MANILA, PHILIPPINES — On the second day of Graphika Manila 2024, the Philippines’ biggest event for graphic designers and creatives, Risa Rodil took the stage to share how something often deemed by the world as “weird and obsessive” actually allowed her to carve her path as a creative in the industry. Fondly, she introduced herself as a “designer, illustrator, letterer, and professional fangirl,” a proud nod to what started it all: fan art.
Risa recalled that her fangirl story really started out in 2010 when she created her Tumblr account. Tumblr, as most users know, is a vibrant hub for all fandoms. With memes, inside jokes, art, and other pop culture fragments constantly circulating across the social media platform. “It’s the place where we can nerd out with fellow nerds,” Risa reminisced.
At the time, she was working as a website designer fresh out of college, with fanarts serving as her outlet and source of comfort amidst the stress of her day job. She started out by reimagining her favorite TV shows, musicals, movies, and books as posters on the evenings when she got home from work, and before she knew it, it became a part of her nightly routine to create something personal and share it with her community.
It was in 2013 when she discovered the concept of lettering, or creating every letter from scratch. She instantly fell in love with it and continued to practice it on digital, with her favorite fandoms once again taking center stage. The freedom it brought in her creativity, the realization of the power of words, and the fact that she can’t, in her words, “draw people to save [her] life” were key factors in her endearment with lettering. It also helped that there were no font licensing fees in this practice. As she practiced and released more fan art, she soon realized that she wanted to do it full-time. So, in 2015, she made the leap and formally resigned from her day job.
While continuing to create fanart for various fandoms and sharing it online, Risa landed her first major lettering gig. What started out as a personal project to reimagine the cover art for Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park turned into the beginning of a wonderful journey of client work fueled by community-shared posters designed by Risa. For this book project, the author personally reached out to Risa to use her fanart for republishing in the UK after seeing the design make rounds online.
This story is an obvious trend across many of Risa’s client work, which led to her being discovered by different publishers, and the likes of Marvel (Captain Marvel and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) and Disney (Raya and the Last Dragon) – while growing her online community through piles and piles of fandom-fueled personal projects.
However, she shared that the downside of doing fanarts is that people usually didn’t take her seriously. She wanted to emphasize this to the audience, mostly composed of students and young artists: to not care about the noise. “I don’t care because I love doing fanarts. And when you do things you love, you share a part of yourself in your creations, which makes them very relatable,” she underlined. “Being authentic is more important than being the best.”
In Risa’s case, it all goes back to her fangirl heart — composed of all her interests and obsessions in media: “If you’re not hurting anybody, and it makes you happy, that’s all that matters.”
Because the majority of her projects are of things that she actually loves, she was able to constantly work on her craft while still having a lot of fun and establish her personal creative process:
- Start with a desire to learn
- Use obsession as inspiration
- Practice again and again
- Improve
“Practice makes progress, not perfect,” she said.
To end her session, Risa shared the key takeaway she hopes the audience would use to fuel their paths forward: “Be the weird you wish to see in the world.” That is, to use their personal interests, hobbies, and obsessions — no matter how seemingly weird the world would lead them to believe — as the foundation of their passions and creative work, and most importantly, share it with the world.
As proven by her story with online fandoms and client acquisition, you never know who might see your work, and what opportunities it might open up.
adobo Magazine is an official media partner of Graphika Manila 2024.
