We were lucky to catch up with Nicolette Ray recently and have shared our conversation below.

Nicolette, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

The most meaningful project I’ve worked on is Netflix’s Spirit Rangers. Spirit Rangers is a CG animated preschool show created by Chumash writer Karissa Valencia about a family of young Native forest rangers who use their powers to help the spirits that live on their Southern California reservation.

I was not the most self-aware kid growing up but I knew I was half Native (Acoma Pueblo). I would gravitate to any type of media that had Native characters, even if their tribes were not familiar to me. Scraps were better than nothing at all, even if those scraps weren’t particularly good. The fact that Native kids today have Spirit Rangers makes me so happy and I’m low-key jealous they have the opportunity to grow up with this show. As much as I had fun working on it, I know I would have been a HUGE fan if I had watched it as a kid.

The timing of Spirit Rangers is personally meaningful to me as well. I had first heard of the project when it was announced in October of 2020. Acoma Pueblo had closed its reservation to all non-residents due to Covid and I was processing the fact that I didn’t know when I would be able to see my family or the rez again. Summer of 2020 was spent buying and reading as many books about Acoma as I could during my 2-3 month hiatus from work.

So when Spirit Rangers was announced I got really excited and hoped to work on it. Unfortunately there were no openings for storyboard artists at the time but Karissa was nice enough to reach out to me and tell me herself. It was all good though because I was still working at Wild Canary and in the meantime I started connecting with more and more Native folks in my industry.

Then in spring of 2022, Karissa reached out again and said she wanted to bring me on to board an episode or two of Spirit Rangers. Once again the timing was perfect because after 6 years of working at Wild Canary, I was looking to move on. I had to weigh the risk of going from stable, constant work to the unpredictability of freelance but I decided the risk was worth it. And it was.

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?

I’ve always liked to draw, even when I was little and could barely spell my name. I loved drawing animals and mythical creatures and characters from my favorite cartoon shows. In middle school I met some other kids who liked to draw and we all became friends and stayed friends through high school.

It was in highschool that I woke up and realized that I could actually make a career in art but I wasn’t sure about the logistics or practicality. I just knew I wanted to draw because that’s what I was good at and that’s what I liked. In my junior year, our art teacher Mrs. Hentschke took us on a field trip to the local state university- San Jose State University. We toured their art building and they pitched us their Animation/Illustration program and now they teach their students the skills needed to work in the modern animation industry. SJSU was local, inexpensive, and, most importantly, my friends were going to be there.

Seven years later I graduated with my friends and with the technical skills needed to work in animation. We moved to Southern California a few months after graduating and less than a year later, I got an offer to work as an apprentice storyboard revisionist at Wild Canary on their new show, Disney Jr’s Puppy Dog Pals. From what I could gather, they got my name off a list of recent SJSU graduates and so I and a fellow class graduate got our first animation jobs!

Working as an apprentice revisionist felt a lot like getting paid to learn how to storyboard and I loved it. I loved working on PDP and I loved the people I worked with. I made several life-long friends working there and even today I’m a little stunned at how lucky my time on PDP was.

Eventually I went from being an apprentice storyboard revisionist to being a full fledged storyboard artist. My personal art journey was not easy- I made a lot of mistakes and struggled to meet the demands at first. But the people I worked with, including my superiors, were all very patient and as willing to teach as I was to learn. My skills improved, I learned how to be a better storyboard artist, and I even discovered I had a talent for boarding to the songs that were in every episode. So much so that I was eventually put on a team that would handle only boarding the songs. The other person on my team happened to be my former classmate and now friend!

Puppy Dog Pals wrapped up in 2021 and by then I considered myself a skilled and confident storyboard artist. I eventually went back to Wild Canary to work on Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures and eventually left that to do freelance storyboarding on Netflix’s Spirit Rangers (in which I got to board to songs again). At the moment, I’m doing part-time freelance on a Native-made indie game called Reclaim!

As you might be able to gather, my art style is very well suited for cute Disney-adjacent preschool shows but I’m still at my core the little kid who likes to draw dragons and other cool creatures. I hope I can one day flex my monster-drawing skills on a future cartoon show or movie. In the meantime I hope to work on as many Native-made projects as I can!

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Just say NO to AI “art.” AI can be applied to do some genuine good in the world but it seems like tech bros are obsessed with using it to scrape art without consent and produce soulless Frankenstein abominations and gloat about how the snobby “gatekeeping” artists are done for. The worst part is that to the layman, AI “art” looks no different to them than genuine human-created art. Even worse, big companies have noticed this and want to use AI to cut corners and save money that would have been spent on hiring real artists. It sucks! AI “art” sucks! Stop using it!

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

My social media presence at the moment isn’t anything to write home about but back in the good ‘ol days of Tumblr, I had accumulated a modest following of folks in fandoms I was into. And honestly, being in those fandoms made me a better artist- it got me to draw out of my comfort zone and I was rewarded by interactions with people who liked my art and were also interested in the same stuff. The more interactions I got, the more art I made and so on and so forth until I had a few thousand followers. Even if the content was sometimes niche, I drew fanart of what I liked and got noticed for it. I’m still friends with some of the people I met by drawing fanart today even though my social media presence is a lot more lowkey.

Contact Info:

• Website: email me for portfolio: [email protected]
• Instagram: unbadgr
• Twitter: unbadger