We recently connected with Joshua Shipley and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Joshua, thanks for joining us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

From a young age I was always drawing and in the 4th grade I was deeply into Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. So much so, actually, that I brought one of the books in for school picture day and convinced the photographer to let me use it in my school photo.

We were living in the suburbs of Chicago at the time, and while my brothers (and every other kid on our street) had adorned their bedrooms with Michael Jordan and Chicago Bulls posters, I had enlisted my mom in trying to find a way to somehow decorate my bedroom in Calvin and Hobbes imagery. Bill Watterson is notorious for refusing to market or sell his work over to any kind of merchandising, and so obviously there was nothing even remotely close to anything I could use to decorate my room with Calvin and Hobbes.

But my mom, a creative in her own right, had found a wallpaper “border” which looked like a film reel–square images with the punched film-holes across the top and bottom–and she hatched this idea of taking photocopies of a Calvin and Hobbes comic (one where Calvin is making a bunch of silly faces at the camera for pictured day) and enlarging them to decoupage them together. No one had a home copy machine that we knew and we couldn’t take the book to a store to have it done without permission, so with my mom’s help, I wrote a letter to the Universal Press Syndicate asking them if they had any Calvin and Hobbes bedroom wallpaper available and if not, could I please take my book to the copy-shop and try to make my own. They confirmed that no such wallpaper product already existed…but they agreed to grant me permission to photocopy the book.

18 years later, I was offered an entry level job at the same company I had written as a child. Universal Press Syndicate was a part of what is now Andrews McMeel Universal in downtown Kanas City. I’m currently the Digital Creative Director there and still have the letter granting me permission to copy Calvin and Hobbes on my home office wall.

Joshua, 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?

Of course! Hi. I’m Josh Shipley. As an immersive designer and creative director, with over a decade of experience, my career spans several industries: web design, animation, branding, game design, large-scale artwork, publishing and storytelling.

I’m a full-time in-house Digital Creative Director for Andrews McMeel Universal, leading a creative team to design and execute engaging games and comics brands, simple and best-practice UX web design and ultimately delivering fun, subscription-based web products. I’ve also styled my own career as a consulting creative director and a freelance artist and illustrator, tackling projects ranging from branding and logo to large-scale mural artwork. In addition to creative direction skills, I work with creative teams and marketing departments well, presenting ideas and delivering meaningful stories which drive business results forward.

While my creative vision has helped shape and define brands, my curiosity about work I find fascinating and spectacular has connected me to many respected artists and creatives in many industries. I’ve always had a curiosity about how things work…how certain artists make their work…how brands figured this or that out…and as a result, I’m constantly trying new projects, approaches, mediums and ideas. This has allowed me to build a career full of diverse projects, clients and artwork.

When I reflect back on the work I’m most proud of, it’s when you take something that is really solid (a joke, a story, a game, an idea) and you are able to execute artwork and design and interaction and thinking around it that takes that thing and elevates it–makes it smarter, quicker, more interesting–that’s when I feel like things are really exciting.

I’m always hunting for new projects, ideas, endeavors that inspire, feel meaningful and are ultimately just fun to execute and to interact with.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Honestly, the most rewarding part of being an artist or creative is the time you get to just ponder things. To fail. It’s very freeing to have failure be so critical to your endeavors. You get to sit in the discomfort of having a problem to solve and having no idea how you’re going to do it. And I think artists and creatives just allow themselves to sit in that tension for longer than other people or other professions. You get to try things over and over and over again that just don’t work. But its all in service of the one idea that does work. The solution that no one else has…because they didn’t take the time to ponder as long as you about it. It’s very rewarding to get to be able to try so many things on for size.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

I think there’s so much to say on this topic, but I think society in America needs to remember how critical creativity is. Art impacts your brain on so many neurological levels and we have so much solid scientific research out there about how deeply our bodies and minds connect with art in these really amazing ways. So putting art curriculum back into schools, not necessarily to gear all kids towards being artists, but because our brains solve all sorts of problems BETTER when we have artwork incorporated into our mental diets. Make art accessible to all people of all class and statures.      

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.behance.net/joshshipleycreative and http://www.joshshipleycreative.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-shipley-creative/