We were lucky to catch up with Nami Oshiro recently and have shared our conversation below.

Nami, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

Art wasn’t really in my big plans growing up. I’d always enjoyed it, but my real goal was to be a writer or an editor. However, due to a lot of undiagnosed depression and anxiety, I ended up bombing most of my high school classes. Except art. The only school that offered me a scholarship was an art school. So I was like, “Welp! Guess I’m doing art!”

It ended up being easier and more fun for me than other paths probably would have been, so I can’t say I regret it.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Art ended up solidifying for me as a career path right out of college, when a family friend offered me the chance to work at their arts nonprofit – an organization called Life Pieces To Masterpieces. I initially taught a comics class for the summer and was asked to stay on to teach more art classes. Aside from a couple of years when I worked at other organizations, I’ve been there ever since.

Working with kids and encouraging their art ended up inspiring me as well, which was nice, because I think otherwise I could easily have let art fall by the wayside. But for the first decade or so out of college, I was busy with work – I juggled four jobs for the first couple of years – and was dealing with health issues, and then my mother going into hospice for cancer.

I was pretty out of it after my mother died in 2017, but by 2019 I was ready to dive back into the art world and tabled at Small Press Expo. I had this one little comic, “Strawberry Cat,” that I’d made at 2:00 AM the night before – drawing it, printing it on my crappy home printer, hand-stapling it, everything. Unbeknownst to me, an editor for a pretty big publishing house happened to pick it up and later reached out to me asking if I’d be interested in a book deal.

So that’s how I got my first book contract. Almost by accident, and definitely with luck.

This past year I also got back into doing gallery art, which was what I’d trained for in college. I’ve had a handful of solo exhibitions in the past year and have also had my work in a bunch of group shows throughout the DC area and in other places around the East Coast.

I think what I’m most proud of as an artist is my nigh-delusional levels of self-assurance – I went through a TON of rejections for my first year or so applying to things, more than I can count. But I just don’t take it personally and keep trucking along, assuming things will work out for me someday, somehow. It’s gotten me through a lot.

Right now, aside from making stuff for gallery shows and working on my book, I make a lot of cutesy and/or weird merchandise. The stuff I make tends to be either very “kawaii” aesthetic or bizarre and a little unsettling. It’s a challenge figuring out how much to keep the two styles separate, but I’ve tried sticking to one or the other and it just didn’t work out.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I think the biggest lesson I had to unlearn was holding onto the word “should” – I mean in terms of letting it guide what I make or how I make it. When I was letting myself get too hung up on the idea of what I “should” be making instead of what I wanted to be making, or how I should be making it, it really stifled my work. I think it’s a big part of what led to me being mostly inactive in the arts scene for around ten years.

My favorite instructors in college actually were trying to push me more into doing what I would enjoy or what was intuitive for me to make, but at the time my head was too clogged up with panic over senior thesis and so on. But I found that when I started taking their advice, my art got a lot better.

How did you build your audience on social media?

I don’t have a huge following on social media – none of my accounts have even 1,000 followers – but I do think I get pretty high engagement considering how few followers I have. One follower who later became a good friend told me that she loved that I just let myself be “unhinged” on social media. And that’s pretty much what I do. Mostly on Twitter. I’m a lot more curated and cautious on other platforms, though I wouldn’t say I’m less authentic. I think I just post less on those, so I have less room to be a nutjob there.

That might sound counterintuitive, but honestly, maintaining a very open and chatty social media presence has helped me connect to a lot of cool people. And the main point of social media should be connection, because it’s through connections that you build a community.

Of course, there needs to be balance, because the more followers you gain, the more wackos will come and be annoying at you, so you don’t want to be TOO open. It can be tough to know what that balance is. I’ve been on social media a long time, so I’ve had time to hone a sense of how forthcoming I want to be about the goings-on of my life. I think that’s the type of thing you kind of have to learn through experience and trial and error.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.namioshiro.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/nami_oshiro
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/NAMI0SHIRO/
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/namioshiro

Image Credits
Nami Oshiro