Written by Ché Crawford, who draws comics as The Immortal Think Tank. You can support Ché on Patreon.

The Foundation

One of the earliest memories I have is of five year old me being banished to the school library by an overwhelmed teacher because I couldn’t remember the word ‘it’ every time it was my turn to practise reading with her. Feeling for me, the librarian offered to read any story of my choice, and I chose the Brothers Grimm Cinderella – Aschenputtel. 

For those that have never had the pleasure of reading this version of the fairytale, it has many excellent and gruesome moments left out of its later iterations. The stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to fit into the slipper, blood drips from the shoes, and the happy ending was poetic justice unlike any little me had ever heard before – Cinderella’s magical doves tear the eyes out of those black hearted stepsisters, permanently blinding them! It was brutal, it was beautiful, and five year old me was enraptured. 

Stories were always encouraged at home. Over the years I was fed a steady diet of Greek mythology, Christian bible stories, and epic fantasy. Basically anything I could get my hands on to satiate my hunger for adventure. Stories were and are wonderful, and I vividly pictured myself there, battling alongside my favourite heroes in the name of all that is good and right. I developed into an idealist who firmly believed that humans at the core are good, and stories are what connect us. 

And I also developed into a bit of a dreamy, quiet, overthinker, that helped to cement me as ‘a bit of an odd one’ at school. But I didn’t mind. I just set out to collect others like me – the artists, the writers, the anime watchers, and I created a little, happy, creative bubble of friends to do school with. We drew, we wrote, we learned instruments, and I decided that whatever I did in the future, it needed to involve being surrounded by friends like these, telling stories in some form or another. 

Discovering Role-Playing Games

After a year of literature at Waikato University, I came to realise that I didn’t like telling stories with only words. I loathed riffling through my brain to describe what I pictured as a picture. Rolling green mountains, trees heavy with dew – yuck. I saw pictures, I needed to draw pictures. So, unable to find a course that was both writing and drawing, I packed myself off to Auckland to attend Freelance Animation School. 

There, I learned the foundations of drawing. I ‘leveled up’ to no longer drawing a person in a T pose. But it was an animation school, and the focus was on how to tell other people’s stories, frame by frame. I wasn’t in the writer’s room, involved in weaving the story together. I couldn’t even see the story. In front of me was 200 frames of a character slightly moving across the page. But moving where?! Doing what?!

Frame after frame, my brain grew weary. I was a machine, and the human aspect of telling stories was being kept from me, just out of reach. I wasn’t okay with that! But also I’d loaned thousands of dollars to be there, so I wasn’t about to skip out.

Determined to find some kind of adventure, I decided to drag a couple of new friends up to a group at Auckland University that I had heard about, the Auckland Roleplaying Guild, where my first interaction with a roleplaying game was not at the table, but was as a vampire in a live action roleplaying game. I found LARP, and it was brilliant. 

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t reading the story, or watching it, or writing it. I was in it. And I never wanted to leave. 

From there came Dungeons and Dragons, came people’s homebrew worlds, came Shadowrun. I was no longer reading Gandalf subtly working magic, I was Gandlf, not at all subtly working magic, and yes, it was me that set that flour mill on fire, accidentally doing significant damage (and some death, oops) to my fellow party members. 

I quested, I leveled, I got loot. I was good, I was bad, I was all shenanigans. And I knew, for the rest of my life, that roleplaying games would be important.

TTRPG Art 

I don’t know about you, but when I picture TTRPG art, I see art like what’s on Magic the Gathering cards. Beautiful, semi-realistic fantasy paintings, the kind that take years to learn how to do. But I hadn’t spent years learning how to paint like that, I’d spent years learning how to draw and animate funny little cartoons. 

And could I learn to draw like that? Possibly. But did I? No, not at all. Cartoons are fun. I like the silly shapes, the flaily limbs, the leaving off noses if I don’t feel like drawing them (which is almost always). I didn’t have an extensive portfolio of paintings to apply for jobs with. And because I’d seldom seen cartoons featured in TTRPG or fantasy books, I assumed that working professionally in that world was out of reach for me.

What I did have though, was a group of friends who came over to my house weekly for table top games. 

In my opinion, one of the best parts of playing table top roleplaying games is the community that can come with it. There’s a real sense of achievement when you down a big bad guy as a group. It bonds you in ways that are harder to notice in real life. “Good job, we both made enough money to pay our rent this week,” doesn’t quite feel as epic an achievement to bond over as “we saved the underdark from The Demon Queen of Fungi after months of questing together.” 

But it was much to my surprise that my favourite moments of these weekly games weren’t so much the epic adventures I always dreamed of going on. My favourite moments were the funny little shenanigans that happened around the table between my friends. I was desperate to never forget the silliest things we got up to. And also, in the back of my mind, I’d been wanting to draw out a fantasy graphic novel, but wasn’t happy with where my ability to draw was. Two birds with one stone, I’d practise and get better at drawing, while turning these moments into little four-paneled webcomics. 

From Webcomics to Paid Illustration

It took time, but through posting my comics on various social media websites, in particular D&D focused subreddits, I slowly built an audience that led to being paid to draw. I genuinely never thought I could work as an artist. But I was going to draw and tell stories regardless. It’s who I am. I can’t exist in any kind of happy or peaceful way without stories. 

The work came in stages. At first, the occasional commission for character art. It is always fun (although time consuming) to help a player bring to life their character visually. Patreon was the next step, then ad revenue on webtoon and facebook. They were all little amounts, but they can add up when you keep going steadily. 

But I am also a firm believer in asking for what you want. And one thing I wanted was to draw some comics for the sketch comedy group Viva la Dirt League. Their sketches were gaming shenanigans brought to life. 

They’re also evidence of what could happen when you just do the thing you want to do. No acting work? Create your own. Not many cartoons in the TTRPG world? Draw TTRPG cartoons anyway. I felt like we’d be a good match.

Viva la Dirt League was going to have a panel and signing at Auckland Armageddon. I remember asking a friend if it would be ‘cringe’ for me to turn up at the signing table with cartoons for them. I don’t remember his exact advice, but I’m pretty sure it was along the lines of ‘just be cringe then.’ So I went, I met them, I gave them art. Was it cringe? I don’t know. But they gave me a tour of their very cool studio and a commission for 20 comics based on their Epic NPC Man series. Twenty comics in my cartoony style. 

 I took this as an open invitation to be a professional TTRPG Cartoonist. 

From there, I’ve drawn comic advertisements for Roll & Play Press, book covers such as the one I drew for Dumbest D&D’s Big Book of Little Adventures, and I even got to draw a comic for Square Enix’s Dragon Quest VII Reimagined, featuring my table top characters alongside theirs. 

There’s a whole spectrum of ways to draw, of stories to tell, of games to play, and lives to be had. So, this is my advice to you. If you want to do something, don’t wait to be invited, just do it. Storm your way through, make what you want to make, and know that whatever it looks like, it belongs. 

Advice for Emerging Artists 

My number one piece of advice is to be reliable. It can be intimidating getting your first commission. You might let the person down. It feels different to draw because you have to, instead of because you want to. Practice on your friends first. Get them to give you a character and draw it up for them on an estimated timeline and stick to it. People who hire artists want to know they’re going to get the art they need, in the time they need it. And once you’ve proven reliable, more work will come. 

Create an audience for yourself. Post to social media, show the world what you do. I am not the best artist. I absolutely know that some of the work I’ve gotten is because of the audience I have on social media. As an artist who draws TTRPG webcomics, I come ready made with the target audience many of the people who hire me are trying to reach. 

Don’t compare yourself to other artists. I believed I couldn’t work as this kind of artist because I drew cartoons. I compared myself to Magic the Gathering cards, to the loading screens on my games, and to the amazing painted illustrations in many of the books we consume. But I could, and you can. However you draw, whatever style, it belongs somewhere. 

And lastly, believe in the power of humans. In the age of generative AI, it can feel like there’s no place in the world for emerging artists. But I believe in you, a human, and what you want to make and share with the world, and so do many others. Our stories and our art connect us. And I plan to fight tooth and nail for creatives to keep creating. I hope you’ll join me in that battle – our epic quest, as fellow creatives. Let’s keep connecting with each other. 

Let’s keep shenanigans-ing.