed. They've all been screwed over somehow, some way. And I've been doing this now since full time since 2007. I've never been stuffed. And I've never had, I mean, even if I wasn't thrilled with the client, they never, because everything is spelled out, they asked me to do more work. They never, you know, sneezed at that. They just pay me more money and say, okay, let's redo this or revise this because it's all spelled out. What was the question again? Actually, I'd like to kind of add another question jumping off that. Would you recommend that people who are looking to like go to art school also take sort of like accounting or more classes that are more about the technical side of it as a business? I don't know if I would necessarily say that. I mean, I was able to do it because I'm both right and left brains, which that everyone is. I think that really helped me. And I have to say that going to school and doing something that didn't come naturally to me is art came naturally to me. I'm pretty much self taught. But that ended up helping me because I mean, to be honest with you, my worst part of my GPA in school wasn't my accounting class. Not because so much of it is like the first couple of years is all logic, and then you get to governmental and tax accounting and it's all about who lobbied your elected representatives to pass stupid laws to benefit their business. So it's road memorization, which I'm horrible at. The good thing about it is that now, you know, when you're more times than not, if you're an artist, you're also a small business person, you're running your own business. And so I can I can do my own taxes. And I guess since I went to school and saw like the jobs that were available coming out of school that thank goodness I didn't get. I never want to do anyone else's taxes. So you couldn't pay me enough. Oh, I remember what I was getting to you with the previous question. The thing that surprised me was that the. When when I was a stockbroker, I had no idea whether a company as I was recommending that my clients buy stock and if they're, you know, their chief financial officer was lying on their statements or shipping bricks all over the place. But when I'm talking to a prospective client about hiring me, I know exactly what I can or can't do. I mean, just like Dan, you know, you know, there's sometimes situations where I haven't done this before, but I have the skill to sell the skill and I can learn this on YouTube. And then I'll say yes to something like that. So, but but I feel like I have a lot more control over my life now that I'm doing this plus plus, you know, fortunately for me it does dovetail into my passions. I'm still able to spend a good amount of my work time each week doing what my passions are, whereas I wasn't always able to do it. It is a balance too, because I think there was a time where I was teaching a lot and the majority of my income was from teaching and then I didn't have any time to work in my personal projects. And then I ended up having to go on sabbatical teaching because I felt like it was holding me back. Very fun. Do you have more questions? I mean, I have a whole long list of questions. Sorry, I blathered on. Yeah. I do want to make a list. I'm a characterist. I have a lot of characters, but yeah, I actually, one of my friends I'm looking forward to like looking into is about children with illustrations. We shared that as well. So I was wondering if you had any advice more of the illustrations side of the letters, right? So I was wondering if you had any advice for that. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, one of the things that you can do to build your portfolios for children's book art is do your own versions of the illustrations for classic children's books. Sometimes they've got challenges to think like that, like that CBWI one year did a like a red writing challenge. And so we all did our own versions of a segment of a story from Red Riding Hood. But I think that's that'd be a good idea of trying to do that. I don't know if, I mean, if it's just for your portfolio, maybe you can do that with other books to that aren't like in the public domain. I mean, and honestly, if you do that. Like, you know, you can tag the writers to maybe they'll like them, you never know. Like I've done fan art for middle grade novels that I've read that I'm like, Oh, this is so good. I had to be I was inspired to draw a scene or a character from their story. And, you know, the authors always appreciate that. And who knows if the authors see them, maybe their agents or editors see it too. I mean, the one thing that I've learned is that you just there's there's so many opportunities out there to make an impression to connect with people. And especially now with the internet and social media, you know, everyone is for the better or worse. You know, everyone can connect with each other. So I think that, you know, being really internet savvy is a good thing to advance your career, especially in a creative career. But just be careful what you say out there as well. Or what you what you share out there because they can thank you as well. Well, you know, I think a lot of people see their social media platform as this is me and this is all sides me. I don't necessarily see it that way. Because I think, you know, I mean, especially if you're not really eloquent about expressing opinions. Your opinion may be, you know, subjectively right. But if you say it in a certain way, then you may offend people that are decision makers that could have been opportunities for you that are no longer opportunities for you because, you know, you kind of burn that bridge then. Would you recommend like a professional account versus a personal account kind of thing maybe with that? No, because even if you've got a personal account, it becomes your professional account. Yeah, I mean, if you get to do a job interview, they're going to look at all of your social media accounts. You know, to make sure that they're not hiring Elise Cannon or something. You know, or someone that's going to create problems for them. So I would say, you know, keep your personal stuff extremely personal because most social media is exactly that, you know. I know in some social media, you can limit the public nature of certain things, but especially in the industry that I am, all the editors and art directors and agents hang out on Twitter. There's no private part of Twitter really, you know, I mean, unless you're already a part of a group that you're, you know, you have a private chat going on or something like that. But that's about it. That's not how people use Twitter though. Follow the hashtags. Any appropriate questions? Kind of about the text. Do you just like add the text and then just put it in like a box and fit it in how are being completed? Or do you do it a different like the visual design of the text? Yeah, yeah. So, so that was one of the things I was hoping to show on my iPad, but you know, the general. So what I'll do is I'll actually do the text first. That way I can make sure they get on that, you know, and sometimes you get a verbose and you are not honest about how much space you're going to have left to draw. So put the text in, you can address that as well as make sure that things are being read in the order that you want them to. I do that first, and then I start drawing just figure versions of the characters because I know they're general shapes. And that only takes me maybe two or three minutes per panel. It's not working. No big deal. I haven't gotten emotionally invested in that. This is the same way I worked when I was working in traditional media as well, consoles and fresh pens and things like that. And then I'll start adding details. The good thing about Procreate is you can do them on separate layers, of course. And so, you know, you can always end up with a really clean finished product because you don't have to worry about, oh my gosh, the pencil is too dark and they wouldn't erase that. And then, I mean, there's ways of addressing that too, you know, so a lot of my friends still work traditionally. And when they scan their work, they just, you know, use certain filtering things on Photoshop to clean up, clean things up before they start adding colors and things. So you still don't want people who can't draw and then skin it? Yeah, I mean, depends on the project, like there's still one project that I'm working on that. I plan everything digitally, and then I print it out on 11 by 17 paper. And then I actually light box everything onto watercolor paper. Because what I really wanted to do is when this book came out is maybe do it like a traveling art show by one of the original art to look really close to what the finished published art looked like. Just sort of that traditionally. So half and half actually. So like I assembled everything. So like the line work is traditional media, at least for the first half of the book. Well, actually, most of the book, like the backgrounds, the watercolor washes are all traditional. But then I assembled them all in Photoshop. And so each page is maybe three or four, at least three or four separate drawings that I did. And then I kind of sandwiched them all together in Photoshop and each piece. Thanks for the process. By the last half of the book, everything was black and white. So I actually selected colors in Photoshop. We are. Oh. Yeah. Welcome. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. Sorry to answer more questions. I'm actually a big comic nerd. I refuse to change. Yeah, nice. You know why they changed it. All right.