Welcome to Alumni Live: The Podcast.

These are conversations with Grand Valley State University film and video

graduates about the industry, the film video major, and alumni profiles.

I'm your host, Randy Strobl today we have a great show all about visual artists.

We've got K. Lynn Smith and Daniel Hogan.

What years did you, graduate from Grand Valley?

I graduated 2005, so I was there 2000 to 2005.

2008 for me.

That was right when I was coming in.

I was, 2008 to 2012, so right on the border there.

So we might have just barely crossed paths.

I gotta say, I have loved going through, both of your works.

Very, different styles, but also, grounded in, uh, personal experience and humanity.

So, do you wanna just describe for the people out there, what your art is?

Someone described my style perfectly one time and I've adopted it ever since,

and they said it was 'Gritty Disney.'

I went to school for film and video, but it was animation for me.

I wanted to be a Disney animator.

So of course, that was like, okay- Gritty disney?

A little edge to the Disney.

I'll take it.

Obviously that dream is different now, but that's how I

describe my style all the time.

I describe my style as funny, cute, and weird.

And if I can get all three of those, all the better.

I try to aim for whimsy and fun and humor and the things I do.

Like a kid drew it, but in a good way.

And I would say, even outside of childish, I think you both

have a nostalgic look to you.

Like K. lynn, you were talking about Disney and Daniel, I would

say that you had some, like early Nickelodeon look to your work.

I get that a lot from people at art festivals.

I'll hear ' Oh, this reminds me of 'Rocco's Modern Life,'

or early Cartoon Network stuff.

I hear that

That's stuff I enjoyed and would definitely, emulate when I could.

So discovering a style, Was there a moment when you realized that your

art looked different than other people's art where you started to

say "Oh, that looks like my image."

I think it was right around, when I finished my first series and

people were like 'Oh, I could tell right away that it was a 'K.

Lynn Smith style' So it was other people telling me that they

could recognize it right away.

that it was like, oh, okay, I have a style.

And that was after you were creating your first series.

Were you just trying to make, based on things that you were looking at?

Yeah,

At the time, just taking what inspired me.

Avatar the Last Airbender, that kind of style, that like 'American Anime'.

I mean anime is based off American style, vice versa.

that kind of style, really influenced me at the time, but I took that

and twisted it into my own style.

over time morphed into what it is now.

Daniel, a moment where you realized that your style was your own?

When I made the jump from Comic Cons to art festivals, I noticed,

people started connecting with my work more at art festivals I

found more of an audience there.

When I started doing the art festivals and I was moving away from comics

and doing more, cartooning work.

That's kind of where my style , developed and people, latched onto that.

How do those factor into your career path?

Like how did you go from being, Grand Valley film student, in

animation to, being the, uh, visual artist that you are today?

When I graduated I wanted to build a portfolio to start sending off

to different animation companies.

What better way than to put pressure on myself and start a web comic.

As far as the animation world.

I wanted to be a storyboard artist.

And so I started this web comic it got more and more popular.

And then suddenly people were paying for something that I

was putting online for free.

And I started going to shows, um, actually a publisher found me through

Kickstarter and they took me to, my very first show was New York

Comic-Con.

Wow.

What way to start, huh?

I just fell in love with it.

The hustle and bustle,

talking to people, that were reading online for the first time and actually

like meeting them in person was great.

Now I, I

do my own work under my own umbrella travel to all the shows all throughout the

US and keep meeting more and more people.

It's great.

Daniel, your path.

How did you go from being a student at Grand Valley and Allendale to, all

the greener pastures you're at now?

I was in the film video program, and then toward the end I pivoted to Animation

and that's where I really found my niche.

I still loved all the other film stuff, but I really got

into the animation side of it.

I you know, I got to have a little more fun with it and be a little

sillier . After leaving Grand Valley, I got a job doing video for the state.

And that's what I have been doing for the last 20 years.

That's the day job.

And, then in, In, 2012, I decided just to start making

comics and putting 'em online.

uh, For a few years, different iterations of that.

Then I started doing my own ongoing story comic.

Then, as I said, I started doing art festivals because my wife

got into doing art around 2017.

And she basically forced me in a good way to do the same.

And because I did that, I had to come up with a whole new body of work for that.

That was 2018 and I've been doing that ever since.

The last couple years I pivoted to one thing, that's what

I call my 'found cartoons'.

which are I. I just say Stars, random color shapes, and then I

make 'em into, silly cartoon things.

And prior to that I was kind of doing a lot of different things

and I felt that that was kind of hurting more than helping.

So I've been trying to narrow my focus and I have been doing good

with that the last couple years.

In terms of lengths of comics that you write, Daniel, most of yours are

kind of four panel and then K Lynn, you're making whole, long series.

Talk me through a little bit of, making a long piece of art or a short piece of art.

My first series was a Western, and that came from many hours

of playing Red Dead Redemption.

, I fell into the Western genre, just loving it.

And then, I had this story in mind for the longest time.

I, I've been writing and drawing, since I can remember.

It was a click in my brain going, oh, I can do both with comics.

I had this story floating around in my head and I was like, let's

just plop it down into the Western.

And then my current series is The House of Loather and it's, a

rehabilitation center for cryptids.

It's just allowing me to draw whatever the hell I want.

I love crypted, so I love falling down that rabbit hole all the time.

Like every state has a different cryptid.

I think Michigan has a couple actually, don't they?

yes.

yeah.

And so, so that's kind of like looking at a long series, right?

So like an, an idea with sequential characters.

, Daniel looking at a shorter, more contained art form.

Do you see anything similar with your process that, K. Lynn was talking about?

Yeah, I've done long form stuff too, and I admittedly didn't do as much preparation

for that as I should have when I started.

And so I have mad respect for people who actually finish a long story like that.

For me, I like, the shorter gag comic stuff.

That's how I started, newspaper comic strip fan before I was

a comic book fan, 'Calvin and Hobbes', 'Farside', 'Peanuts'..

I read that stuff before I ever got into Spider-Man and whatnot down the road.

Now I love it all I try to incorporate some of that into my recent work.

What can I do with a single drawing that tells a story?

What can I do that tells a story as simply, as quickly,

or as funny, as possible?

You doing short form is so impressive too.

I've done short form.

Way back in the day, and you only have two, three, four panels to tell a story.

You know, K. Lynne in your House of Loather, it's mostly black and white, but

we'll see like a splash of some color.

Daniel, same thing, a lot of times sparse color, but then we'll see

like pops throughout your work.

How do you decide when and where colors should pop?

For me, for Loather it was definitely a Wizard of Oz, Schindler's List

situation where if there's a moment of high emotion, let's pop some

color in whether it's good or bad.

For me, I would try to incorporate it for effect reasons or storytelling reasons.

Like how can I use color to signify the emotion or the mood of the scene.

With my more recent stuff, my, found cartoons, they all start as color shapes.

So I'm actually thinking of the color first, and then I figure

out what I turn that into.

Sometimes the color dictates the cartoon I come up with.

This past couple years I've been experimenting more with acrylic paint.

Going from watercolor to acrylic paint is very different.

That allows me to layer colors differently, which I've been enjoying.

I can throw on extra.

splashes of color here and there to add more energy to the piece

and you know, enjoy doing that.

'cause with watercolor you, you can do that, but it's not as easy.

But acrylic, you can really go crazy with that stuff.

That's so interesting.

It's physical too.

'cause I picture everybody to be using procreate in an iPad at this point.

But it sounds like you're doing a lot of, physical stuff.

Um, K. Lynn, what kind of tools are you using?

I have a Cintiq and Photoshop that I work primarily through.

I do commissions, at shows.

I used to do, commissions of anyone's characters but I fell

into doing the pets primarily.

I'm similar where I use a little bit of both.

If I have a piece on canvas, I'll take a picture of the color shapes

on the canvas and dump that in to procreate and I'll draw on top of

that to figure out what I want to do before I do the final ink and paint.

Cause if I mess up the canvas, that's a whole lot of work I gotta redo.

When I'm just doing like the small watercolor five by sevens,

I don't worry about that so much.

But the canvases are much more of a process.

I have used procreate and also Clip Studio Pro for digital art.

If I'm doing stuff for, prints or freelance.

What is space like as you're working both of you.

I have another screen next to me that usually is playing, because I'm a gamer,

but I don't have the time play games, so I love to watch people play games.

Or I'm listening to a podcast.. Writing, I have to have either

silence or, soundtrack with no lyrics.

But when it's art, I have to have some kind of background noise.

and it's either a gameplay or a podcast.

My wife and I share a studio space outside the house.

She has about 90% of the studio.

I have my little 10%, which is fine.

That's just my little art chaos area.

There's supplies everywhere.

I do have a traditional drafting table that I will

sometimes use even with my iPad.

If there's something visual going on, I can't ignore that and work on something.

I, I can listen to this stuff fine, but I know people who like

watch movies while they're drawing.

I can't do that 'cause I'll never get anything done.

As far as what I listen to, it's a lot of podcasts.

Lately I've been getting into house music stuff that's no words, but

it has like a steady, beat to it.

You also, uh, live stream, right?

You'll have a camera up working with people on Twitch.

So what, What does promotion look like?

How are you getting your work out there?

K Lynn, you're in a couple different, publishing spaces.

It's social media.

It's through the Comic-Con shows.

I always say social media, but the landscape is changing so much recently.

It's a little shaky ground every now and then.

But the main, way I get my work out there is through Kickstarter, crowdfunding.

The wheels are greased by social media.

So, that's, that's the main way to do

And how does publishing your comics work too?

Through Kickstarter as well, getting it printed.

The House of Lothar though, currently has a, publisher who is very kindly hands-off.

And they understand that Kickstarter is one of my main sources of income.

So they said, we're not gonna touch your Kickstarters, but we'll take it to stores.

So they're taking Lothar to the Comic-Con stores and they're going

to publish it through the big bookstores like, Barnes and Noble.

Like publisher that's very rare for a publisher to allow, the creator to have

their own Kickstarter book separate.

Cool.

And, and Daniel reaching out to your audience, of course live

streaming's a big part of that.

Tell us a little bit about how that works.

I just started live streaming last April.

I'm Daniel J. Hogan on Twitch and YouTube.

Mainly it's art.

I occasionally do gaming.

I'm Daniel J. Hogan on TikTok, Blue Sky, Daniel J. Hogan Art on Instagram.

I'm trying to do, more short videos with that stuff, where the

live streaming helps with that.

'cause I can just make clips of, my art live streams and put those out

to be, easily digestible and viewed.

When you're creating your art, do you think of the printed page or how

it looks coming through a screen.

Is there a difference for, your creative process between those two?

I dabbled with WebToons for a bit.

I know exactly what you're

there was a fist raised in the air.

Tell us about that.

You gotta reformat everything for WebToons specifically.

When I was doing comics on the regular.

I was always making stuff with books and print in mind and and stuff like

WebToons or social media was secondary.

'Cause you can always chop stuff up not always easily, but can

do it, for that sort of thing

after the fact, it's more difficult to take something that was not

designed for print and then make it for print after the fact.

It's best to design with print in mind first, then do everything else later.

Hey, it's Randy.

We're taking a short break to tell you about the Morse-Cuppy

Film, Video, and Animation Study Abroad Endowed Scholarship.

The scholarship was established by Bill Cuppy with support from Deanna Morse to

help film, video, and animation students with the cost of studying abroad.

Alumnus Bill Cuppy talks about why he started the scholarship.

We created this scholarship because experiencing the world and other

cultures has been life-changing for us and we wanted students to

have a similar experience during this pivotal time in their lives.

Caroline Hamilton, the 2024 recipient of that scholarship, describes the

benefits of the support she received.

I'm a film video major and I have a German minor.

I've been studying German for about eight years now, and so I decided to

study abroad this past summer in Germany.

It definitely challenged me as a person.

I had to figure out how to do things and communicate and just

put me outta my comfort zone.

It introduces you to new things that you'd be afraid to experience because

you don't wanna embarrass yourself, but you have to just go for it.

The scholarship itself, just the almost permission to be

like, yes, go experience this.

Go learn, go see what happens, how this changes, how you see the world

and how you approach your work.

It took the pressure off of me a little bit to just be like, I can

experience this and not have to worry about everything else going on.

I can just go enjoy my time there and see what I can learn and grow from.

For more information, and to donate to the scholarship, visit

the link in the description.

Now back to the show.

So thinking about, , the young Grand Valley student that's listening to this,

what are things they could be doing right now as a Grand Valley student

that could gear them up to, have a booth next to you at a Comic-Con someday.

My advice again is always, building that audience online, drawing

every day and just start posting.

It doesn't cost anything.

Man, the social media world is just constantly ebbing and flowing.

The algorithms, the people behind the social medias, all this mess is,

it's a lot harder these days to get

eyes on your page.

But that is always my advice is just start posting online, gather an audience slowly.

Especially with, the options of Kickstarter or any other crowdfunding,

campaign sites you have to have that audience built online in order

to, be able to crowdfund a project.

So, yeah, my advice is always draw every day.

Practice your craft and let people see it.

Yeah, I, I second that.

I will also add, to build on what she was saying about social media being e ebbing

and flowing is get your own website.

And just hang onto that for as long as you can and put stuff there.

And then, The same thing with the print plan for your website and then send stuff

out to social media after that because we've seen some social media sites come

and go or just completely change what they were about and not be worth it anymore.

Like look at Tumblr, when Tumblr went down and changed.

That was a big thing for a lot of artists.

And then that's not what it was anymore.

If you always have at least your website with a portfolio of everything

that you can always link to.

That saves you a lot of headaches.

You don't always have to share everything too.

You can make stuff for yourself.

But it's worthwhile to share stuff and.

You're gonna have to develop a bit of a thick skin when you're doing that.

If you're a student now, and you have good creative friends, keep those friendships,

keep those connections 'cause you don't know where you're gonna be in 10 years.

Your friend in your Animation 101 class, a few years from now, could be

working at an animation studio and like, Hey, they need a storyboard artist,

and they remembered you being really good at drawing comics or something.

And one of my favorite things to do is if I get an offer for a freelance

art job and I can't do it, I love giving it to my friends, I can't do

this, but I know the perfect person.

and I love doing that.

That is super cool.

So thinking about, you know, that student that might be thinking about

going into your profession, what is the, the worst day being a visual artist and

your best day being a visual artist?

What is the spectrum?

So for me it's the same day.

Oh yeah.

That happens all at once.

Um, I'm actually running a Kickstarter campaign currently, and the best

and the worst moment of my career is pushing launch on that campaign.

It is exciting, but the imposter syndrome rears its ugly head and you think, there's

so many plates that you're spinning.

There's so many different things that could go wrong.

It is very stressful, but it's very rewarding.

It's very nice to see the support roll in.

But man, that, that moment where you hit launch and you're like,

is the support gonna roll in?

So yes, I think the best and worst moment of my career is that very moment.

Wow.

The highs for me, like is having an amazing weekend at, at an art

festival and the lows will be the next weekend doing incredibly terrible

where I barely make my money back.

I was 30 when I started doing comics.

I was in my late thirties when I did my first art festivals.

It's never too late to try that.

I hear this all the time at art festivals.

"Oh, I can't even draw a straight line." "I can't draw a stick figure."

And then I tell 'em , I didn't start doing stuff till I was in my thirties and nine

times outta 10, they don't believe me.

They're like shocked to hear that.

I'm like, yeah, it's, you can start, just Start.

You will not get worse at something you do every day, you only get better.

That's the goal for my upcoming workshops, and stuff I wanna

do with my videos just to help encourage people to, start drawing.

Everyone can draw.

You just have to like get over that, negativity you have of

yourself that you can't do it

and just start doing it.

Thinking back to, your experience at Grand Valley, were there, moments or

professors, assignments, other students that helped you become who you are today?

What were, you know, some lessons you learned or, or some, uh, assignments

you got to practice on where you started to realize, even as you're working

today, you think back on those lessons.

Yes, I always shout out my professor of animation, Deanna Morse

She's

who I was gonna shout

out

She was amazing.

She pushed me to enter a storyboard contest, which I

never would've done and, and won.

And so without her, yeah, I don't think I would've stepped

out that comfort zone, for sure.

And yeah, she continues to support.

So yeah.

Deanna Morse.

Love her.

Same for me.

When I switched the animation program, that was my first

time taking class with Deanna.

Same thing, she was very supportive of the weird stuff I wanted to do and, just

being in the classes, it kind of pushed me to think about that stuff and to do

animation and to learn those skills.

There's days where I miss the daily grind of going to a class and learning

stuff and having someone say, I need you to make XYZ thing by this date.

When you're doing it all by yourself sometimes you need that, that third

party to say, I need this by this day.

Whereas if I don't have that, it never gets done sort of thing.

Yeah, Deanna was great.

She, definitely helped encourage me to submit stuff to festivals.

Through her I got involved with the Cartoon Challenge stuff at

the Kalamazoo Animation Festival, which I don't think exists anymore.

Do you,

do you both work mostly solo?

Is there any collaboration in the work you do?

Yeah, I'm, I'm mainly on my own.

I do collaborative works here and there.

Nothing long form.

I'll do, variant covers for other projects.

Just short form right now.

I just don't, I, I don't have the time.

So yes, very selfishly doing my own projects.

And, and do you feel like is your, temperament correct for that?

Like, Is there any time where you get lonely during that or is it,

something that you look forward to like sitting down all the time?

I do, I enjoy it.

I am a little bit of a control freak when it comes to that, so

I want to control every aspect of the project, and so I enjoy it.

I live my life by checklists.

I Write out a list of things I wanna accomplish.

That's my third party of keeping me in check.

' cause without that, I would be sitting here playing video games

. I've always been a DIY solo person, and I think that was a reason I actually

enjoyed the animation program more than the traditional, film production

stuff at Grand Valley, because I had to do everything by myself.

There are exceptions obviously, group projects and whatnot.

I didn't hate that, but when I got to just handle everything on my own.

I definitely enjoyed that a lot more.

And so like, yeah, all my comic stuff and all my art stuff, it's just me, my wife,

Steph Joy Hogan, who is also an artist, we will occasionally collaborate on pieces.

We do share studio space and we do art festivals together.

We're always side by side.

Um.

I feel like I might already know the answer to

this, but

If you don't mind getting controversial for a second what are

your thoughts on AI generated art?

Is that a part of your workflow at all?

Absolutely not!.

It's destroying the planet.

It's destroying our opportunities.

It's destroying our capability of thinking for ourselves.

I cosign all of that.

It's 'cause it's all built on theft and plagiarism.

As I like to tell people: why would you rob yourself of the joy of creating?

You're just typing something in a prompt, you're not creating anything.

It's just creating something for you I got approached by an art festival.

I won't say which one, but they, They asked me if I was interested in

helping them come up with terms and conditions for allowing or judging

AI art, and I said, absolutely not.

This was more of should we start considering allowing it in?

I said, if you start doing this, I'm never doing any of your art festivals again.

Period, end of a story.

This is the other reason why I'm trying to push my whole like,

everyone can draw a thing and trying to get people into making their own

stuff to show them you can do this.

It changes the language too.

'Cause on, my display at shows, I have all these portraits of my characters from

Loather and they were all digitally drawn.

And so when people are asking me about commissions, I'm like,

I can do traditionally, or I can do it digitally like these.

And they're like, oh, those are AI.

I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Digital is different.

The words, digital and render are ruined because of AI art.

If you say, yeah, I rendered it people automatically think I just

clicked a button and it's done.

And that sucks.

I want us to, uh, climb into our time machine for a second.

We're gonna go, back and we're gonna talk to 18-year-old Daniel Hogan.

We're gonna talk to 18-year-old K. Lynn Smith.

Give yourself some advice.

You're a freshman at Grand Valley.

What would you tell yourself about future you, send yourself a message.

To my 18-year-old self.

Just keep going.

Just keep doing what you're doing.

Trust your instincts on some publishers for sure.

Don't sign on the line quite yet.

I'm very happy with where I landed, so I don't wanna mess too

much with the butterfly effect.

So I'm just gonna give her a good handshake and say, you got it, kid.

Yeah.

Is there, Is there more advice to that, you know, watch your publishers is

there, some red flags that people should look for as they're looking for those?

Because you probably just wanna take whoever you

have would be

yes.

Yeah.

When someone promises you the world, and they have no company to back

them up listen to your instincts.

It was just one the very first publisher I ever signed with took my books and ran.

And that was it.

The contract was void and all that.

It's fine.

It was a very small blip.

And it could have been worse, but it, just trust your instincts

on some of this.

I, yeah.

Daniel Hogan, going back in that time machine, what are

you telling young Daniel?

So I would've been 19 as a freshman because I repeated first grade.

Couldn't color in the lines.

Yep, no, because I, that's all I wanna do was color.

I would probably tell myself, start drawing and don't stop because

I wasn't really doing it then.

Don't worry about how it looks now.

Just keep going which was not something I understood as a 19-year-old back

then, or even younger when I was like in middle school and, was

afraid to draw I always wanted draw.

I liked drawing when I was younger, but I just stopped doing it because

I couldn't draw like other people.

You know, if I knew that's fine.

You don't have to draw like other people, that would've been a

big, help for me, decades ago.

Calling it, drawing like other people rather than "A good artist".

I think that's an important language shift there.

So I, I think that's some really good advice.

I had friends around me who were naturally talented artists and I was

intimidated by that 'cause I could never do anything at that level.

I, Being a young, 12-year-old, I didn't understand that you can

increase your skills over time.

Not everyone starts at the same level.

So if students are listening to this, they wanna see your work, they wanna,

follow along as we're discussing, where can people find your visual art?

Uh, My website is klynnsmith.net.

And that's K, the letter K-L-Y-N-N-S-M-I-T-H.

And all the social media links are through the website.

And then for me, I am @ danieljhogan.com.

And if you go to daniel j hogan.com/links, it'll have my links to everything.

If you wanna watch me live stream, stop by my Daniel J. Hogan.

Twitch and YouTube channels on Saturdays at 9:00 AM Eastern or

just go to the YouTube channel.

Everything I've ever done is there.

You can watch 60 hours of me playing Stardew Valley if you want.

Have fun.

And I can't recommend all you, look the artwork on their websites because

it is all, beautiful, fun, funny.

I saw a lot of myself in it, and I also found myself getting

wrapped up in the storyline.

So lots of good stuff out there.

Well, Daniel Hogan, K. Lynne Smith, thank you for all the rich

stories that you've given us.

This has been a great episode and thank you so much for listening and

keep tuned to our podcast feed and you'll find plenty of more great

interviews just like this one.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Alumni Live: The Podcast.

Subscribe to our podcast to hear more from our alumni across the industry.

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Let us know what topics you want to hear our alumni talk about.

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Thank you for listening.