Meet Emanuel Pavel

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Emanuel Pavel a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Emanuel, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?

It wasn’t easy. It was a process that took years and that I wasn’t aware of for a long time. But, at a certain point, at a crossroads, I stopped and looked carefully into the past. That’s how I noticed that the events of my life flowed naturally from one another. How each of them played a clear role in the one that followed, how none could exist without the other, as if strung together on a shining thread. “This is it,” I said to myself. And since then I’ve tried to follow that thread as faithfully as possible.
I’ve always loved drawing. As a child, I would fill entire pages with drawings of all kinds. I continued to draw even when times forced me to opt for a profession other than drawing. I graduated from college, started practicing that profession, but I didn’t stop drawing. I did my job as well as I could, but I didn’t find it fulfilling. In the meantime, I’d publish cartoons in small local magazines from time to time. Then, drawing also became part of my work, albeit on a secondary level. A first step, the importance of which I wasn’t aware of at the time!
Then, for financial reasons, I moved to the capital of the country, Bucharest. And here I took a second job as an illustrator at a publishing house. I was doing illustrations for school textbooks. This was the second step! When I was fired from my main job I became a freelancer in what was left to me: drawing. This was the turning point!
I’ve been doing this for 17 years. And I love what I do! Over time, my drawings have become an integral part of countless children’s books. At some point, I realized that thousands, tens of thousands of Romanian children, have learned and are currently learning from books containing my drawings. And then I knew I’d found my path.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I was very happy to have found my path. As I’d already told you, it wasn’t easy, but once found, this path opened up other possibilities. Now I draw every day for a living. From a hobby, drawing has turned into a profession. I have deadlines, I don’t always draw what I want, but I haven’t lost my pleasure to draw. I think that’s essential. And learning too.
I don’t have studies in the field. Everything I do I’d learned on my own, studying various tutorials (many tutorials), reading various books (many books), constantly trying to enrich my visual culture and striving to apply what I’d learned in my daily work. If you put passion in everything you do, it’s impossible not to succeed. Because passion makes all the steps you must follow in your training as a professional not to seem difficult. That’s my personal belief.
I was talking above about new possibilities. Well, a few years ago, I started working in the field of comics. It’s another “youthful” dream, apparently forgotten, that now I have the chance to fulfill. To be more clear: I’ve loved comics since childhood, before the 1989 Revolution. Back then, I’d dreamt I would end up doing something like that. For a long time, it wasn’t possible, because in Romania, during communism, comics were not a popular genre and in no way could they represent a “serious” profession according to most people.
Recently, however, in Romania, the interest for comics has been growing significantly. And suddenly, four years ago, I found myself making my own comics. Since then, I went to comics contests, won prizes and had a lot of satisfaction. Not as a job, but as, again, a hobby. If I hadn’t had a job as an illustrator (which taught me patience and trained me professionally), I probably wouldn’t have started making comics. As I said, one thing leads to another…
Then my first comic book album „LUMEA MAGICĂ A LUI PUF” – “The magical world of Puf” (the name “Puf” can be translated as “Fluff”) was published by a major publishing house in Romania. It’s about a bunny who lives with his friends in the world inside a magician’s top hat. It’s an album about childhood, about the awe and wonder of discovering the world at that age when everything seems magical.
Currently, the album is available only in Romania, but you can buy it online from the publishing house’s website (www.editura-arthur.ro), here: It belongs to the “silent comics” genre (it has no dialogues) and therefore can easily cross the language barrier. I’m currently working on my second album about Puf. And it seems there will be more to come.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

I think the most important quality is patience. Lack of patience tends to rush things and believe me, when it comes to drawing, it’s obvious when something was done in a hurry. But I don’t think it only applies to artists. I think those “first steps”, the accumulation of basic knowledge and skills, seem slow and boring no matter the profession and most people tend to rush through them. However, they are essential and if we arm ourselves with patience and do them properly, it will bring us faster to the desired level (paradoxical, right?).
For me, patience is an acquired quality. Even now, I’m not a very patient person. As soon as I start to draw a comic page I want it finished already, because other ideas are waiting in line, clamoring to be put on “paper”. But being aware of this tendency, I always tell myself: “Be patient!”. Most of the time, I succeed.
A second quality would be curiosity. Always be curious to learn new things in your field (but choose your sources wisely). Never stop learning. Over time, I’d tried various drawing styles and methods. Doing this, I’ve come to crystallize my own style, to know what I really want to draw and how to progress in that direction. Even when I’m not drawing, I like learning new things. I can’t seem to stop, nor do I want to.
The third quality is responsibility. The seriousness you put into your job. From large tasks to tiny ones, solve them all with maximum dedication. Because what may seem unimportant to you could be very important to others or could have an echo in their lives. For me, as an illustrator of children’s books, each drawing matters in all its details. Because my job is to convey as accurately as possible – through my drawings – the information from the author to the children. If I can bring something more, that’s great, but what I mainly aim for is to transmit the information as clearly as possible. When I draw, I always have in mind the audience I’m drawing for. If it occurs to me that a child might be sad because the flower in the drawing is missing a leaf, then I’ll draw it. An extra leaf in a children’s drawing may never be noticed, but its absence certainly will.
I’m not convinced there are “native qualities”, only “educated qualities”. I think it all starts with having a hobby. A hobby means you’re very interested about something and you consciously invest time and energy to fulfill this need. This way, one tends to accumulate as much information as possible (it never seems enough) so that, at some point, he/she becomes a professional in that field. In my opinion, the ideal would be to try to convert your hobby into a job. If not completely, then by choosing a job where your hobby is the helping hand you need, the friend you can lean on.
My advice would be this: find your true hobby. And don’t worry if it’s not the first thing you thought of.

What would you advise – going all in on your strengths or investing on areas where you aren’t as strong to be more well-rounded?

I think you must use all the skills you have. Professionally speaking. Because there’s something that connects them all and that “something” is you. You’re the soil they grew up from. Only by pursuing some of your passions or dreams did you acquire those skills. It doesn’t even matter how different they are from each other, or whether they are old or new. If you look carefully at your daily work, please notice that you already use fragments of old and new skills, like in a puzzle, to do your job as well as possible.
Let’s take me for example: when I was a child, in addition to drawing, I became a passionate reader. Reading a lot, I wanted to write. After practicing my writing for years, in parallel with drawing, I went to the Faculty of Journalism (because my family didn’t see me making a living from drawing). In the meantime, I founded a local rock band with some friends. And that’s what taught me teamwork. Afterwards, becoming a journalist, it was easy for me to integrate into the editorial team, because… I already knew teamwork.
As a journalist, I learned to express myself clearly and I continuously practiced responsibility towards my readers. Then I took my second job, drawing. Then drawing remained my only job. But even in my current profession I employ, quite naturally, my journalistic experience: the way I organize my ideas and put them on paper. Although the work environment is different, the stages I go through to complete a drawing are the same as those used when writing an article: documentation, organizing the content, choosing the elements that need to be highlighted, and arranging everything into a logical and attractive structure. Not to mention the responsibility and seriousness towards the clients and the public, quintessential for a freelancer. In addition, after so many years spent using my writing skills as a journalist, today I can write my own scripts for some of the comics I work on.
And now let’s go a little in reverse: today I make full use of skills acquired by practicing journalism. Which came from the desire to write, which came from the pleasure of reading. Which came from my childhood, even before drawing. Of course, I constantly improve my drawing style. But I use all my skills to highlight it.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emanugrafix/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100048589886728

Image Credits

All images are from my personal archive.