Featured Illustrator: Dana Atnip

Sunday funnies, Detroit dragons, comic cons, and Pesky Gremlins: Featured Illustrator and cartoonist Dana Atnip

Charlie Barshaw coordinates our regular Writer Spotlight feature and interviews writers of SCBWI-MI. In this piece, meet cartoonist  and featured illustrator Dana Atnip.

Your website abounds with your art, but very little bio, although you admit you were consumed with making art from a young age. What started young Dana on the road to web comics and picture books? 

I started drawing at a very young age. I would see pictures of cartoon characters on the wall of my classrooms, such as Mickey Mouse and Snoopy, and I wanted to be able to draw them; so I would spend a lot of time trying to draw my favorite characters. 

When the Sunday newspaper came every week (now I feel old, haha) I would grab the Sunday funnies and read them over and over. I loved comics, and I learned pacing and delivering gags from constantly reading my favorite comic books (Peanuts, Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, Cathy to name a few). I also loved picture books, although I was more interested in illustrating them than in writing them. 

How did you transition from copying established cartoon characters to creating your own strip?

I started drawing comic strips as a kid on regular notebook paper with just a pencil; I would make my own Garfield comics. As I got older I started making my own characters and comics, and would send them to syndicates, hoping to get a contract. 

While I sometimes got good feedback, no one was willing to syndicate my work (where then it would be in newspapers). It’s pretty much like submitting manuscripts to publishing houses, but this was comics.

One editor told me to just write what I love; I loved dragons and astronomy, so that’s how I came up with Galactic Dragons. I received some praise, but still no contract. Years later I rebooted the comic for the web, so at least I had a chance to display my work to an audience (but with no pay). 

Most cartoonists these days don’t submit their work to syndicates as newspapers are a dying institution; they just post them to social media in hopes of building an audience who will hopefully support them in different ways such as subscribing to their Patreon page or give tips like Ko-Fi, or buy their books and merch.

I do freelance work that I do get paid for, like pet portraits or design work. It’s not enough to quit my job but it’s a nice side hustle.

These photographs were taken by professional photographer, Alanna St. Laurent. She has agreed to let me add cartoons to a few of her photographs,  depicting Detroit locations! https://danaatnipart.com/cartoonphotographs 

Could you tell us about Alanna, and the cartoons you add? How did this collaboration come about? 

Well, Alanna is my sister! Creativity runs in our family. She was in her forties when she discovered her passion for photography, and she worked very hard learning everything she could. She’s an incredibly talented and amazing photographer. 

She has received numerous awards over the years, and her work has been displayed in magazines, books, and in many businesses around the Detroit area. Her passion includes Detroit photography, historical architecture, and old barns and mills. 

I would look at some of her beautiful Detroit photography images and imagine cartoon characters in those images; so, she gave me permission to use her images combined with cartoons I would draw. I sell prints and magnets of these images at local comic cons. You can view her work at www.AlannaStLaurent.com

Sooooo…this is going to be my last comic for a while. I had hoped to do 15 new comics, but I’ve been swamped with other projects and getting prepared for comic con season. And with my software being buggy too, I figured this was a good place to stop for now. 

Not sure when this post is from, but at the time you were announcing a hiatus. And you were swamped with other projects (emphasis mine.) Care to set the scene? At this point, buggy hardware, comic con season (emphasis mine again), and not the promised allotment of Dragons, what did the future look like? Where are you now? 

That was likely from when I put a pin in weekly Galactic Dragon comics for a while back in 2022. I was doing freelance work, pet portraits, and creating new designs to sell at my table at comic cons, plus working a full-time job, so I just didn’t have the time to devote to drawing weekly strips anymore. 

Although I love the comic, it’s more of a hobby and not an income stream, so I had to put it on the back burner. As of right now I am updating new comics weekly to promote the release of my latest book, Galactic Dragons Vol 2: Planet X-F3. I have since gotten a new PC to replace my old, buggy one I’m happy to say.

I always leaned towards animals in my drawings.  For me, drawing the human figure was always a tough challenge.  To this day I still feel I struggle when drawing humans, but I still attempt it. 

You did ask that the characters be animals in your Quick Draw event with Ruth at A2CAF. Ha! I could slap myself for not taking pictures. I hope someone did. Tell us about your comic con weekend. 

stickers

I was so happy to be paired with Ruth again for the Quick Draw event at the Ann Arbor Comic Arts Festival! Intimidated as well, because I admire her and her work so much, she is so talented. 

Yes, Ruth was very kind to go along with my request for no people when we did the Quick Draw together; I’m intimidated to draw people, which likely is still old PTSD from a caricature class I did eons ago, where I just couldn’t draw people to look like the people they were supposed to be. 

My weekend went very well! Sales were good, and I got to see a lot of old friends as well as made some new ones. It’s always a great experience to do A2CAF, it’s my favorite show to do.

Describe a typical comic convention experience for Dana Atnip, Cartoonist. 

I will spend weeks in advance getting things together; going through inventory, making lists, designing new merch, ordering prints and stickers, and loading up boxes. It’s a lot of work but once I get to the show, I always feel it’s worth it! There’s just a great energy at comic cons, and it’s easy to get swept up in all the excitement.

How does an artist at a comic-con balance fan art requests versus copyrighted characters and shows?

Many artists who table at comic cons or art shows will also offer fan art of other popular characters from movies and cartoons; it’s a pretty common practice, although some artists will look down on artists that do fan art. 

But the reality is that it’s a tough and competitive market out there, and fan art can be what draws people to our tables where we can pitch them our own original characters and work. 

I personally offer both; I do fan art too but a big bulk of my work is my own. I also like to add a fun slant to it, like having the characters in actual photos of Detroit.

Dana and friend

As for getting struck with a copyright lawsuit, you do have to be careful. I’m small potatoes, I’m not out there selling thousands of dollars worth of merch with characters from say Disney (most smart artists steer clear of Disney fan art, but they own just about everything now). 

Someone selling a few prints of a licensed character is probably going to be very low on their radar, but if you open an Etsy or Amazon shop and are making a lot of money from copyrighted characters, you are taking a huge risk. That’s why I keep my fan art to a minimum, and I’ll  only sell it at my tables, not in an online shop.

You wrote a guest post for The Mitten where you outlined your struggle to balance a web comic with your desire to write and illustrate picture books. How goes it on the picture book front? 

Sadly the picture book front is still on the backburner. I still haven’t given up my desire to illustrate picture books someday; I still will write down ideas or write out rough drafts, but it’s been such a slow process for me because of real-life commitments. 

I still try to stay on top of new releases and I’m always at the library checking out picture books and graphic novels. Hopefully one day I will have more time to commit.

Greeting Cards? 

Greeting cards is another avenue that I had explored in the past, but I haven’t been devoting any time to it lately. Greeting cards are still a big business, despite so much digital media these days, but I’ve chosen to focus on other projects.

Vox and sketch

You cite a lot of cartoonists who influenced your art style. But the Galactic Dragon characters I’ve seen remind me of Walt Kelly’s Pogo. (and then I remember where I got the idea: Crazy Fox from Comic Fury.) What say you? Pogo or not Pogo?  

To say my characters remind you of Pogo is one of the biggest compliments I could receive! Walk Kelly was a master. My dad was a Pogo fan so I did spend time reading his comics; however I was so young I’ll admit I didn’t always understand them, but I loved his style so much!

Draw everyday.  Nothing will make you improve faster than the physical act of actual drawing or painting – even if it’s just sketching.  And if you want to draw digitally, you still first need to know how to draw on paper with a pencil. 

Your advice for aspiring artists. A struggle for today’s artists, digital and physical art have their pros and cons. How do you balance the digital vs. hand-drawn and painted for each of your projects? 

There are pros and cons to each, as you’ve said. I’ve always been a traditionalist and when I was in school there was no digital art. But now almost everything I do is digital! 

I have an iPad where I have Procreate, and as soon as I discovered brushes where I could sketch just like I was drawing on paper, it was game over. It’s so much easier and cleaner to draw digitally, but I still have my sketchbooks and will still draw with a pencil sometimes. 

And people really enjoy receiving something hand-drawn such as if I sketch a character in a book I’m signing. I think it means more to people to have something that’s an original. 

I will admit though that I can no longer say that someone might be a better artist because they learned to draw on paper. It still holds though that you do need to learn how to actually draw; AI and all the shortcuts that digital drawing software offers still doesn’t hold up if the person doesn’t know what they’re doing. 

And you can see it all over the place now, from picture books and coloring books being sold on Amazon to art work sold on Etsy; you can tell if the seller actually knows how to draw or not. 

The pros for digital for me is the ease; it’s so much easier to correct mistakes; you can enlarge and flip and move things around the page, you can’t do that (easily) on paper. However, you do have to have the hardware to draw digitally, and an iPad or a PC don’t come cheap. But you can go to an art store and buy a pad of paper, pencils, and ink pens for a reasonable price.

Peskygremlins and Zombieboycomics and comic fury and dustbunnymafia, and finally, skittercomic. (In a Desi Arnaz Lucy voice): Dana, you got a lot of ‘splaining to do. 

Lol! Those are some comics by my fellow cartoonists that I’ve befriended over the years! Comic Fury is a webhosting platform for webcomics.

What’s next? 

Right now I’m finishing up another run of Galactic Dragon comics, while also creating new designs for my next show in September, which will be WebcomicCon at the Rust Belt in Ferndale. 

I am also designing coloring books that I will sell on Amazon (something I didn’t even know I wanted to do until recently), and I plan to start another web comic that is a bit less niche than dragons in space, lol. And of course, continuing my pursuit of illustrating picture books!

Please share any social media: 

You can find me at:

www.danaatnipart.com
www.galacticdragons.com
Instagram: @danaatnip_art
Facebook: Facebook.com/galacticdragons
Twitter/X: @galacticdragons
Bluesky: @danatnip-art