We caught up with the brilliant and insightful D’artagnan Perez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

D’Artagnan , appreciate you joining us today. Are you happier as a creative? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job? Can you talk to us about how you think through these emotions?

I find myself wondering if a career as a creative will be as fulfilling as I hoped. So far I have done one paid photography gig, while an amazing experience, the limbo I’m currently in is unnerving and discouraging at best. Hunting for jobs is draining especially creative ones and when you need to pay bills, waiting for one is a huge gamble. I have to ask myself if I would be happy hopping from job to job with potentially large gaps between each. It is honestly scary, not knowing when you will work again in the thing you want to be doing. On top of that, choosing to go with a regular job, do I pick one to pay the bills or find one that could potentially teach me new skills that I can use for opportunities in the future. Something I have struggled with in pursuing work in a creative field is balancing my passions with my work/school. I learned the hard way how easy it is to burn out the thing you love while in school studying illustration. When I got stopped pursuing illustration it ended up being a year before I bothered to draw anything because I was so exhausted.

There’s a stability to a regular job that is hard to find in photography, film, and i’d imagine other creative fields. At least for me now, starting out, I understand having to get the ball rolling and people finding you but man is it hard to stay motivated and hopeful. Its hard to wait. While not working though you get an abundance of time and I figured I could try and learn something new while I am searching and waiting. It keeps my mind occupied and at least somewhat creatively stimulated.

D’Artagnan , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Hi, My name is D’Artagnan Perez, I am 22 years old, and I have been pursuing creative work for since I turned 18. By that I mean I attended SCAD in 2020 through 2024. I initially attended with the intention of pursuing Illustration for Concept art; I wanted to do art for movies pre-production. I did that for 2 years, but it ended up being not what I wanted creatively and it left me in a mental rut. I choose to step away from school for a bit to better evaluate my options and my expectations of myself. During my time away I didn’t draw for a lot of it, I worked as a baker at a bakery, and I picked up BTS photography as a hobby. Id be on film sets with my friends for their projects and take pictures of the happenings of a set. In the fall of 2023 I returned and switched majors to Production Design. It occurred to me in my time away that I had the most fun on film shoots, sure having friends there helped and only taking pictures made the expectations really simple. I felt I could do more for a set and found Production Design encompassed everything I wanted to do previously while being more engaging.
I aspire to be a production designer because it takes the conceptual processes of illustration and adds in “Well how could we actually do that”, opening a door to a whole host of questions and rabbit holes to explore, and that’s before anything actually has to get made or found. I have learned to love the way a set looks and the effort taken to make a home feel lived in or an alien world feel alien. So far I have only worked on one short film, called Primary Consumers. I had to make a hole that the movies creature tunneled out of, kind of in an anthill shape. We had to make it look like the asphalt on site and be big enough for a person sized creature could crawl out of.
Despite wanting to be a Production Designer, I have done more BTS film photography than I have PD work. I have now worked on 9 sets as the photographer, and 1 professional gig where I attended The Voyage North to Bicolline in Montreal, Canada. Bicolline being North Americas largest LARP-ing event.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Find value in the arts again and encourage people to really create. With the rise of AI, the ability to replace creatives has been taken to a terrifying all time high. It could be a great tool for artists, at the same time it could replace them. We have already seen with the Writers and Actors strikes from the past year that AI has been in use behind the scenes and with clear intention of cutting people out of the process. Even outside of AI, companies and studios find ways to cut creatives down given the chance.
I remember seeing an AI replicate the style of Alex Ross, a comic book artist and painter, and it damn near crushed me. As someone who is moderately good at art, seeing that with the right prompt anyone could make a replication of his work was insane. I think it was last year where at the start of 2023 it was, “AI can’t do hands” then by September people were being fooled by photos of Trumps “arrest”, AI could do hands. In 9 months it did that, now we are on the cusp of it being able to make videos.
I bring this up because it opened a discourse about creatives and if art is actual work. People were dismissive of why writers would strike when they could simply be replace by AI, a sentiment you can apply to all creative fields now. Working on movies is work, Illustrating is work, painting is work, just because it isn’t blue collar or corporate doesn’t make it a job or hard. Now we see people doubting the authenticity of artists work because of AI.
Art is hard and it can be a real job. If we continue to dismiss it and replace people with AI simply cause art is deemed not a necessity we will only lose. Its an incredibly rewarding experience seeing a piece come together, be it film, dance, music, illustration, you can’t beat it.

Have you ever had to pivot?

At the end of my first quarter at SCAD, I was presenting my final for ILLU100, the first class in the major. I had just spent the past two days grinding to get it done. The assignment was to do 3 character illustrations, fully colored. I got it done, barely, and I came in that morning exhausted. You could see it on everyone’s face though, which brought me some comfort. It would come my time to present, I get up and explain my concept, show my work, then await critique. The class typically goes first, this time though the professor had his hand up.
“If I may, and dont take this the wrong way, I am going to make an observation. You are trying to microwave an entire artistic evolution into 4 years and if you keep at it you will burn out long before you make a career out of it.”
To be honest much of what he said after is a blur. I think he told a story of a student he had that was similar to me but it worked out for him. I choked on my tongue holding back tears. Those word haunt me to this day, echoing in the back of my head at the turn of every career decision I make. I greatly appreciate his honesty and transparency, without it I wouldn’t have realized the danger of what I was doing. I pushed, pushed and pushed to convince myself I wanted to be an illustrator, that wanted and deserved to be in that room. In truth I had no idea what I wanted other than an easy way out. What I found was all my shortcomings served to me on a platter with a GPA attached.
I took my break from school, came back and switched majors, both big risks but they turned out great. Since then I try to take more risks, push myself to be uncomfortable where I can. Slowly but surely it has helped ease my anxieties in life.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @comiclycrazy
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/d-artagnan-perez-b7a007242