We caught up with the brilliant and insightful April Connors Ramirez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

April , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I had to do a lot of legwork to get instruction when I was younger because I couldn’t afford school, so I used books, figure drawing sessions, and workshops to learn things. A lot of trial and error, and just drawing/painting as much as possible. Smaller schools like Concept Design Academy or open drawing workshops like The Drawing Club became indispensable, as they offered affordable alternatives to formal education. Youtube was just starting so there wasn’t the bevy of instruction on it that there is now. I would recommend young artists who don’t have a lot of money to definitely go through youtube and glean as much info off it as possible. Some stuff is great, some stuff is not great, but there’s a lot more instructional content on there now, so take full advantage. Drawing is, in my opinion, the most essential skill for an artist, and learning how to communicate visually with a drawing is what matters most in the learning process.

April , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am an illustrator, author, professor, and comics creator. I specialize in gesture drawing for the entertainment industry (think animators, storyboard artists, sequential storytellers,etc), but offer classes in life drawing, fashion/costumed figure drawing and illustration as well. Typically I work with professional and university level artists; our problems become less “life drawing” focused and tend to center on storytelling and acting. For example, a class at an animation studio may be full of animators and storyboard artists who are working on building more solid and exaggerated performances with characters, so our class will have costumed models and exercises that will support those types of explorations. Usually my clients will tell me what type of class is needed for a specific group of working professionals and I will create a class to fit those needs.

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

Simply hiring artists and paying them is the best way to support artists and creatives. Not asking for free work, or dangling the promise of “exposure” in front of them. You can’t pay bills with “exposure”.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I wish online learning resources were as present as they are now back when I was in high school. Obviously the internet existed, but youtube was in its infancy and we didn’t really have the amount of websites, blogs, etc that we have now. Social media was also just kind of getting started (myspace was a thing, but not for learning really), so we didn’t have the connectivity between artists and the art sharing communities that exist now. We had books, magazines, and dvds, but none of those resources are free, and add to the cost of art supplies, software, etc. I would advise anyone interested in developing their craft to take advantage of as much free/low-cost resources as possible. Being part of an online drawing/art making community is also a great way to learn, share, and make like-minded friends.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.aprilconnorsart.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aprilconnors/
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@professor.raco