Today we’d like to introduce you to Ryan Reveles aka FLuX.
Hi Ryan, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
My art began at an early age. My father is an artist/painter and would encourage my artistic expression by giving me art lessons and bringing home sketchbooks and materials for me to work on. My father and I would paper m’ach’e masks for Halloween or I would draw an idea out for a spaceship and he would help me build it out of cardboard. I would draw little cartoon characters and make little comic stories about them. I would take art workshops as I got older and in Highschool joined the art program. Finally, in college I pursued the illustration major at Pcc (Pasadena City College). With intentions of possibly transferring to either long beach or art center, I received positive feedback from my teachers. By this time, I knew that I wanted to be a successful independent comic book artist/author. Coming to the realization of how diverse the success of indie comic authors are with varying degrees of artistic expression, I decided to just start working on a graphic novel.
With several different short stories that explored different techniques, I found the ongoing webcomic saga method to be most successful. My webcomic, Trixysparks and The Talented Mr. Wellington has been an ongoing series for several years now. It’s an ongoing saga, which allows me the freedom to update it when I can while I myself handle regular life (which tends to be quite unpredictable). The community of webcomic creators is strong, everyone supporting each other, and has helped tremendously with establishing a bit of a fan base. With the active webcomic series slowly picking up momentum and the rise of the cartoon industry (from both an artistic expression standpoint and practical standpoint due to the recent pandemic) I hope to turn my webcomic series into a cartoon series. This goal of mine has led to my expansion of artistic knowledge and practice of animation. I have recently picked up the opentoonz software and have been teaching myself to animate in hopes to create a substantial pilot episode that could be pitchable to the likes of cartoon network. With my YouTube channel, I’ve been posting up my little animation skits and I think after about 12 of them, I could have a 15mn reel.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
No. It definitely has not been a smooth road. Housing, jobs, relationships, life. Always presents a struggle/ challenge that precedes my artistic priorities. And of course to be legitimized is to be making big bucks from your work as an artist in this country, so my art is categorized as a hobby until that ever happens. In the meantime, I just keep my bags packed until I can setup shop and keep pushing the pencil until I can make it happen.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
So, I’m mainly working on this webcomic series and working the animations. The work can best be described as satirical comedy based in the post-apocalyptical future where the land is basically destroyed and lawless yet corporations still try and push they’re products on a dying society in the most campy and detached manner or propaganda. Kind of what happens in today’s era.
Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
The best advice I could give is just to not give up. Doesn’t matter your skill level, just keep creating. Look at every piece you do as a practice and you’ll never get stuck in trying to be perfect.
Contact Info:
- Website: trixysparks.thecomicseries.com
- Instagram: ryan_flux
- Facebook: facebook.com/ryanfluxart
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxdFojobb7tf-V54PgMN5fw
