Meet Caleb King

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Caleb King. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Caleb, we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?

I was the eternal odd duck.

The last kid picked in any group activity.

The nerdy kid who fell in with the ones who played Dungeons and Dragons.

The kid who liked Star Wars.

Once upon a time I saw these things as obstacles needing conquering, but no longer.

All of these things are my greatest strengths.

I was never the person that good things just happened to. Never the person who found forgotten money in an old winter coat, or won concert tickets in a call in radio promotion. I was always the kid who forgot their school lunch at home, the one who would fall and skin the knees of his dress pants on school picture day. The kid with the weird name.

Caleb.

It was hard to find a horrible nickname that stuck to me, but that didn’t stop people from trying.

Elementary school was hard for me. I had a lush and vivid imagination, and much preferred to spend my time there rather than the objectivity of english or math classes. My grades were never all that great, and despite my intelligence (I was a very bright child), I couldn’t keep my mind from delving into the depths of my imagination.

It was here, in the third grade, that I found JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

This book single handedly opened my mind to the possibilities of creativity. The environments, the characters, the battle for good and evil.

Smaug, the vile dragon.

I wanted to make my own worlds, my own characters, my own stories.

This didn’t help my popularity one single bit.

It did, however, provide the soil from which the love of my adult life would grow from.

My unpopularity grew through my middle school years, and that culminated in a complete and total lack of self-esteem. My own opinion of myself was ragged and ugly. I loved video games and comic books like any other boy my age, but the friendships I had were few, and my social standing was non-existent.

It was at this time I discovered girls.

Talk about adding insult to injury.

I let it slip to one of my friends that I had a crush on a girl named Lisa, and he proceeded to tell everyone he could to up his own social standing. All I got were comments of “ewwwwww…” or “gross” from literally everyone in my class, including Lisa.

Is it possible to go lower than absolute zero? Because I was there.

My peers picked on me. My friends made fun of me. The girl I liked thought I was gross.

My education, that was never stellar to begin with, took a nose dive.

My parents finally intervened after a pretty telling parent/teacher conference in my seventh grade year. After my parents were brought up to speed on the state of my educational progress, they decided to pull me out of school and homeschool me.

In spite of my lack of interest in school up to that point, I was broken hearted about the move.

I felt like a complete moron. I couldn’t even do what every other kid in the world seemed to be able to do.

My utter failure was now complete.

My eighth grade year was an adjustment to say the least. Sleeping in, getting a handle on the new educational environment, dealing with my siblings who were also now being homeschooled, and the isolation and loneliness. I no longer saw my peers regularly, and as much as I didn’t fit in, I missed them.

It was my first year of high school at home where I found my footing.

I found the freedom in my situation.

I could finish my school in around three hours.
I could use that time to write and draw.
I picked up the guitar after begging my parents for one.

I found myself underneath all the shit and ugliness that others had heaped on me in their insecurity and pain.

I realized that the things I loved were valid and important, not just to me, but to others as well.

I began the long journey to love myself, and art and music were the path forward.

A few years later I joined a band as a guitarist and vocalist.
I began drawing seriously instead of just mindlessly doodling.
I didn’t give up when it got hard.
I pushed through my own nagging insecurities and kept pushing forward.

I chose to devote myself to my writing. My music. My art.
I honed my skills day in and day out.
I stopped making excuses for other’s behavior and chose to focus on myself.

I grew.
I learned.

It took years to become comfortable in my own skin.
It took years to unlearn all of the coping mechanisms.
It took patience and self-love to accept myself.

I joined another band and helped write songs, toured the country, and signed a few recording contracts.
I went to school and studied painting, earning my BFA in Illustration from the American Academy of Art in Chicago.

I became a father.

I learned an important lesson far later than I wanted: Other people’s opinions about you don’t matter whatsoever.

They don’t live your life.
They don’t walk in your shoes.
They don’t live with the consequences of your choices.

They don’t have your passions.
They don’t think your thoughts.
They don’t have your unique perspective.

They don’t wake up with new songs in their head.
They don’t wake up with visions of elves in their minds.
They don’t have worlds forming in their consciousness.

They aren’t me.
They don’t get to tell me who I am.

Ever.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I am an illustrator, writer, and musician living in the Chicago area.

My main artistic media is watercolor, and I produce nearly all of my professional content that way.

My main artistic focus is on painting my own fantasy IP which focuses on elves in a fantasy world I named Ardoresh. These drawings and paintings can be found under the banner of work called ELF AS FUCK, and includes my original fantasy pulp stories called The Umbra.

I also create illustrations for Lucasfilm, making my father the proudest dad of all.

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?

Music: Music Theory. I am a believer in learning all the rules so you know how to break them. If you never know the rules, everything is just chaos and happenstance.

Writing: READ EVERYTHING. I’m not a trained writer, but I’m a natural storyteller. Reading all the time has taught me how to write, as I’ve learned so much from absorbing the style and voices of those I’ve read. I read a pretty diverse assortment of literature from fantasy/sci-fi to historical fiction to everything in between (well, maybe not EVERYTHING…).

Painting: Drawing is the most important skill any artist can possess. If the bones are solid, a bad painting can still look good. If the bones are bad, the painting, no matter how well executed, is on bad bones and will not hold up.

Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?

There is one particular book that kicked open the doors in my mind, and that was JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

I went to a unique elementary school wherein the entire philosophy of the school was about individualized education. We called the teachers by their first names, the focus was on self-disciplined learning, and what they called the 4-R’s: Respect, Responsibility, Resourcefulness, and Responsiveness.

One of the highlights of this program was the creative courses in the afternoon. Twice a year the school would hold what I wolf essentially call a “job fair” and the students would get a small catalog with course descriptions and the teachers who were offering the classes. The students would then create their afternoon schedules, and go from class to class and sign up for their chosen courses. If a class was at capacity (the popular ones always filled up quickly) you would need to have a second option.

One particular year, I had chosen my favorite courses and got signed up before capacity, but that meant that other classes I wanted would be full before I got to them. This meant I had to take a class simply called The Hobbit. The class consisted of us students listening to the teacher reading the entire novel, and we would occasionally have coloring sheets to help keep us from getting too antsy from sitting for long periods of time.

I was not excited about this class.

I did, however, soon find it to be my favorite class. In this class I was entering a fantasy world where the characters were clever, and funny, and mysterious. There was bravery, song, horror, fear, battle, and a massive battle of wits between the smallest and the biggest of characters.

The story was a true epic.

This story opened an entirely new world to me, and I wanted more. Fantasy novels soon became my favorite stories, and I eventually began to write my own. A large part of my professional endeavors now center around fantasy and science fiction as a direct result of this one class, This one, singular story about a Hobbit who preferred the comfort of home to the company of Dwarves and the call to adventure.

I owe a part of my life to Bilbo Baggins.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://TheCalebKing.com
• Instagram: @TheCalebKing
• Other: My Patreon features all my new and current work, as well as my illustration archive:

  Patreon.com/TheCalebKing