Today we’d like to introduce you to Chloe Schans.
Hi Chloe, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I have always been fascinated by characters. Creating them, performing them, depicting them, investigating them. I cycled through wanting to be an author, illustrator, animator, rockstar, and filmmaker as a kid, all of which seem more or less like different ways of embodying characters and being a storyteller. I think I haven’t changed much at all in this regard since the age of 5, which could either be cool or embarrassing depending on how you look at it. Today, I most frequently channel this fascination into making illustrations, paintings, and music.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Connecting with other people by sharing, exchanging, and talking about art is extremely important to me, but sometimes, finding community is hard. I’ve lived in a rural area most of my life, which makes real-world connections more sparse, and most social media platforms irritate me so much that I struggle to maintain a consistent presence online. This is not ideal, because I want to see other people’s art and talk to them about it. Instead my eyeballs get blasted by five trillion ads and an evil algorithm programmed to give me super-anxiety every time I go online!
I’m working on being more active in local art spaces when I can find them and when I have the time outside of work.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am mostly a 2D artist; I primarily draw and paint. I tend to depict surreal scenes and am almost exclusively interested in portraying human or human-like figures and beings.
My most recent big project was Nervvy Nelly’s New Gig, a graphic novel I wrote and illustrated in 2023 and self-published in 2024. It chronicles the story of Nervvy Nelly, a punk rock bassist suffering from debilitating anxiety due to his tyrannical bandmate, whose life suddenly changes when he witnesses a friendly alien crash-land to earth in a cornfield and vows to help him find his way back home.
The process of creating Nervvy Nelly’s New Gig was exhilarating. I made it for a class called Narrative Forms in college, and it was only supposed to be about 20 pages long, but ended up being 100 because I couldn’t stop adding to the story (and I had great mentors and peers that encouraged me to take the story further). It came after a years-long spell of making paintings which were mostly fearful or pessimistic in tone. Writing Nervvy Nelly felt like I was wrestling with some sort of sentient force; it resisted hopelessness at every turn, even when I deliberately tried to steer it down that path. It ended up being one of the most hopeful and endearing messages I have ever created in a piece of art, and for that reason, it’s what I’m currently most proud of. That’s not to say I don’t still like making thematically or tonally dark work— I’m just happy to have something earnest in my portfolio to balance it out a bit.
It also felt really nice to create something that other people resonated with. Friends, family, and sometimes random internet strangers will tell me that they relate to a certain character that I made up, and it’s crazy and awesome to know that other people are participating in your little world. I try to be as inviting as possible. Even in the art style of the book, which is sketchy, black and white, with wobbly, hand-drawn panels— I could have refined it more, but I preferred to leave it that way. I felt like it was welcoming.
My creative output lately has been a little stagnant, and a big reason for that is that I’ve been taking my time writing what I hope will be a compelling and satisfying sequel to Nervvy Nelly’s New Gig. I feel like I have a lot more to explore with these characters I’ve introduced. I’ve also been spending a lot of time working on music projects with my band.
What would you say have been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
Share your artwork with people even if you think it sucks!
Someone might actually like it!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://creaturous.carrd.co
- Instagram: creaturous.jpg
- Other: https://globalcomix.com/read/5fe6758b-3c5e-4a86-b6e7-07dc16f79acb/1
