Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Nana Boachie. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Nana, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

My love of art started with making comics in my notebooks as a kid. They were the tiniest panels and drawings, probably because I already doodled in my notebook margins so often. This was also a time in which Flash was gaining traction. In the early 2000’s Web toons were popular through sites like Ebaum’s World, Newgrounds and Albino Blacksheep, but Newgrounds had so many users that submitted content. I liked watching shorts and series people made all the time, much of which was kind of bad, like flickering images with audio of a kid screaming bad. I was a shy kid who liked telling stories through art so one day it kind of clicked, “If they can do it, why can’t I?”

By high school I got Macromedia Flash, and wow, I had no idea what to do with the program. Things usually came easy to me, but this was incredibly foreign. Keep in mind, the most experience I had with digital art was Microsoft Paint and drawing games for Windows 95. Flash was a whole new animal and tutorials weren’t widely available. I remember spending an afternoon trying to figure out the program, closing it, then going on with my day. I didn’t touch it for a month, but something kept itching at me to give it another try. Something kept telling me that if I could figure this weird thing out my life could change. I don’t know why I thought that, maybe it was the first real challenge I had in a long time, but it was enough to get me to open that program and hunker down.

And, hoo-boy, I. Was. Bad.

Figuring out the drawing tools, the timeline, frames and tweening without any help took plenty of practice, and my first few files weren’t good, but I don’t regret them. I was able to animate after all and kept working at it, getting better with each project and falling in love with the process more and more. I kept making shorts and eventually found a forum about using Flash. That place had plenty of tips, it even encouraged me to use its interactive features via Actionscript.

At first animation was just for fun, a hobby an art kid discovered. Later it became a viable career choice, and I decided to go to an art school to get some real training.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

After graduating art college I worked as an independent freelance animator for a few years, creating animations for ad campaigns and small businesses primarily. Later I got in touch with the producer of a children’s television show on PBS and became a studio animator. I loved working on that show, but the studio had to close down about a year later unfortunately. It was back to freelance work for a while until another studio presented a full-time job opportunity. From then on I worked as a character animator on a variety of shows that aired on Adult Swim, Netflix, SyFy and a few other networks. It was a larger team, and I learned plenty along the way while getting to know more artists in the Atlanta animation scene.

By 2021 I felt like I needed a change of pace. Though the studio I was at was growing I felt stuck. Soon I took a chance and resigned to freelance for another children’s television show. It had been over 5 years since I worked on children’s content. The new team I worked with was smaller, and our production schedule tight, but I loved that project dearly. To my fortune it was a mini-series for PBS where I was given more responsibility and the crew grew close to each other.

After that project wrapped up I felt inspired to take on work that was more challenging. This included directing a pilot, working on a TV movie, and working for a tech company that was creating educational content for classrooms. That last one was a bigger change of pace for me, but I enjoyed the process. I built and animated characters and worked closely with the team’s creative director. It was a highly collaborative process, and my director shared my passion for inclusivity and diversity in the product.

What was supposed to be a limited contract expanded into a full-time position after my creative director reached out to me personally, and ever since I’ve transitioned from a freelance character animator to a senior technical artist. It sounds so official and dry when I say it out loud, but I help with building and animating characters and act as a bridge between the creative and engineering parts of our team. I’m part of a very small creative team, probably the smallest I’ve ever been, but I have a lot of room to develop and implement ideas and ever since I’ve continued to grow.

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

A lot of art gets shared on social media by random accounts, but take a second to find the source of that art. Find a name, find the artists’ accounts, pages, stores, etc. Try to share them directly from the source. Bonus if you can leave a comment of some kind and/or buy from those artists. It can make their day and help them get seen.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I learned to take care of myself the hard way.

While in art school there was this kind of culture around hard work. It can be boiled down to this phrase, often said humorously, “I’ll sleep when I die.”

My circles were filled with students who burned the midnight oil, some people going well beyond 24 hours for projects before finally resting. It was a norm especially during finals. Friends and I saw long hours as a badge of honor sometimes, and I took some of those habits with me after graduating.

Honestly, those were poor habits to perpetuate as I grabbed freelance contracts. I felt like I needed to do whatever it took to make a project conclude amazingly, even if it diminished my health. Not sleeping well for weeks on end can do that to you easily. One evening I felt so stressed late into the A.M. for a project I didn’t even like. The following days I noticed I had shortened breath and aching muscles regularly, but couldn’t figure out why. I wasn’t able to take on more work because my body felt so run-down. It wasn’t until I actually rested normally did I feel significantly better.

It was burn out plain and simple, but burn out can come in many forms of stress, some physical and some mental. When it came down to it I had to commit to better time management so that I could schedule my work hours in a more responsible way but also schedule in some “me-time”. Today we’d likely call that self care. I think it’s common for artists to run into burn-out at least once in their career, but something good to know is that burn-out is harder to recover from as you age and quickly. How you recover at 18 can be different from how you recover at 25 and very different from how you recover at 30. It’s not a habit you want to keep repeating so it’s good to learn to manage your time more responsibly, and know that your time shouldn’t be all about work and productivity. Your body, mental health and creativity is worth so much more than that.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.nanaboachie.com
• Instagram: @nanazeartist
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nanaboachie/

Image Credits
Jelly Ben and Pogo (fanart) Jelly Ben and Pogo Lazor Wulf Lazor Wulf Untitled (personal art) Untitled (personal art) Untitled (personal art) Untitled (personal art)