Steenz Quotes

I do like the idea that not only white people have to have adventures. So when you’re designing characters, who they are, what their ethnicity is like part of them, but it’s not everything.

It's all about visibility for me. It took me visually seeing another Black female doing the work for me to have my entire life changed. I always say yes to panels, yes to interviews, because I want to make sure that whoever is looking at the interview sees me. Then maybe kids will end up in a cartooning class saying, “I want to be like Steenz.”

anxiety and depression can also change how you see what people are doing and what they’re saying and what [they’re] actually meaning.

you don’t want your stories to all be people who just have their shit together all the time. They need to be flawed because humanity is flawed. Everyone’s got problems, y’know? And I’m just really happy that we’re able to get that across sensitively to people. ’Cause we also didn’t want it to go too far to the other end where it’s like, oh, ’cause she has a mental illness she’s crazy. That’s not what we wanted to do.

I try to put as much of their personality into the kind of clothes that they wear and how they wear their hair or their make-up and so on and so forth

I like to make sure that I have time where I don’t draw at all. So that schedule, I will do it like five out of seven days. And then those two days that I have, I can relax and, when I get back into it, I don’t get burnt out. Because burnout is real. I mean, when I finished Archival Quality, I was like, ‘I’m not gonna draw again.’ And I don’t think I drew anything like in earnest for like four to six months.

I definitely am very deliberate and strict when it comes to my schedule. So, while I was working on Archival Quality, the big bulk of it anyway, I was working at the library. And so that was still full-time work. So I would do eight hours at the library, come home, take a nap, wake up, get some dinner with my husband, and then work for four hours or four pages, whichever came first. And that’s how I worked for the majority of the time. And just making sure to stick to that schedule is a lot mentally, just because there are days where I’m like, “I never wanna draw ever again.” But it’s definitely worth it. And, once you get into that habit, it’s really easy to keep the train going.