Today we’d like to introduce you to Daniel Monroe.
Hi Daniel, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I have been drawing for as long as I can remember. Art was never really something I decided to do one day—it has simply always been a part of who I am.
Over the years, that became a career. I have worked professionally as an illustrator and artist for decades, illustrating children’s books, creating commissioned artwork, working with publishers and authors, and even having the opportunity to work with some well-known people along the way. Much of my career was spent bringing other people’s stories and ideas to life, and I am very grateful that my artwork allowed me to make a living doing something I love.
But while I was illustrating other people’s stories, I was always creating my own.
For more than twenty years, my sketchbooks and drawing table have been filled with characters, stories and worlds of my own creation. Characters such as SHE-ORK, ValDra, Vik-Tor, Omega-Chick and the characters of Ye Gawds! have existed in various stages for many years. Some were developed extensively, while others were ideas and drawings that simply had to wait while paying illustration work took priority.
One of the biggest changes in my life recently has been largely stepping away from children’s-book illustration. After spending so many years helping other people tell their stories, I realized that if I didn’t begin seriously developing my own work, some of these stories might never be told.
So, in many ways, I feel as though I am beginning a second career without actually starting over.
I bring decades of experience as a professional illustrator with me, but now I am turning that experience toward the worlds and characters that have been living in my imagination all these years.
One of the projects I am most excited about is The First Howl, a mythological story involving Fenris, Loki, Thor, Odin and Frigga. Although it contains elements that people might initially associate with a werewolf story, I really see it as a mythic epic—something that should feel as though it might once have been told by a Skald around a fire on a dark night.
At the same time, I am developing several of my other properties and bringing them together under Dragonbrush Arts and DMON COMICS. They range from mythology and heroic fantasy to science fiction, cosmic adventure and comedy. They may look very different from one another, but they all come from the same storyteller.
That is really where I am today.
For much of my career, people knew me primarily as an illustrator of other people’s books. Now I want them to discover me as the creator of my own worlds.
I sometimes look around my studio at drawings of characters I first imagined twenty years ago and realize that they have been patiently waiting for me.
I think it is finally their turn.
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?
No, it certainly hasn’t been a smooth road, but I don’t know that any worthwhile creative life really is.
One of the greatest struggles has simply been survival as a working artist. There is a romantic idea of what it means to make your living through art, but the reality is that you have deadlines, bills, clients, changing markets and periods when you simply take the work that is available. For many years, children’s-book illustration was a large part of how I made my living. I am grateful for that career and everything I learned from it, but it also meant that my own characters and stories were continually pushed aside.
There are only so many hours in a day. When you have spent ten or twelve hours drawing someone else’s book, there isn’t always much left to give your own.
That is probably one of the more difficult things for me to look back upon. Some of the characters I am developing today were originally created twenty years ago or more. They weren’t abandoned. They were waiting.
I have also pursued projects that I believed deeply in that didn’t receive the support I had hoped for. I spent years developing and performing Captain Wallace’s Artsy Adventures, an interactive arts program for children and families. I put an enormous amount of myself into it, personally and financially. Eventually, I had to recognize that passion alone cannot sustain something indefinitely.
But I don’t consider those years wasted. Every project teaches you something. Every book I illustrated, every convention table, every performance, every painting that sold—and probably every one that didn’t—helped make me the artist and storyteller I am today.
There have also been plenty of times when I have questioned whether I should continue. Being an artist requires a strange combination of sensitivity and stubbornness. You have to care deeply enough to create something, while also developing a thick enough skin to survive when the world isn’t particularly interested in it.
I think that stubbornness has served me pretty well.
At this point in my life, my definition of success has changed. I am less interested in chasing whatever the industry happens to want from me and much more interested in creating the work that I believe I was supposed to create in the first place.
So no, it hasn’t been a smooth road.
But looking back, I can see that even the detours brought me here.
And I like where “here” is going.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
My work is actually rather difficult to put into one category, and I think that is one of the things that defines me as an artist.
I have spent much of my professional career as an illustrator. I am probably best known for my children’s-book illustration work, but my abilities and interests have always extended far beyond that. I work in pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, acrylics and digital media, and my subject matter ranges from highly detailed realistic portraiture to fantasy, mythology, science fiction, comics and character design.
I have never particularly liked the idea that an artist has to have only one style.
If I am drawing a delicate pencil portrait, that piece should have the sensitivity it requires. If I am painting a warrior standing on a battlefield, I want you to feel the weight, power and danger of that character. If I am drawing something humorous, I want the drawing itself to participate in the joke. The story determines the style rather than the other way around.
I think storytelling is probably the common thread running through almost everything I create.
Even when I create a single illustration, I tend to think about what happened five minutes before the moment I am drawing and what is going to happen five minutes afterward. Who is this person? Why are they standing there? What has happened to them? What are they thinking? Those questions inevitably find their way into the artwork.
Today, much of my attention is turning toward my own characters and stories through Dragonbrush Arts and DMON COMICS. I have an entire library of characters that I have created over the past twenty-plus years, including SHE-ORK, ValDra, Omega-Chick, Vik-Tor and Ye Gawds! Alongside those projects, I am developing The First Howl, a much darker mythological graphic novel inspired by Norse mythology.
What I am most proud of, however, probably isn’t any individual drawing, painting or book.
I am proud that I am still creating.
After decades of working professionally, I am still sitting at a drawing table with ideas that excite me. I am still learning. I am still experimenting. And perhaps most importantly, I still have things that I desperately want to draw.
I think what sets me apart is the combination of experience and imagination that I bring to the work. I have spent decades learning the craft of illustration, but I haven’t lost the kid who looks at a blank sheet of paper and sees an entire world waiting there.
At this stage of my career, I don’t want simply to demonstrate that I can draw.
I want to show people what has been living in my head all these years.
What do you like and dislike about the city?
I actually live in Paw Paw, so I tend to think of “our city” a little more broadly as the Kalamazoo and Southwest Michigan area.
What I like best about this area is that it still has a sense of community. Paw Paw is a small town, but Kalamazoo is close enough that I can participate in a much larger arts and creative community. As an artist, I appreciate having that combination. I can spend my days quietly working in my studio and still be within a short drive of galleries, events, conventions and other artists and creators.
I’ve also found that people in this area genuinely support local artists. When I attend conventions and events around Kalamazoo and Southwest Michigan, I have opportunities to meet people face-to-face, show them my artwork, talk about the stories behind it and sometimes see the same people again at another event. Those personal connections are important to me.
And Michigan itself is beautiful. We have forests, lakes, farmland and four very distinct seasons. For someone whose imagination tends to wander into mythology, fantasy and strange creatures in dark forests, Michigan provides plenty of inspiration!
If I had to choose something I like least, it would probably be that opportunities for independent artists and creators can sometimes feel limited compared with larger metropolitan areas. You occasionally have to work a little harder to find your audience.
But that has changed considerably because of the internet and social media. I can create something at my drawing table in Paw Paw, Michigan, share it with someone on the other side of the country—or the other side of the world—and then take the physical artwork to a convention and have someone walk up to my table who already knows it.
So I don’t really see living in a smaller community as a limitation.
For me, it’s home.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.dragonbrushart.com/
- Other: https://ko-fi.com/dmon/commissions
