We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ekaterina Soyuznova a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ekaterina, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

The project I’m gonna talk about has been in development for almost 2 years now if you don’t count the year it took to develop a solid idea. It is the biggest passion of mine right now.

Ages ago i did a sketch of very weird characters. Some old lady with a huge nose had a very slimy green pet with a lot of teeth. When i found it again, I showed it to a close friend of mine and we had a moment of laughter. We talked about how this could be a cool portfolio project and jokingly started brainstorming about the world these 2 characters would live in. A few days later I felt a very warm feeling in my gut telling me to reach out to my writer friend and let her help me develop the story even more. Little did I know, that the project that was supposed to be just a couple of concept pages dedicated to just a quarter of my website would turn into the most fulfilling project in my life!

When I was 10 years old I was a huge fan of manga and anime, if you come to my house you can find huge folders filled with sketches of characters and comic pages. When I went to college I didn’t think I would ever go back to the sequential field (i did not even know that it was called that way), but here I am, years later developing a webcomic of mine called – “Monster pet”. A story about Gary and Marta, two ordinary university teachers, that one day come home and encounter a mysterious “visitor”.. They don’t know yet that it escaped from the well-known smuggler Dexter with a key to his treasures. Dexter is sending his right hand Shaddok to get the creature back. The couple will have to leave their dull everyday lives in order to save their new friend.

This project helps me grow and feeds my personal hunger to solve artistic problems. Also, leads me to amazing collaborations and conversations with readers! It gave me an opportunity to work with a writer – Enrique Rosado.

I had experience working alongside other artists before, but it was my first time sharing work with a professional writer, a person who allowed me to rely on him and give full creative liberty to bring the project to another level. At first, my reasoning to reach out to Enrique was to divide the workload, so that i could focus on the art and not be distracted by the way the story should go and its dialogues. When you love the idea it is always scary to give someone permission to tweak it. After working with Enrique for a month i was blown away by his skills as a writer. He felt the characters, sensed the emotions, and made it incredibly easy to work with him. After a year and a half of our collaboration, I can say it is an amazing feeling to have somebody on your team with a completely different set of skills but who you trust like yourself to do an amazing job!
Five or six months into the project and I still felt really happy working on it, i enjoyed that we were able to bring positive emotion into the readers and make them smile. Each of our characters had its own impact on the audience. I especially love how my co-writer was able to bring meaning to the character – Jill. She became a symbol of what it means to have a best friend, BFF, the perfect ride or die.

And the response from the webtoon audience helps me get even more excited to continue and grow this project and hopefully in the future, a team as well!

Ekaterina, 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?

Hello, My name is Ekaterina I am a character and story artist, I had my BFA Illustration degree at Camberwell College of Arts and a Masters’s in SCAD. Since graduation, I have been working primarily as a character designer and a storyboard artist on animated and live-action projects. It’s been fun and so far I enjoyed every bit of it!

Usually, when people and companies reach out to me they are looking for fun and expressive storytelling that would bring their ideas to a different level. As a character designer, I have the ability to dive deep into different cultures, take inspiration from architecture, time periods, and religion, and go full creative. And as a story artist, I value amazing collaborative experiences and the ability to work side-by-side with directors. Knowing that I helped the production team to have an easier time on set and increased their chances of good communication between departments.
I love watching films and browsing through fashion photography and being inspired by camera angles and lighting in photographs.
My personal art is full of 1950s inspiration, pin-up artists, and good sassy gangster movies like “ Irishman” for example. I can lose time while reading fantasy books, which boost my creative thinking, with vivid descriptions of fantasy characters which i love to incorporate in my mood-board stage. I have been a fan of old book paper textures and love using them in my digital artworks.
As an emerging artist, I personify the qualities of a happy, yet hard-working workaholic. I love what I do and put my heart into every new project. I love drawing stories because they’re not only a window into a fantasy world but also a mirror of one’s emotions. Using humor can sometimes be the best way to heal oneself or those around you. I enjoy coming up with new ideas for each of my characters and want them all to be different and special in their own way. Monster Pet’s characters live sometimes very odd lives, filled with cooking mishaps, secret superhero adventures, and so on. They were born out of my desire to create something fun, colorful, cozy, and fantastical that provides rich material for adults and children alike to indulge themselves in. Spending time developing these characters has been such an unexpected joy for me!

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

As an Adobe user, i thought that photoshop will be my saving grace for the rest of my art career. But when I started my webcomic I decided to try Clip studio paint because everybody in the comic business uses it. It’s very intuitive and it has an automatic breakdown for pages and integrated 3D objects to help you do your work faster and more efficiently. I started to love using 3D models, when I have trouble placing the couch in the right position or have trouble with the perspective I enjoy putting in textures and environments to help myself figure out the best way to plan the shot. During the second year, I completely transitioned to Clip Studio and now do most of my design work there. I love how natural the brushes feel in comparison to Photoshop and the program feels more natural to use when you are painting. This year i also got familiar with Mid journey ai! It is sooo much fun, but mostly it is a great tool to create references for your work and get inspired by Ai generate images. I believe an artist should not be afraid to use it in their works if it helps speed up and make the quality of their ideas more complex and unique.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I think being an artist is very fulfilling, you get to be unapologetically happy all the time. Well of course there are times when you may don’t want to draw or maybe you get tired of it and you need a break but most of the time I feel when I talk to my non-artistic friends I always realize that I have so little to be annoyed with because even if the project is difficult I still genuinely enjoy doing it. And the harder it is, the more exciting it gets. You get to solve a problem and enjoy it in the company of other creatives. The best therapy session for yourself by yourself for free) Start to scribble and doodle on the page, so it may not be beautiful, maybe even messy or actually ugly but it will be the best therapy session to calm your nerves.
Also just generally when we create art we have the power to bring out emotions in people and see their happiness, sadness, or anger. As a creative, you have the power to influence somebody’s mood or change their perspective on the situation just with a couple of hand moves.
That’s mostly how I feel when I’m creating my webcomic. When I see people comment on it and leave their emotions in those messages, it just feels great to be able to inspire people to value their existing friendships, want to get a dog, or maybe just give the spark of joy into their day. Not everybody has a chance to do that and I believe artists are very fortunate to be able to make somebody feel something.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.monsterpet.shop
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/soyuznova_ekaterina/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/soyuznovakati/
• Other: Personal website: https://www.ekaterinasoyuznova.com