We recently connected with Greg Bigoni and have shared our conversation below.

Greg, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

Getting by on creativity alone can be socially isolating, and isn’t often the most clever financial decision. There’s an unpredictable, feast or famine element to the hustle, and that scared me away from making it a life priority. And dry seasons in commissions and sales are hard not to take personally sometimes, because art is such a personal pursuit.

But for what felt like a million years, I tried to get by with day jobs that left me too exhausted to create, and that didn’t work out great for my soul either.

I’ve worked in sub-freezing industrial warehouses filled with the stench of ammonia and scorched shrinkwrap, where at least one co-worker per day would start crying. I never knew if I would have to come in on the weekends with an hour’s notice, or if I’d be sent home without pay because there was nothing to do.

I’ve worked at law firms where I was forced to skip lunches due to constant deadlines. One year-end speech at this firm saw our department lauded for our 400% uptick in productivity during the previous twelve months, and my reward was a raise of twelve cents per hour.

I’ve worked as an invoicing clerk at a company where my commute could be up to 90 minutes in each dirction. Where I had to supply a doctor’s note to justify taking a sick day, and where a supervisor kept the TV tuned to Fox News for eight hours a day. This same company had a CEO who complained in print, in our local paper, that offering paid vacation days to employees is a detriment to running a successful business.

I make less money from my art than I made at any of those jobs, but when I create personal commissions for people’s cards or gifts or stickers or whatever, they are actually GRATEFUL for my efforts! That shouldn’t be an impossible sensation to find in a day job, but it has been in my experiences. Every time I begin worrying about my future as an artist, I remind myself that I have more control than I’ve had at any other workplace. I don’t have to get up at 6 AM when it’s freezing, or be concerned about incoming layoffs. I don’t have to accrue a number of arbitrary office points to earn permission to wear jeans on one Friday per month, while also wearing a giant sticker on the leg of those jeans to let my office-mates know I earned this jeans-wearing privilege without cheating the system. All I have to do is keep up the practice of creating art as frequently as I possibly can, and to be grateful that I can do it at all, because I’m not good at much else.

Greg, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’ve been an artist-for-hire, at least periodically, since grade school. I learned the lesson early about not accepting money to draw vulgar pictures of classmates, because it won’t get you off the hook to claim you were just a cog in a financial arrangement (especially if whoever you drew now has their fist up your nose). I was always fascinated by animation, comic books, funnies pages, and Mad Magazine, and as a kid I drew more pictures than you’d think possible in which tragic protagonists were being imperiled by out-of-control toilets. Drawing was always my primary mission, but especially when I was supposed to be paying attention to something else. A long series of girlfriends have described these qualities as “so Pisces,” but in fact, while I didn’t know this until last year, it was the result of severe ADHD. Which figures.

This has led to a lot of work on event posters, flyers, stickers, logos, murals, pet drawings, and customized greeting cards / holiday cards. The variety of the commissions is random and exciting! Some people want their art applied directly to a page with pencil, ink, and brush pens (especially if they plan to give it as a gift), others want it colored digitally. I usually encourage the latter for anything that will be mass-produced, like cards or posters. Sometimes I’m asked to cram several dozen inside jokes into a single piece, and I’ll have to figure out a way to include these details without sacrificing flow or focus. I’ll always bounce ideas off art clients to get their own imaginations going, so the drawings can grab that collaborative spirit. And if people aren’t entirely sure what they’d like depicted, I will usually ask for feedback from any young kids in their family. They always have super-weird ideas that outdo any nonsense I could dream up on my own. Kids also get especially excited to see their ideas captured this way. (This is how one Christmas card ended up depicting dinosaurs devouring a birthday cake made of Legos, while a soggy hairball in a Santa hat solemnly observes. A 4-year-old called the shots on that one, and thank God she did.)

I’ve gotten good at listening to people’s ideas, escalating them, and amending work as necessary. This is easier to do when a piece is digital, but I’ve mastered sticky cut-and-paste corrections for analog art as well. I don’t want to let go when there’s still parts I could have drawn better, and I won’t give up on this until they’re fixed.

I’m proudest of a mural-sized map I drew for Movie Madness, one of the last remaining video rental stores in the country. The store is filled with so many bona fide props and costumes from the cinematic world, it functions equally as a museum. By far the most massive and ridiculous project I’ve ever taken on, the mural includes scenes and characters from over 400 movies of all eras and genres, from Best Picture recipients to the entire history of television to niche cult stuff by Ed Wood, Rudy Ray Moore, Andy Warhol, John Waters, Russ Meyer, and Golan-Globus. It’s a mix of ink-and-paper art and digital compilation, and it took me about ten weeks of eyestrain and wrist pain in 2023 to draw it. The store then had an enormous version printed up. And as people enter, they’re greeted by my framed work covering an entire wall. This project was one of the only times I ever suffered from the OPPOSITE of imposter syndrome, and was moaning “Ugh, I’m doomed to spend months breaking my movie-nerd back on this insanity because nobody else could possibly do it correctly.” Still, creating it was so exhausting that I couldn’t stand to look at the completed version for a year. Once the immediacy of the struggle had faded, I revisited the digital file in 2024 to fix minor details and rearrange the flow and scaling, which led to another month or two of additions and perfections. This wasn’t a request of the store, it was done mainly to calm down any of my own nagging feelings that it wasn’t as good, or as crowded, as it could have been. It’s the hardest I’ve ever worked on anything in my life, and the coolest compliments are when I’m told customers stare at it in a trancelike state.

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?

Some people don’t understand how solitary and personal art can be. It’s not just non-creatives who don’t understand this, plenty of actual creatives take a while to learn it too. I know I did. Sometimes our best work relies on a perfect storm of opportunities, coincidence, and endless revision. Very few of us have the ability to sit down and create something perfect off the top of our heads, it’s more about who has the patience to work on bad material until it’s better. Sitting alone with one’s own bad material can be a huge drag, so who can blame anyone that doesn’t want to? I try to break up these self-torturing moments by going on lengthy bike rides, which lets my body be my brain for a little while.

Also, most artists I know are self-conscious about setting prices for their art, or even accepting money for it. That kind of business-based thinking is usually the opposite of whatever is driving us to create in the first place. I still feel itchy whenever I text a price to a client and they take more than two seconds to send that thumbs-up emoji. I’d almost rather they said No immediately than make me wait an hour for a Yes. (Most people are really cool about payment, though, and some wonderful human beings even pay extra. But once I was commissioned to draw a piece extolling the evils of capitalism, and then the recipient never paid me. I guess I should have seen that coming.)

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

I wish I’d started learning digital art techniques earlier than I did. I kind of blew off the concept of it for years. I would say “It feels inauthentic to me,” and I believed that was true, but I also secretly feared the learning curve. I felt like it would take me too long to be decent at it, and why stray from the techniques that were already working for me?

As it turns out, there’s a lot of reasons. It’s never a bad idea to learn a new way to do things, and add to your number of creative options. It’s not a betrayal of any other learned style, and it’s a perfectly authentic way to create. My instincts for composition and color are still my own, whether they’re coming out of a brush pen or pixels. And it has so many advantages, like the ability to change major details with just the click of a mouse, to zoom in deeply and get the curves and angles and details exactly correct, and to rearrange and scale different elements. It’s changed so many things about the way I pursue art.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.tumblr.com/gregbigoni
• Instagram: @dollartaconite
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greg.bigoni/