Meet Antonia Lacerda

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Antonia Lacerda. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Antonia below.

Hi Antonia, thank you so much for opening up with us about some important, but sometimes personal topics. One that really matters to us is overcoming Imposter Syndrome because we’ve seen how so many people are held back in life because of this and so we’d really appreciate hearing about how you overcame Imposter Syndrome.

I’ve always been self critical, which I think every artist can relate to, but that common and manageable anxiety evolved into full fledged imposter syndrome when I entered art school for the first time. I didn’t know many other artists growing up; I was the “art kid” in the classroom, which warped my perception of my own ability. So to go from that environment to an arts university and realizing that everyone here was the art kid was a real culture shock. I saw classmates with amazing ability, some who probably could’ve gone pro after the first year, along with others that already had popular Instagram accounts and even online shops. I felt small, jealous, and embarrassed, questioning if my entry into the school was just a happy accident and not a result of my own efforts, which seemed lesser compared to others.

There was no magic cure for this syndrome, and I didn’t have any overnight revelation that suddenly lifted my spirits. It was a journey that took all the years I spent at RISD, studying and practicing all the fundamentals of art. Over time, I could see my skills improve slowly but surely, and that was an important first step. It doesn’t matter where you start, as long as you’re getting better, that’s all that matters, right? But that wasn’t enough to really soothe my spirit. Even as I was improving, I feared that others were doing so even faster, and that I would be left in the dust. Why would people care about my work if there was somebody else that was even better already? In my last year, I was fortunate enough to receive the supervision of an excellent senior professor. She oversaw various projects I did in my last couple of semesters, and I trusted her feedback completely. I told her once how I felt like I was in the bottom rung of the class, and I wasn’t sure what I had to offer in the eyes of other people, and she gave me some advice that I had never heard before.

She said that the worth of art isn’t just a line from ‘bad’ to ‘good’; it’s a spectrum with many different directions and axis, and every artist occupies a point on that spectrum. Every artist, whether they realize it or not, gravitate to certain subjects, traits, and stories. These are our passions, what distinguish us as individuals, and it’s this that distinguishes artists, not ability or experience. Skill and polish are well and good, but those alone will not give your art punch or meaning. You need to focus on what it is you love and want to say, without shame or inhibition. Your personal voice isn’t just a fun addition to your art, it is the essential backbone. Without it, you would just be imitating others, becoming a worse facsimile of works that already exist, and the point of our job is, hopefully, to make things that haven’t been done before. She told me that if colleges and companies were only looking to bring in already perfect, established artists, the field of art would be a millionth of the size it is. Instead, what people really value is YOU, the potential that you bring and the style that you are capable of developing. This attitude was so inspiring to me, one not focused on raw talent but on passion and potential, and I am grateful that she helped me rediscover it.

I think one of the most insidious things that imposter syndrome does is demotivate you from doing the work that you really want to do. I think every artist has a project that they would love to accomplish, but they think that they don’t have the skills to fully realize it yet. I’ll do it later, when I’ve perfected this and that, we think. And even when we do work on it, we are often scared to show other people because we fear that our enthusiasm for our own work could be taken as a haughty pride. “My work isn’t that good, what right do I have to try and pretend it’s something worthwhile?” But if we take this attitude, how will we ever improve? How would any difficult or interesting piece of art ever get made? Art doesn’t appear when it’s ready, it needs us to make it. Now I want to do the ideas that I have justice, by making them reality.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I’m an illustrator, with a focus on concept art and editorial illustration. I use primarily digital software to sketch and render characters, environments, and scenes. I have a really wide range of interests, from historical fiction to horror short stories to high fantasy, and I want to display as much of my tastes as possible. I haven’t forgotten my roots in traditional painting though, so I make sure to practice the fundamentals of art and color. Sometimes you take a break from drawing one thing by drawing something else, which is fun.

Ever since I was a kid, I had a million ideas in my head of characters and stories that I wanted to get out onto paper. This fascination has naturally drawn me to doing concept art. Concept art of visual development is the type of sketching, layout, and illustrations done in the preproduction phase of major projects like film, animation, and video games. It’s where the art team figures out how they want the general style of the project to look like, from obvious factors like the characters and locations, to even subtler ones like props and textures. You don’t see the exact art in the final product, but you see the effort in the beautifully polished and realized world. I’ve worked on small games projects before, and seeing my sketches fully animated in a game is an amazing feeling. I would love to contribute to even bigger projects in the future.

I also love the pairing of art and writing. I’ve done a bit of editorial illustration, pairing art that is tied to a journalistic article, with the hope that the illustration helps to summarize and capture the writing, and imagined book covers for theoretical novel reprints. A passion I am trying to pursue recently is my old love of comics. Making a comic is a time consuming, difficult process of combining dialogue and drawing, but the final result feels so worthwhile. I finished my biggest comic yet “Stretching Day” for my senior final, and am excited to get started on my other comic ideas.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I think that some of the most important qualities an artist can have is a desire to explore art, the willingness to practice consistently, and a receptiveness to criticism.

Exploration is important; an artist should love art and probably loves looking at it. If you’re aiming for a specific genre or field, pay attention to artists online and see what traits their art has. You’re not looking to just copy them, you’re looking to be inspired and combine them with your own style. Get out of your comfort zone sometimes and look at trends and styles you don’t think you’d like at first glance, there’s often lessons you can learn even from artists completely different than you.

Practice is the only magic pill for improving your work. No amount of tutorship or tutorial binging will do anything if you don’t physically apply the concepts you are learning on paper. For visual artists, just a little can go a long way. It’s often better to draw for a bit every day instead of taking long breaks and trying to cram knowledge all at once. It’s a bit like studying for a test, you’ll retain information better if you do it over a long time, not during an all-nighter.

One of the most valuable things that RISD offered to us students was a culture of friendly but direct criticism. Every class has a section where we’d all sit down and offer feedback on all of our homework. Getting strong criticism can definitely hurt the first time, but we do it for a reason. Artists can get stuck in our own heads a lot, and feedback from other people can help us see issues and improvements that we just couldn’t see the first time. So keep an open mind and your ego down and you can fix a lot of your sore spots.

How can folks who want to work with you connect?

I am really getting back into comics, and my resolution this year is so finish more comic short stories than ever. Comics are very time intensive and it can feel a bit lonely doing it on one’s own, so I really want to connect with other comics creators. I’ve also been considering creating an online space such as a Discord server in order to create a community of creators. I want to make a space that can help encourage those who are interested in creating comics to pursue their goals, with consistent feedback and support, and also opportunities to collaborate together on anthologies and multi partner works. I think there’s so many interesting experiences we need to encourage. If you’re interested in comic work, you can message me on X and Y.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://pileofants.carrd.co/
• Instagram: pileofants_
• Linkedin: http://linkedin.com/in/antonia-lacerda-632b4a225

Image Credits

All the images are art made by me. The last is a page from my most recent comic “Stretching Day”.