We recently connected with Dianne Yingst and have shared our conversation below.
Dianne, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?
Yes, I have been able to earn a full-time living from my creative work, but it has not been an easy journey. I earned my BA from Southeastern Louisiana University in New Media and Animation and my MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design in Sequential Art. I graduated from SCAD in 2019 completely burned out and with nothing lined up for work. I’m grateful that my fiancé was willing to handle the bills for awhile so I could find my feet and enter my chosen field without having to find a day job. His support made all the difference and allowed me to say ‘yes,’ to an assistant inker position I found posted on Facebook. It was for an app called Portrait Works by Worldspinner. My job was to assist with inking digital assets such as, weapons, armors, various facial features, hair styles, etc to help insure a consistent final product. At the time I thought it was going to be a small 3 month or so long gig that would hold me over as I looked for more (preferably comic) projects from indie creators. However, I ended up working with Worldspinner for two years. At the time Worldspinner was a small indie company so they funded their app, Portrait Works, through Kickstarter.
In January of 2020 the kickstarter was +500% funded and unlocked all 18 stretch goals. I feel very lucky to have been working for Worldspinner at the time because, unbeknownst to us, Covid was just a few months away. I watched my friends who graduated with me get industry jobs and then get let go or furloughed during the pandemic. It feels like luck that our kickstarter was launched and funded when it was, because if they had waited 6 months it’s possible my career would have gone a very different way….
Thanks to the successful kickstarter and the wonderful people who run Worldspinner I was able to gain financial freedom during the pandemic. I also discovered I LOVE technical work. It is very peaceful to me. As a Sequential artist I’m typically involved in every step when it comes to creating a comic page. My comic process includes thumbnails, tight roughs, pencil/inks, and sometimes color and lettering. Thumbnails and tight roughs are especially mentally taxing and can burn me out quickly. I’ve learned its important to diversify the kind of work I have throughout my day. The mentally heavy work, such as thumbnails, should be handled in the morning, and more technical work, such as inking or flatting, should be saved for the evenings.
I did start to feel like I was falling behind my peers after awhile. They were getting their first (or multiple) books deals and I had zero comic work. I wasn’t even drawing in my own art style. At Worldspinner I had to match the lead inker’s style in order to stay on brand for the app. However this worked out in my favor, because I was able to market this new style matching skill to get my first comic project. On a Facebook comic job page I was hired to style match for a graphic novel. The project was almost done, but the original artist was no longer able to complete the artwork. I was able to match the original style and I finished the last 38 pages of Anna Chronism written by Patric Lewandowski. I find the skills learned from one job will often inform the next. I make it a point to no longer feel behind or to compare myself to my peers. Skills learned from your desired field (or not) will lead to progress and can help you become a well rounded creator.
We’ll talk about my next gigs and big news shortly. :)
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Dianne Yingst, but professionally I mainly go by DK Yingst. I like to tell clients that DK gets the credit and Dianne goes to billing. :) I am a digital freelance artist from Southeast Louisiana, currently based in Wisconsin. I love cute coming of age stories, dark realism with hints of the supernatural and exploring nature. Honestly, I work on anything that catches my interest and I’m absolutely terrible at social media. I have limited energy so I focus on what brings me joy and how I can help my clients achieve their dreams. I’ve always known I wanted to be an artist except for a few months in 7th grade when I wanted to be a meteorologist and about two seconds when my Dad said accounting was a good idea. It was unrealistic. Haha! Outside of art I love hiking, fat snow flakes, receiving biscuits from my cats, and getting a little too obsessed with farming sims and anything BioWare.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Man, I think I may have a pivot for every category. In 2020 I was rear ended at a red-light and developed 24/7 tension headaches from whiplash. Both cars were totaled. I’ve tired countless treatments with only mild and very recent improvements. This May marks the third anniversary of 24/7 chronic pain because some kid was texting and driving. After everything with the pandemic, the car accident, and a life time of oppressive heat my fiancé and I had enough of living in the south. I had attached my chronic pain, hopelessness from failed doctor and ER visits, and undiagnosed depression to where we were living. All of this negativity wrapped itself around this little suburban neighborhood and I needed to LEAVE. The pain had me permanently overwhelmed and I felt like everything needed to change if I had any hope of feeling better.
We were able to transfer to Wisconsin with his job and finally live somewhere with real seasons. (And I love it!) The move was a dramatic solution, but it was a dramatic departure as well. We drove from Georgia to Wisconsin only half a day ahead of a hurricane. It felt like a fitting end to our southern chapter.
This is roughly when I had another large pivot. My work with Worldspinner, Anna Chronism, and a little mini comic with Comic Experience were coming to a close and the other comic gigs I lined up were being constantly delayed. I was feeling better after the move, but I still didn’t have the mental bandwidth deal with much. I wasn’t confident new freelance gigs would be delay/problem free and I was uncomfortable asking my partner to the cover bills again. I also lived in a brand new place with zero ties so you betcha I got myself a day job!
In school they talk a lot about the hustle culture in the gig economy and how hard you have to work to stay afloat. BUT they don’t talk about how nice it is to know exactly when your next paycheck is coming and leaving work at work. What a revolutionary concept of when you’re done at 5pm you’re actually done. Haha! It was the kind of certainty and stress relief I needed. My comic gigs eventually stopped delaying, but I continued to work my print shop day job for 7 months. Employment is a two way street and since my time wasn’t respected the freelance gigs have to wait till my schedule frees up.
Just because I had a day job doesn’t mean I stopped looking for opportunities tho. (Nor did they stop looking for me.)
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
The lesson I had to unlearn is deeply tied into my career path. I had to unlearn how to network. It’s likely because I was in academia for so long, but the professors mostly talked about how to approach editors or industry professionals at work events like at a forum or a con. I’m deeply uncomfortable approaching someone cold like that. They don’t know me and I am obviously someone who wants something from them. It makes me feel like a parasite. The feeling was only driven more home when I watched 20+ of my peers try to schmooze a visiting artist all at once. I’m not a shy person by any standard, but I do try to avoid inorganic interactions like that. Instead I’ve learned networking is more successful if its mutually beneficial or you already have a rapport with the person. For example, while I was working at Worldspinner I made it a point to befriend my fellow artists. We had a work group chat separate from the managers and had weekly digital artist hangouts on our own time. I’ve never met any of them in person since they live all over the world, but I do consider them my peers and friends. Even after Worldspinner was over we all made a point to stay in contact. After a handful of months working at my day job, Lisa Hall, the penciler from Worldspinner, asked the group chat if we were interested in working on a possible kickstarter card game. If it was anyone else I would have said no to such a vague question. But it’s Lisa, her artwork is stunning, she’s been an amazing friend, is the queen of mom puns, and agreed to sign my contract and give me a percentage. To me this is networking in its most organic form and resulted in an amazing ongoing work relationship with Lisa’s company, Level1gamer. (More kickstarters to come!)
Of course networking doesn’t have to be exclusively done with friends. I found the job posting for Worldspinner posted by a SCAD alumni on a private SCAD FB page. We immediately connected over a shared educational experience and favorite professors. Later, when management was looking to hire more artists to join the team I made a point to post on the same FB page. An acquaintance of mine who is an amazing artist applied for the job and was later hired. I learned of the opportunity because of an alumni and it feels good to provide the same opportunity for someone else trying to break into the industry. Networking can be very difficult and I make a point of trying to help students and young artists get some early job experience. Naturally, this has come with varying results. Haha. Bottom line you don’t have to ooze charisma to network well, but you do need to have the proper skillsets to take advantage of the opportunity or be hired.
Networking or hustling doesn’t always work when you want it to, but there does eventually come a time when your efforts come to fruition. Like I said before, having connections, especially to SCAD, is deeply tied into my career path. For example, SCAD offers an event for sequential students and alumni called Editor’s Day. The event typically includes 10 minute portfolio reviews with a variety of editors from the comic industry. I’ve participated in 4-5 Editor’s Days, and while I often get solid feedback or praise it’s didn’t resulted in future work. (Or so I thought.) I did find out much later that my name and portfolio went on an internal list for some publishers. Myung Hee, the creator of a webtoons original series, Simon Sues, contacted me from such a list. I was hired as a color assistant for her series and it was enlightening to see the behind the scenes process for vertical scroll format comics instead of paginated. I was also contacted by Comics Experience for varies projects and I imagine they discovered me in a similar way.
I mostly viewed Editor’s Day as an opportunity to stay visible and get updated contact info from editors. Like the previous years, I wasn’t expected much. In fact, I was expecting nothing to come from it and had already lined up a teaching position for the upcoming fall. I interviewed extremely early for it, but that is because of networking as well. My very first job in high school was as a studio assistant for a local artist, Mia Kaplan. We had the same high school talented art teacher and she reached out to find out if any current students wanted a part-time job. Of course I did. It’s art. Over a decade later she is still a contact and emailed me about a potential teaching position at my undergrad she thought I’d be perfect for. I still knew most of the staff their from my undergrad days and the classes were in my major. It would have been a great fit. I was offered the job—but I ultimately had to let this opportunity go by.
It didn’t line up with my current family needs and I was staring in the face of two more opportunities. Opportunities in comics. I was contacted by two publishing companies about future work after Editor’s day. I was over the moon, but dealing with the hard choice of what to do next. I was advised to follow through with the one I was already offered verses the two that were only hopeful maybes. However, I concluded I’d be more devastated if I had to turn the comic deals down due to time constraints vs having none pan out at all.
It felt strange to say no after so much time spent hustling and hunting for opportunities. That is until I remember my most promising comic opportunity. I had an amazing portfolio review with Scholastic. I was told my work was ‘delicious’ and felt like I hallucinate the rest of the conversation because it was so positive and a point blank job offer.
As a result, for the first time I was given the opportunity to test for an unannounced project. It took months of back and forth and test designs and sample pages, but I was eventually offered a deal. In a single year I went from having a day job to my very first book deal with a universally known publisher. Everyone I know has gone to a Scholastic book fair as a kid. Even my mother recognizes the name. Haha! The books are still unannounced, but look for my name in the next couple of years. :)
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