We recently connected with Petra Mulligan and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Petra thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

When I was a kid in the late 90’s, I fell in love with the anime Sailor Moon. I had never seen anything like it – the animation was more sophisticated than the average American cartoon, and there was something just mesmerizing and impressive about it. I remember my initial attempts to draw what I saw on the television screen, and being utterly dissatisfied with the result. That dissatisfaction has served me well. From that moment on, I was drawing every spare moment, until that feeling began to transform into a buzz of contentment.

Anime was just the beginning. I was glued to the TV – Nickelodeon, MTV, Cartoon Network, the (then) WWF, whatever movies I could beg my parents to order off pay-per-view or rent from Blockbuster. My sister is seven years older than me, and often wrested control of whatever screen we were watching at the time, so I feel I also had a powerful gateway to whatever the previous generation was into at the time (even if I was unable to fully appreciate Fight Club or the forbidden fruit of Napster). This was also a heyday of magazines, and Toyfare (for toy collectors) and Wizard (for comic book fans) were foundational. I would cut out particularly inspiring images and glue them to my school folders. I still have the November 1999 cover of Wizard I cut out, an Alex Ross original of Batman surrounded by the Rogue’s Gallery of Gotham – it’s hanging right by my desk. I began to understand there were artists and writers behind these images and words I consumed night and day – that this was what real people did for a living!

As I advanced through school, after every test, during every study hall, even at recess, I was drawing. There was simply nothing I wanted to do more. I noticed folks would get excited if I was in their group for a project with any visual element – a whispered “Yuss, we got Petra!” – and various other forms of social currency – drawing someone’s favorite band logo on their binder or a quick sketch portrait of someone were popular requests. As I accumulated a social circle of fellow creatives and weirdos, by middle school we were collaborating on comic books, and by high school I was doing band logo and merch commissions.

At home, I was living in the middle of the sticks in a single-wide trailer with no car, but fantastic internet service, so the work and stream of pop culture inundation continued unabated. I spent hours on Deviantart.com, witnessing my favorite online artists like Sophie Campbell and Becky Cloonan begin to appear on the physical shelves of comic book stores in real-time. I was making cobbled-together animations with Windows Movie Maker. I was poring over article after article on Wikipedia, learning about music and artists that existed thirty, forty, a hundred years before me. I simply gave myself permission to follow my artistic obsessions. That dissatisfaction kept me from getting complacent with my skills, and that glow of gratification when I recognized I had succeeded in a creative endeavor would be the prize I would chase for the rest of my life.

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’m a 33-year-old Kentuckian illustrator/creative Swiss army knife. The Swiss part is actually true – my dad hails from the Jura. I publish my original art and commissions currently on instagram as @NECRODISCO. My illustrative work I would split into two categories – narrative illustration and expressive portraiture.

Portraits are the easiest to characterize, I reckon. I’ve always loved the thrill of capturing a likeness with ink or pigment. The human form is the most fascinating subject for me to render. I do semi-realistic painterly portraits regularly as commissions and original work. One of these, Voices of Kentucky Literature, in which I fashioned a motley crew of authors from the commonwealth into a cohesive composition, has been selected to decorate a traffic box in downtown Owensboro. I also love to interpret real people in fantastical and larger-than-life ways – as zombies, perhaps, or like bombastic cartoons, all the while maintaining that unmistakable identity of the person. The latter often happens from direct observation and a bolt of inspiration, such as with my portrait of Richard Perkins in The Poet, or the rubber-limbed fiendish glee of Tennessee metal band Flummox. Getting out and about to see other creative individuals in their native habitats is thus a vital part of keeping my inspiration reserves nice and topped off.

Narrative illustration I would define as my works that go beyond the single subject, and attempt to tell a story in one or more images. This manifests mainly in my movie posters, album art, event flyers, and stand-alone illustrations. In my humble opinion, the rapid decline of physical media, and thus proper covers for things as a method of introduction to movies and music is a travesty of the highest order. It is my goal to give the viewer a taste of what’s in store through a visual vignette of sorts. If the composition wouldn’t enthrall a teenager for at least fifteen minutes in the middle of a video store, I haven’t cracked it yet. I’ve done my best to snare listeners and viewers in this way, most recently with my artwork for Queen Aster’s first two singles, House on Haunted Hill and River/Ocean. In addition, my first and dearest love was comic books. I plan on publishing a graphic novel in the next two years.

One could also include my work as a concept artist under that narrative umbrella, which leads me into the Swiss army knife aspect – I have experience as a special effects artist, storyboard artist, art director, scenic painter, sculptor, and every other odd thing, seems like. All of these disciplines strengthen the others. There’s nothing like being on a hectic independent horror movie set for 18 hours straight to make one realize that a graphic novel is nothing but an entire movie – that you can fully create by yourself in the comfort of your own home. Not to say my experiences on sets and in the trenches of fabrication shops haven’t been fun or informative – those blink-of-an-eye pivots and solutions when things go awry and time is of the essence become new tools in the kit for future projects, and the knowledge generated by so many folks of different disciplines and backgrounds in a collaborative working environment is invaluable.

All in all, I find people fascinating and entertaining, and seek to fascinate and entertain people with my art in return. I strive for that ‘Whoa. Cool.’ reaction that simply cannot be suppressed. I want to create an accessible experience for everyone. I want to make people laugh and hide secret clues. I want to elicit that sensation of getting sucked into a two-dimensional moment.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

When I graduated from the Art Academy of Cincinnati with a fresh BFA in Illustration a decade ago, I promptly returned to my hometown and moved in with my Dad. I was unemployed for that whole summer, spending my time stringing together show flyer commissions and zine spots in the Lexington and Louisville scenes, and filling sketchbooks full of bitchin’, and entirely unrealized company logos. I was in full depressed debutante mode – I’m at all the shows, but broke as a joke. I finally got over myself (in no small part thanks to my dad’s patient but stern insistence) and became a holiday temp at Amazon for a few months.

Let me first say, there is no shame in any job, period. A college degree guarantees nothing but (hopefully) interesting things to ponder while at work, be that your own studio or slinging packages at UPS, which I also did. Finally, I got a job as a quality inspector at the Toyota plant in the same town, where my dad also worked. Dear God, I thought, we’ve come full circle.

Eventually, I had enough money to move into an early-century house turned college slum apartment in Lexington with two friends. The kitchen floor had enough of a slope to it that cans needed to be turned upright in the fridge lest they roll into a pile on one side of the shelf, and when the landlord turned the furnace on, feathers and dust plumed six feet high from the floor vent in my bedroom. But hey, the ceilings were ten feet tall, and we had that do-or-die, work hard, play hard mentality enjoyed by those in their early twenties. At 3PM I would journey to the factory to inspect parts or cars as they rolled down the line, maddeningly slow, 800 of them, until 2 in the morning, or whenever the nightly overtime was called. It was mind-numbing, but the determined artist will find ways to art no matter what.

I kept a small spiral-bound sketchbook in my back pocket, the metal rings covered with a cotton glove to guard against scratching the cars, heaven forbid. I would begin a drawing, hop in a car as it hunkered by, check the ceiling lining or rearview mirrors or whatever the task of the day was, hop out, note the car number and compliance on a log I’m not entirely sure anyone ever looked at, and spend the forty seconds til the next car arrived continuing my drawing. This forced me to slow down, refine. I’d average 1-3 small illustrations a night, some I still consider as contenders for my most dynamic. I went through about three sketchbooks in my time there.

This arrangement was, of course, not ideal, nor where I wanted to spend the rest of my life, and I wouldn’t. I ended up moving to Pennsylvania in two years for another go at school, this time Tom Savini’s Special Effects Makeup Program, which in turn led to securing a job as a painter at Animax Designs in Tennessee, with my very own desk and my very own brushes in a cup on it. The dream, realized! And now, as an independent artist back in Kentucky, I absolutely consider my time on the line at that factory as time well spent. It was the equivalent of eating broccoli and doing crunches, it brought my real interests into sharp focus. My time at Savini High was maximized – nothing was going to be wasted this time around. And it wasn’t.

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

For a long time in my artistic career, I labored under the false narrative of Imposter Syndrome. I probably will in some form forever, it’s a hard weed to stamp out completely. This feeling of not being good enough led me to put undue importance on the approval of those I deemed the Art Authorities – my professors, publications prurient to my interests, arbiters of freelance submissions, curators of galleries, successful peers, and of course, my heroes and their entourage. I say ‘excessive’, because of course, heroes, mentors, peers, and their feedback are all very important for an artist to have and constructively consider (for a great deep dive book on this subject and others related to creative neuroses, I suggest Standing At Water’s Edge by Anne Paris, PhD.), It became excessive and undue when I put those people on a pedestal, constantly compared myself to them, tried to divine their reactions to my work, treated their advice as unmitigated gospel, and when I perceived a shortcoming on my part, engaged in an incredibly cruel internal dialogue with myself.

This wreaks havoc on your mental health and paralyzes your ability to create- since nothing will ever be good enough. And even when I did get that coveted praise, award, recognition, etc, it was never enough to satisfy the voice that only existed in my head. It never sunk in. Even after getting to work with legends like Corey Taylor and Tom Savini, a year later I’m working myself into an anxious frenzy trying to be absolutely perfect at work so they don’t suddenly realize I’m a hack.

Eventually, I experienced a period of burnout, and in the forced self-reflection afterward, I managed to look back at my accomplishments and the amazing experiences and skills I’d accumulated objectively. I allowed myself to be proud. That’s another way of looking at Imposter Syndrome – the inability to be proud without feeling ashamed for whatever reason. It’s also the inability to recognize others’ pride in you, but your own unabashed self-confidence is the real key.

In taking stock of my work, I also gained appreciation for times I was brave or original when I thought I wasn’t, and in really cool concepts I thought up and then quickly hid away because I couldn’t see any safe examples of them already existent in the world. The advice given to artists that, in that brain of yours, there is something only you can envision and create, is true. I have distilled this into my own mantra: there is no permission slip. Want to do a thing? Do it. Research it, test it, ruminate on it, but don’t wait for a cosmic permission slip to be handed to you by a fan, colleague, mentor, hero, or anyone else, because it does not exist. To this day, those words give me great comfort. There Is No Permission Slip.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/necrodisco/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@mulliganperkinsvhs200
• Other: http://cara.app/petmulls

Image Credits

Portrait W/ Head – Richard Perkins