We recently connected with Drimmolo and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Drimmolo thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you recount a story of an unexpected problem you’ve faced along the way?
For sure the most unexpected problems I have faced since becoming a professional artist and comic illustrator were my sudden arm injuries. While all artists hear about possible wrist or back issues that can occur if you don’t stretch properly or maintain a correct posture, I was definitely among the ones that took the issue lightly.
When I was younger, so from 18 to 23, I would be able to draw non-stop for hours and hours without any stiffness or pain, and so I’d often skip any kind of stretch or warm ups. Sadly, during covid, I spent the entire quarantine doing just that, and apparently that was the last straw for my tendons. Soon after the end of quarantine, I started feeling strange pains in both of my arms. I thought a few days of rest was all I needed, but instead the pain spread to my elbows, and soon the pain turned into a debilitating mess. In a few weeks, I was at times barely able to bring the fork to my mouth, and the pain felt like there were cords ripping apart inside my arms, and bent needles moving about in my elbows. At first, doctors told me that just a few months would be all that needed, but after a year of physiotherapy, medicines, X-rays, CAT scans, cortisol injections and of course lots of exercise, I was nowhere near able to get back to the professional level I needed to find a job. At one point, one doctor even told me I needed to give up on art if I wanted to get better.
I don’t think I could ever find the words to completely describe how miserable and desperate it all felt. I had just completed my master in comics and Graphic novels in my university thanks to a full scholarship, even winning an award. I had bet everything on my ability to create stories and draw fantasies for people to read. I was supposed to start my Patreon, create the second issue of my comic, table at conventions, sending job applications… Instead, i was laying on my bed, pain searing in my arms, the need to draw burning me from the inside out and cursing myself so bad I was close to breaking my own heart. And on top of all of this, the heavy bitter guilt of becoming a huge financial burden on my family.
I never lost hope I could get better, and I was privileged enough to keep trying, but none of that took misery of it all away.
It turns out, that while the bad posture and lack of warm-ups had been a catalyst, the true reason behind the mess was a malformation in my mouth, of all places: the frenulum of my tongue was abnormally short, and since the tongue is the biggest muscle in your head, it pulled my head continuously forward, pulling on the muscles of my cervical and neck. In most cases, a short frenulum is spotted when very young and is cut before it causes any damages, but as nobody had noticed mine, this small deformity had been slowly affecting my entire body.
As soon as we finally noticed this, and performed the small surgical cut (and did lots of speech therapy), I finally started to see real progress in my arms. It has now been 3 years, and I am almost completely healed, but sadly, as it is often the case with inflammatory issues, my inflammations turned chronic, and now it is just a reality I live with. I stretch everyday, I exercise and have a normal tongue, but every once in a while, I get really bad flare ups, and that horrible sensations of ripping cords and bent needles returns in my arms. It was only half a year ago that I truly started participating in the art community again, and I am finally working on my projects again.
While my case is definitely not usual, if I had stretched and done proper warm ups, my physiotherapist told me it would never have turned out this bad. One of my biggest regrets for sure, but I am now a great cautionary tale, and at least, my tale has a good ending!
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.
My name is Emma, Drimmolo in the art community, and I am a comic artist and digital illustrator. I write stories about imaginary worlds and mythological creatures, trying to blur as much as possible the line between fantasy and reality. Autobiography, Fantasy, Modern\Urban Fantasy, Humor, Feel-Good, Slice of Life and Adventure are all genres you can find in my works. My art is all about celebrating the freedom of imagination and the beauty of the multi-cultural world we live in.
At the beginning, I used to draw just for myself, as I needed a way to let out all the dreams and imaginary creatures floating about in my head. However, when I started posting online and saw how much people liked seeing my drawings, I began creating comics and stories, expanding my world and wishing for even more people to look inside and dream with me. After finishing my undergraduate, I turned around my plans for the future and decided to take a master in Comics and Graphic novels, where I started working on my current autobiographical fantasy comic called “Reveries”. Sadly, soon after graduating I was left stranded due to serious health issues and only last year began working again.
I am now back to being a professional artist, and have been posting for free my web-comic “Reveries”. I have also started attending conventions again, where I sell posters of my illustrations and scenes from my comic, lino-cut prints, physical copies of the first issue of my comic and a hand-stitched mini-book called “Life Advices from various Mythological Creatures”. Soon, I will also be offering key-chains, bigger books binded traditionally and even notebooks (also binded traditionally) with different historical headbands.
Currently, I am especially proud of the mini-book I mentioned earlier. It is a small A7 booklet, where I interview 7 mythological creatures from different cultures, and “ask them to offer one life advice to humans”. The Hydra, the Simurgh, the Qilin, the Leviathan and others give small but impactful lessons based on their experiences and myths. I am proud to say many people buy them as gifts for others, but often keep one also for themselves. Soon, volume 2 and 3 will also come out, and later, even a collection of all 3 of them in a bigger, colored version.
My works are about escapism. All my art creates the illusion that the creatures you see and the stories you read, they are all real, they all happened and that I am just the story teller bringing it back to you. No matter how young or old you are, there’s always room to let yourself fall, for a little while, into fantasy, listen to fairy tales and discover about other cultures. You will learn from them and come back to real life stronger than before, or at least, with a smile on your face.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I want to share a story from when I was still stranded from my arm injuries, and suffered greatly from the stress of not being able to create. Especially in the first year, my arms were incredibly delicate, and even the barest of efforts could lead to very strong pains that would force me to literally just have to lie down and wait for it to pass. Because of this, drawing or even writing were completely off the table, and like any artist or artisan knows, no continuous practice means your skills run aground, and slowly start to rust. This is excruciating to any artist that put serious effort into their craft, because the feeling of being left behind gnaws at you endlessly at the back of your mind. It does not have to be like this though!
As a comic artist, my work consists in uniting text\inferred text with images. Of course, without both of my arms, I was unable to practice neither my writing nor my art, as I couldn’t type nor hold a pen for any useful amount of time. At first I was absolutely miserable, and tried to distract myself by playing some visual novels, which only required a few button presses every once in a while. These novels were more writing than text, and many of the dialogues between characters would just be two still JPEGs of the characters side by side, with the text scrolling by underneath. The stories were interesting, but the lack of visual stimulation turned the experience quite boring, so I’d try to concentrate and imagine the scenes in my mind. Slowly, I started to map out in my head the scenes like I would for a comic: which lines per speech bubble, which panels to be bigger, which facial expressions to highlight, which perspectives to use and so on. Once I realized what a good mental exercise that was, I spent the rest of the game turning the chapters into comic pages, concentrating as much as possible and imagine exactly how i would turn the still images i was seeing and the text I was reading into panel compositions.
After the game was over, I decided I’d do the same with any media that interested me like audio books or movies. Of course, it was all in my head and it wasn’t always easy to keep track of it all, but just attempting to do this regularly helped me train my mind to visualize information and images in a linear comic structure. It reminded me that while the physical part of my work couldn’t be trained, the mental part of it was still there, and with enough effort, i could still feel like I was working on my craft. From there, I started training my “comic brain” as much possible. For example, reading comics I liked and studying why I liked them, or reading comics I hated and trying to understand what i would change about them. I watched documentaries on psychology (facial expressions, body poses and characterization), fashion (character design and culture representation), architecture (settings and background), movie camera framing (panel composition)…all fields which are needed to create compelling comics.
Concentrating on studying like this and training my brain truly helped me get through those moments where I couldn’t draw and felt like I was being left behind by my peers. Of course, involving myself so much in the mental part of my art, made me miss actually creating it even more, but it still was better than doing nothing at all.
To any artist reading this, that is currently suffering from any kind of injury that prevents you from physically creating your works, focus on what makes your craft also a mental skill, and hone it as much as you can. Try to find as many different ways in which you can feel involved in your craft without physically making it. It will never be easy, but it helps make the time go faster, and most importantly, it helps you focus on the idea that you *will* get better and that you *will* get back to creating your works, which is crucial for your mental health.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
In a time where AI image generators are running rampant on the internet, I feel the need to remind people who are not interested in creating but enjoy consuming creations, that what you are consuming is not a product that is just pretty pixels, calories or cool dresses. Everything around you, from the clothes you wear, to the websites you visit, to the comics you read, to the plates you eat on…everything has someone behind it. Everything has an entire history of people behind its creation that spans to thousands of millennia ago. You are part of the cycle of community where we give and take and make life worth and fun living.
Every once in a while there is some cynical person who proclaims that only science is necessary to society and that there is no point in investing in the arts. That humans could easily go on living without artists. And of course! of course they could…in the same way a goldfish could to live its life in an empty crystal bowl with scheduled feedings of nutrients in powdered tasteless form.
Sure, if you feed a picture of yourself to an AI image generator, it can hand you a nice pretty portrait of yourself, maybe even in the style of your favorite show. But if you had gone to an artist whose works you like, and asked them to make a portrait of you, it wouldn’t have been a machine seeing you, but another member of your community. An artist that sees beauty in a way that is only theirs, and sees now you in a way that is only theirs, and because they have spent years honing their craft, are capable of showing it to you. Maybe they’re also a fan of that show you like, and love what makes that show unique, and wouldn’t draw you just in that style, but as if you were truly a character from it.
A life without art, and especially a life without art made by artists, is not worth living, and just isn’t as fun.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.drimmolo.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drimmolo/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/
- Other: https://tapas.io/series/Reveries