We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Abigail Muñoz. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Abigail below.

Abigail, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I knew I wanted to be a professional artist from a really young age, somewhere around six or seven years old. I had this weird fascination with watching my VHS tapes frame-by-frame, after I accidentally discovered how to make the films play in slow motion. This allowed me to analyze my favorite animated scenes, and to really notice how the character was moving and turning in space. I’d then try to draw what I’d observed, using my own characters. But I don’t think I understood that I could do this kind of thing professionally, until I saw a “behind-the-scenes” featurette showing how “Bambi” was made. They showed artists drawing their characters frame-by-frame, what I then learned was called “animating”, and I thought, “that’s it. That’s what I want to do when I grow up.” I became super dedicated to achieving that goal from then on out, and started looking at art colleges while I was still in middle school.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a concept artist who has worked in a wide range of industries, including tech/social media, mobile games, virtual reality, educational computer games, toys, and television animation. My first job out of college was actually as an independent contractor on Facebook’s “Stickers” team, and it turned out to be a super fun gig. The recruiters from Facebook found me because they were browsing my university’s end-of-year art exhibition, and I had some of my character designs up on the walls. The year was 2015, and it was my final week before graduating. The recruiters interviewed me right then and there, and I started working for them about a month later.

After my contract ended, I continued to do freelance work in the form of more “Sticker packs” (they’re like emojis, but bigger, in the form of more detailed cartoon characters) for Facebook, as well as other modes of expressions like holiday-themed frames for Messenger. My ultimate goal was still to work in animation though, so I continued to refine my portfolio and apply to every character design and visual development role that I could. My big break came in the late summer of 2017, when I got a call from Nickelodeon Animation, letting me know that I’d been selected as a semifinalist for the 2018 Nick Artist Program. After several grueling interviews, I got the news that just two applicants had been selected for the program, and I was one of them. I couldn’t believe it when I got the call that morning – it was like, a childhood dream come true.

The Nick Artist Program lasted six months, during which I was mentored on “The Loud House”. I then went on to do character designs on a couple of Nick shows as a freelancer, and my art career has gone in all sorts of directions ever since. I’ve designed everything from props, environments, characters, packaging, even 3D implementation, for a wide range of companies and clients. Right now, I work as a 2D Artist at Storm8, a mobile games studio.

For me, that range of work and skillsets has been my biggest strength as an artist. Being able to work across a really wide range of mediums and contexts just opens up so many doors, and helps you find what you truly like. I discovered that I actually enjoy working in mobile games quite a lot more than in animation, which I couldn’t have predicted when I first started.

I’ve also finally been able to devote time to a 10-year-old passion project of mine, Rock & Roar, which is a webcomic that I update every two weeks. I started posting the pages last summer, and now it’s on Webtoons and Tapas.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I think every new role in my career has been a pivot, haha. Throughout the 8 years that I’ve been working professionally, I’ve been consistently jumping over from one creative industry to another, and having to adapt to how things are done in that world. Designing smartphone-friendly assets for a tech company is pretty different from designing characters for an animation studio, or designing packaging for a toy company. However, what they all require are strong art foundations. Good design is good design, across any creative field. If you have strong art foundations, are easy to work with, and can quickly learn new kinds of software, processes, and work tools, you can flex your art skills to adapt to a wide variety of needs. I really enjoy the challenge of having to become proficient at something I’ve never done before, like doing 3D lighting and effects for video game levels in Unity software. That’s something I would’ve never imagined I’d be doing, but here I am, and I love it.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

There’s nothing like the feeling of drawing something, and having it come out exactly like how you saw it in your head, or at least close enough that it makes you really happy. All those years and years and drawing, and learning, and crying, just all paying off – there’s no satisfaction like it. As artists, we get to create entire stories and universes in our heads, and then pull those things out of our imagination and share them with the world. You start with nothing, and suddenly you have a beautiful something, and that something can reach people all around the globe. For some creations, that lasting reach might even outlive their creator. It’s the closest thing to magic that I think exists in our world.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.abigailmunoz.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rockandroar.comic/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abigailmunoz/
• Webcomic: https://rockandroar.com/

Image Credits
All art is by Abigail Muñoz (me)