Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicky Rodriguez

Hi Nicky, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.

Being a professional artist was never my plan, mainly because I didn’t know it was a possibility. Most of the few career days I’d experienced in school were basically devoid of anything related to the arts, so I think I assumed the only way to work in the arts was to have already gone to some special art high school, honestly. My AP art teacher was shocked I hadn’t thought of applying to an art college by the time senior year came around, so with her help I decided to very quickly put together an art portfolio and send off applications. If she hadn’t believed in me and steered me that way I probably would’ve tried to study science? It’s really a huge mystery! I applied to two schools, Montserrat and California College of the Arts, and got into both. While I’d had more interaction with Montserrat and gotten the same scholarship amounts from both, with my sister also studying in San Francisco it felt like the right choice to head there.
I studied animation for undergrad because by that point I’d decided I wanted to focus on character design and building stories around those characters. While I certainly learned a lot during those 4 years, with a program geared towards animating and my having decided that particular track wasn’t for me, I felt a little lost by the time graduation came around. Especially knowing that animation was essentially headquartered in LA and I didn’t have the means to make a sudden move, I had a bit of an existential crisis that resulted in me looking for MFA and PhD programs. Somehow, I thought more school would solve my problem! I did, however, find out about the MFA in Comics program at CCA, and managed to just squeak into the program after applying past the acceptance date. I also knew I wasn’t where I needed to be skills-wise if I wanted to do any kind of professional work in animation, and I didn’t know much about comics as an industry other than that it could be another way for me to tell the stories I wanted to tell. Those 2 years really gave me the time I needed to hone my skill and create a vision for what I wanted to do with my life.
Becoming a freelancer, with all its ups and downs, is ultimately always where I wanted to be. I wanted to have the freedom to create my own work while also working with like-minded people and organizations to create art. Prior to COVID, I was traveling all across the US for different zine and comic fests, doing workshops, panels, and selling my work. The goal was to next tackle international events, but the pandemic really threw a huge wrench into my life that I’m still working around. I’m technically full-time freelance, and while it didn’t come about in the way I wanted it to, I did still end up reaching some goals for myself that had before seemed intangible. I got an agent, I illustrated a children’s book for a publisher which won an award, I inked a graphic novella, I flatted 2 books for Scholastic, I have a comic coming out in an academic anthology next year, I made a webcomic and I’m currently shopping around that webcomic—in it’s graphic novel iteration—to different publishers in hopes it’ll become a published book. It’s been hard as hell these last 4 years, but I’m happy to look back and see that I still accomplished things in spite of it all.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?

Not at all, really, ha! Through college and grad school I was working while also doing classes and small freelance here and there, and eventually throwing traveling for zine fests into the mix. It was an organized chaos that I made work for about 7 years up till COVID, and while there was so much I loved about it and so much I was able to do and achieve, it was certainly a hectic road. Art, especially comics, is not a huge money maker, which meant constantly having to juggle gigs and jobs to make ends meet and get me ready for whatever event I had next on the docket. I’m still very much dealing with that even if I haven’t been traveling anymore, just by nature of the underpaying of freelancers and the long wait times between payments that publishers hold us to.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?

I specialize in making comics, also flatting and coloring them for other individuals and publishers, as well as illustrating for books and for non-profits. My works are primarily centered around the trials of existence, being a bit of slice-of-life, existential ennui, the recognition of and struggle with depression and anxiety, and the longing for and comfort of a place to call home. These themes are woven through most, if not all, my zines and are huge in my webcomic, The Unlucky Ones and the Edge of Nowhere. That webcomic is my proudest work, for sure, because I never thought I’d ever make one, let alone have a road map to finishing it. It was born during a very difficult period of my life, but with the encouragement and support of one of my best friends, Sierra Barnes, it came to fruition and helped motivate me to further push myself to where I wanted to be in the comics world. Reimagining it into a longer, even more heart wrenching story was a challenge, especially as someone who’d never written a formal story, let alone a proper comic script. But I did it, and it got me connected with an agent. While I’ll admit that the likelihood of TUOTEON becoming a published graphic novel isn’t looking the greatest currently, I’ve still learned a lot and hope to use this endeavor as a teaching experience for the next stories I hope to write.

We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?

Wooof, my adult life up till this point has been built on risk-taking, I think! I took a risk applying for art school last minute, deciding to pursue a masters—also somewhat last minute, and then applying for zine fests and comic cons was always a risk because I’d have to figure out taking work off and affording the trip all within a small window of time should I be accepted. Even deciding to focus on freelance once I became disabled, as it was the easiest and most accessible job at the time after a long struggle to find other work, was a risk and still continues to be. It’s not stable, and for someone entirely independent without a secure support net, I just never know how a month will go. I know, though, that if I didn’t take these risks on myself then I wouldn’t have had work published, let alone even be making zines and comics, period. Whether it’s purely on impulse, or after careful planning, sometimes a risk is necessary to allow yourself to grow and make your dreams tangible.

Pricing:

• I have commissions, ranging from $50-138
• Zines, physical and digital, for up to $4
• I do workshops and class visits and can be contacted about pricing for those.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://artofnickyrodriguez.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/artofnickyrodriguez
• Other: https://www.webtoons.com/en/canvas/the-unlucky-ones-and-the-edge-of-nowhere/list?title_no=637308

Image Credits

Who Killed Sarah Shaw? is created by Frankee White and Adam Markiewicz (cover colors by me)
2 images of the woman dancing is from a comic called INHALE written by Christa Harader and illustrated by me