Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Calvin Day. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Calvin, 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’ll never forget the exact moment I quit engineering and decided to pursue art. I was sitting in the basement of my highschool’s science department about halfway through engineering class, looking down at a worksheet, and I said to myself, man, I am not doing a single other bridge pressure calculation ever again.

I packed up, headed over to the art room, and haven’t looked back since.

It was like some cheesy teen romance: art was right for me all along, we grew up together, I just didn’t realize it was right for me until I was grown. Many family members before me had backgrounds in the arts that nurtured my creative side from birth, like my Dad in the film industry and my Grandmother as an art teacher. As an avid lego kid, I’d mismatch body parts to create my own characters and backstories, which were probably the roots of where my art ended up today as a concept artist.

I’d always twist something to make it my own – be it a lego, a transformer, or even a cool rock I found. I’d doodle it into a brand new character. I’d show them to my Dad, and he’d appreciate the creativity, but I knew the same critique every time was gonna be “you should actually draw it”. 99% of my creative output as a child was mere doodles. I realized that when I stepped foot into that first actual art class in high school. I had all the passion and ideas in the world, but very limited skill or knowledge to realize those ideas. Luckily, I hit the ground running and levelled up from Art 1 to AP Studio Art by the very next year.

The years since I left that engineering class have been aiming straight to the top. I set my sights on SCAD early on, which really helped focus my improvement. Also, in the past few years, a little thing called COVID-19 happened, but I made the most of it by picking up a beginner’s XP-Pen and borrowing my dad’s laptop to teach myself digital art. The pandemic years before college were my metaphorical-but-almost-literal cocoon as an artist. Being stuck in the same room with nothing but all the time in the world and a blank digital canvas were some serious modern-day monk conditions, and I re-emerged ready to take on the world.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Like I said earlier, I always loved making art, but I had to learn for myself that art could be more than just a hobby, that it’s a crucial aspect of nearly everything you see or interact with everyday. My first time witnessing this was when my Dad, a lifelong Star Wars devotee, took me to an artist’s panel in Pasadena for the Star Wars film Rogue One.

That day I learned what a Concept Artist is, and to this day, I aim to live up to that first impression. The concept artist works with the rest of the team, creating countless different designs for characters, creatures, ships, planets, and everything in-between, until they find the perfect fit for the story. That’s my dream job. I’ve tinkered away at my own little personal projects trying to capture that glory, but just this past spring I’ve actually snagged my first legit project where I’m doing all those things! It’s super exciting, and the absolute perfect first gig as someone stepping foot into the industry. I’d love to get into the gushy details but it’s still under NDA for now!

Outside of my concept work, I like illustrating comics, characters, and general scenes of nature. Having grown up by the beach in Los Angeles, marine biology has always been a muse of mine, and I’m sure that’s clear in a lot of my work. I’m chipping away at a graphic novel that I’d love to find the time to finish, but these are my ripest years and it’s too fast paced to fully commit to something like that right now. In the meantime, I’m getting through college off parttime work and commissions, and I think the next step for me is selling prints or stickers or something like that. You know, get myself out there and turn a profit.

I knew I needed to step up my game on that front when I got humbled by my young cousin from Colorado. I visited a few summers ago, and she was working a crazy hustle doing caricatures at the local farmer’s market. She was pulling hundreds of bucks a day as like, a middle schooler. And I’m about to graduate art school. Stay humble guys.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

What do they say? The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison? That’s a good way to put it. There is nothing in the world I could stay up until 3AM working on and still have the energy to continue other than art. If I was filing audits, tax returns, or whatever paperwork stuff people do that I’m ignorant about, I’d be a goner. I can endure ridiculous hours of illustrating simply because it just never gets old. Every project is new, different, and exciting, and better than the last.

But seriously, I think the single most rewarding thing is seeing your progress, and how fast that progress can come. I look back at something I did last year, thinking it’s done by a preschooler, but remember that when I made that I considered it my Mona Lisa. I have those moments so often, and it’s a great sign.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Over the quarantine I made a bucket list of things I want to accomplish once life goes back to normal. On that list was “have my name in the credits of something so my friends and family can point it out and be annoying about it”.

Spoiler alert, I’m gonna need to find a new goal soon.

But on a day-to-day basis, I think of my family and friends who put their faith in me and hype me up to make this all work, and that gives me the strength I need to push through. I’ve always been worried about the shakiness of an art-related career, but my people back home give me the confidence I need to make it happen.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://shrimpala.wixsite.com/caldayportfolio
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shrimpala01/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/calvin-day-a70627228/

Image Credits

All artwork by Calvin Day