Let me tell you something cool about people. Sometimes when you email them, they email you back. Even if they’re kind of a big deal on the internet, they sometimes take a few minutes to email you back. I’m certain a number of you keep blogs on tumblr. I do as well, although my sister, a self-admitted tumblr addict, informed me that I’m very bad at tumbling. A friend of mine from college turned me onto a webcomic called Infinite Naps via tumblr and, instantly, I fell in love with the style and the extremely relatable scenarios the comic strip depicts. So what did I do? I promptly reblogged it and began frantically combing the internet for the author and her email address. I don’t know why I felt so urged to email this girl, but it had to be done. I wanted to tell her that I loved her comic and wanted to speak with her. And that’s what I did. I didn’t expect anything back, but apparently she’s a very cool human who emails her fans back. So within 5 emails, we arranged a skype date which I’m about to detail to you now.
Her Campus, meet Claire Levis, a music performance major in Chicago who just happens to be growing in internet fame through her new comic. A very chill chica with a fabulous rockstar pixie haircut, Claire has always been interested in pursuing a future as a starving artist. She was a doodler throughout high school, although her interest in making art her full-time hobby didn’t pique until college, as her high school’s art program was more arts-and-crafts-esque than she desired. After some time at college perfecting her clarinet skills, Claire entered a relationship with a young man, and while he was away for a time, she doodled a single-panel comic about missing him and posted it on her tumblr account, where it garnered a few hundred notes (that’s the tumblr currency, right?). Her friends encouraged her to continue with her hand-drawn comics. And she did. And now she’s a little bit famous.
Since the success of her first comic, Claire has been writing and publishing her work every or every other week on a tumblr account she created just for her work. A college kid like the rest of us, Claire’s high-falutin art supplies consist of pencils, pens, and markers. Real high-end stuff. From there, she starts drawing. Sometimes, a certain scenario will occur that she wants to recreate, and other times, she has random, vague ideas. Most often, though, Claire makes fun of her own social anxieties, weird friendships, and silly daily happenings. Some combination of doodles and sketches in pencil lay the groundwork for her comic and once she’s pleased with her characters’ facial expressions and body positions, she adds in the verbal punchlines and finishing touches in pen. Like any writer, though, Claire runs into writers block — no one’s fully immune to the crippling disease. When that happens, she hunkers down and power-writes through it. It’s no more complicated than her forcing herself to sit down and write and doodle for a few hours. Sometimes a very nebulous idea comes to fruition, and other times, it results in nothing more than a sketchbook full of worthless scratchings. This easy, stress-free side job costs her five to six hours per week and she couldn’t have asked for better feedback.
Claire’s small, but growing internet fame came as an utter shock to her and is now to the point where she enjoys her comic art more than school work, but continues to pursue clarinet performance as a more “practical” road for her education. The website “tapastic” picked up her work and now sends her a monthly stipend for her troubles. Very recently, with the advice of internet sensation Frogman, she has started selling autographed prints of her work. The transition from “college doodler” to “small business owner” has also been a surprising transition for the young artist; with the development of her merchandise line, she’s had to balance her need to get a return on her investment against the value of her fanbase… and good lord does she value all the people who’ve supported her as her project has taken off. As brutal and hostile an environment as the internet can be, Claire has gotten nothing but support and love for her relevant and engaging hand-drawn portraits of young adult life. Day to day, she spends time linking up with other internet comic writers both in person and via the interwebs to share ideas both for her art and for running her business. A few times, she and other professional doodlers meet up in the park in Chicago to share and leave their marks and signatures in each other’s books. In the future, Claire hopes to be able to help out more budding artists and small business owners through her own story and methods of trial-and-error.
So, ladies, that’s what being a young internet-famous cartoon artist is all about. It’s a lot of endless doodling, emails, and sketchbooks. And maybe if you do it right, you can be as cool and chill as Claire.