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

Dirk, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

As an artist, I’m mostly self-taught. I’ve taken some classes in high school and college, but they were not where I learned the most.

What I’ve discovered, in art, writing, and other skills, is that you learn the fastest by doing finished work, then looking at what you’ve created, taking an honest evaluation of what worked and what didn’t, and then taking those lessons with you into more finished work.

I say “finished work” because I think a lot of people (including myself) can get bogged down with work that doesn’t matter. It’s that finished work that makes you struggle with the complete process and forces you to do your best.

Create. Evaluate. Learn. Repeat.

That’s the best way I’ve found to improve what I do creatively.

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

I started out writing and drawing comics in the 90s. Along with several friends we self-published comics, sold them through the various distributors of the time, and had fun attending comic conventions with the big pros.

In the late 90s, I was frustrated with my illustration career, so I went back to college and learned how to do professional photography, and I enjoyed doing that for over two decades, won some awards, and was largely known for doing that.

About 2015, I got the bug to do art again, but this time I wanted to learn how to do it digitally. So instead of creating art by using pencil, ink, and paper, I began to learn how to use a graphics tablet and various apps to create artwork. After a lot of experimentation I settled on Clip Studio Paint Pro and I’ve been using that ever since to create my work.

In 2017, I started doing commissioned portrait art and I’ve worked with dozens of people each year to bring their visions to life through my art.

Concurrently, I was working on doing my own illustrations and taking on some work for various publishers.

Recently I made a big leap in my process, and found myself right back where I started… doing comics, except this time it’s all done digitally and the results are so much more exciting!

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

My experience with social media goes all the way back to AOL online, Friendster, and MySpace. Yeah… I’ve been doing this a while.

I now have a Twitter account with over 8o,000 followers that I’ve built over a long period of time.

I’ve also lost accounts, including Google+ where I had over 50,000 followers.

What I’ve learned is that creating a successful following for each platform is largely the same process.

You have to know who you are and define who you’re talking to, then make sure that you’re talking to that audience all the time.

Also, you have to be creating high quality content for that audience and presenting it consistently to those followers.

Finally, you have to be social. Where I see most people make the mistake on social media is to post stuff and walk away. If you’re not being social then you’re missing the whole point of social media.

Let me give you an example. James Gunn, the director of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, has a lot of people who follow him, and he could get away with just posting stuff and then not responding to people, and he’d still have a great following because he’s in an advantaged position because of who he is and what he does.

Instead, he responds to people who reply to his posts. He also responds to other people who talk about subjects that he’s interested in. What does that do? It supercharges his account!

I try to tell people that a supercharged social media account is like a fun party that everyone wants to visit. If you can keep the party going then people will happily check in with you from time-to-time, and they will tell other people to visit your party too.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

When I was originally working as a professional illustrator and writer was during the 90s. It was before the internet took off. Resources were largely contained in books, and in classes. If you were lucky to find a mentor who would walk you through the process, then you were particularly blessed.

Now you have the opposite problem.

You have so many resources that it’s hard to figure out which ones are best.

No matter what subject you’re interested in learning more about it’s available to you, and it’s likely available for free. You can find out so much with a deep dive on YouTube. Amazon has so many books available to you on niche subjects that you could literally spend the rest of your life reading about how to do things. When you’re ready, you can take classes on sites like Udemy and even colleges are offering classes online now.

But, most of those resources are generic, or base level stuff. When you want to accelerate what you do then finding a mentor, or hiring a consultant, who has both knowledge and experience, is how to level up.

Or, you can just learn by doing. Nothing will teach you more than going through the process of creating finished work.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://rainkingstudios.com/about-us/dirk-hooper/
• Instagram: https://twitter.com/DirkHooperPlus
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dirk.hooper
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dirkhooperplus/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/DirkHooperPlus
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TaskforceGeek
• Other: https://themusesfunhouse.com/

Image Credits
All art and photos by Dirk Hooper