We recently connected with Josh Loera and have shared our conversation below.
Josh, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What was the most important lesson/experience you had in a job that has helped you in your creative career?
Before I took the leap to be a full-time artist, I worked as a Sales Engineer in the Civil engineering industry. Before that, I worked most summers between school years as an intern for construction companies. An internship I was able to get an interview for because my uncle worked at the company. I wasn’t a particularly strong student academically. I focused more on the social and leadership aspects of college. Many organizations I participated in and lead in were latino-based. An effort to meet more Latinos and have a home base in a mostly white university.
Construction management did no require very high technical prowess so it seemed like a good fit. By this time, my creative aptitudes had been put by the wayside for longer than is comfortable. As a good student in middle and highschool, art was always an aspirational activity. A hobby I would earn one day. After I got my grades in highschool and got into a good college, after midterms, after finals, after I get a job, after work on the weekends. But construction management isn’t a work-life balance kind of career, so I began to look into technical sales because a good friend from college had went that route.
Lo-and-behold, I got a job in Houston as a technical sales engineer. But guess what? anything new, especially a job, is going to take a lot of time and hard work to learn the ropes, so for the first year or two art was still an aspiration. A hobby I would make time for one day, but not right now. But it was a job I generally enjoyed (maybe not some of my coworkers and leadership but that’s a story for another time.) I got to create my own schedule, determine my destiny as far as commissions, meet new people, travel, take clients out for drinks. It was a good job.
Eventually, I wrangled my territory in a real way and started to carve out time after work and on the weekends for art. And let me tell you, once I started I knew there was no turning back. It was my teleportation time, my time machine in a little corner of a 700 square-foot apartment. This was it! I was doing it; making money, making/learning art, enjoying life.
One day, after a good yearly review, I got the courage to ask for a raise in my base. The response to this was for him to insist that I start the process of getting certain certifications and licenses. This would eat up the time after work and on the weekends that I had finally carved out for my creative side. It posed the question, give up my art again for a few years and make more money, or keep working on my art and stay stagnant professionally.
As you might be able to tell, I chose art. I liked the profession and I was happy but it ran its course. A chapter in my life that would end whether by my decision or someone else’s. So, I started the process of looking into creative careers. I knew I would probably take a big pay cut but it would be worth it in the long run. The plan was to spend a couple years building skills and then find a gig. But it all happened much faster than expected when my girlfriend got a job in Guatemala and asked me to join her. That’s where I am now.
I learned some great things from my previous professional role. Hard skills like sales skills, marketing skills, networking skills, budgets and estimates. Soft skills like self starting, conversation, working hard when no one is looking, continual learning, and doubling down on your strengths. I also learned to enjoy the process and find happiness in the climb not just in the results. Maybe the most important thing I learned is that no amount of money is worth the time you can spend doing something you love.
So, here I am 5 issues of my independent comic later, building slowly but surely. Happily drawing and learning and meeting new creative people. I do aim to one day make as much as I was at my previous job, but it’s not as important as enjoying the journey. And you can be a part of it!
Thanks for reading!
Josh Loera
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
If you read the last part, you got a lot of my background. There was a point where I had to figure out what I wanted to do, what I liked, and how I can make money. I looked into into professions such as graphic design, UX/UI design, web design, animation, character design, illustration and gained skills in most of them. But back to the doubling down on your strengths part, I realized that I had a natural proclivity for illustrations and I tended to enjoy creating my own comic the most.
The comic is called Nahualli: Modern Aztec Heroes: Kids Series. Essentially imagine, harry potter, meets marvel, with an Aztec/Indigenous Mesoamerican twist. I’ve been releasing new issues free to read on a web reader I built on my website and I’ve been using the kickstarter platform for preordering physical comics. Each issue improves as I improve as an artist.
I also make illustrations for clients and I can do character design, cover art, scenes, and creative consultations.
: Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
I want to show brown skin superheroes rooted in mythologies from where we’re from. I especially think it’s important to show kids this kind of content especially if they are children of color, but also kids of all backgrounds to see these brown superheroes and maybe learn about cultures that school doesn’t really teach about.
These cultures are too often shown as violent and savage but there are obviously soft sides to these cultures which is one of the reasons I started the characters off as kids and intend to “grow them up” in future series.
Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)
I think NFTs are a really cool technology. I’ve been saying that it was a bubble for a long time and as you can tell the bubble is bursting a bit. But just like the tulip bubble in the 1600s or the dot-com bubble in the late 1900s, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t some inherent value in the thing itself. We still buy tulips and we still use websites and one of those websites is Amazon. So, this is a correction and I think artists can use this technology to build a community and reward them for “buying in” early. And instead of aiming to sell 10,000 NFTs for $500-$10,000 a piece. Maybe a comic creator like me will sell 100 NFTs for $20 each and everyone who owns one gets a physical copy and access to a new and improved web reader that I might build in the future.
From there, those who collected can either hold on to that $20 NFT like a stock or sell it and if I end up becoming the Mexican American Stan Lee with my version of Marvel studios, those 100 people will own a very valuable digital asset. Or I go no where and you’ve only spent $20 to support a struggling artist.
Contact Info:
- Website: tmcrtv.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timemachine.crtv/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/timemachine.crtv
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/TimeMachineCrtv
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCngba5YxSt_DcfSOxeeHHRA
Image Credits
Josh Loera – I made all of those images.