Seeing the Gray

With her drawing stylus in hand and touchscreen monitor before her, Steph Gray carefully pencils out a character posing in a panel, the last one of the short comic she’s making. With a few last strokes, the deed is done, and Gray leans back.

“Penciling is the biggest chunk of the process,” she said.

GROWING UP

Gray is a freelance digital artist who lives in Sulphur Springs, and she has pushed through challenge after challenge starting with multiple surgeries when she was an infant.

“I was born 16 weeks premature, and I had issues with my eyes. A lot of babies have that,” she said. “The surgeries left a lot of scar tissue.”

Gray found her affinity for drawing early when she was about 8 years old; however, it wasn’t until a little later that she found her passion for writing.

“I hated reading before,” Gray said. “But then I read A Wrinkle in Time, and then later on I read Eragon, and I figured that if this boy in the mountains can write something like this, I could too.”

After her third grade English teacher gave an assignment to write a creative short story about a leprechaun finding their gold. The teacher wanted a page for the story. Gray gave them five.

“It [the books] opened this box of what writing offers,” she said.

“I didn’t hear about it until about a month later,” she said. “Then the teacher called me over and told me that they thought I cheated, and they failed me.”

However, karma was sweet as the principal heard of the incident and talked to the teacher, and Gray kept writing.

“Writing helped me with my depression and anxiety,” she said. “When I moved into middle school, I was bullied, and I was homeschooled during high school because of it.”

Tragedy struck her family when Gray was 17. Her father died, and it left the family in a lurch because he had been the breadwinner. Her mother began working, and Gray wrote very little for about a year.

“I wouldn’t do much besides short stories,” she said.

Gray enrolled at Paris Junior College when she finished her high school curriculum, and at a time when she was refining her writing, she also began working on her art.

“I hadn’t drawn a lot since I was 8, so it was still at that level,” Gray said. “I wanted to be better at it.”

Her writing didn’t suffer, however, as she entered into PJC’s annual creative writing competition in 2013 and 2014 with the short stories “Opening to Love” and “Galactic Warriors” respectively.

“I won first place the first year I entered,” Gray said. “I was an honorable mention the second year.”

Gray graduated from PJC with her associate degree in English, and she earned a scholarship to Le-Tourneau University. However, she said it was “not a good experience” due to the university’s lack of creative writing classes.

During her time at Le-Tourneau, Gray participated in National Novel Writing Month which takes place during November. Participants work toward writing a 50,000-word novel during the month, and for Gray, a college student, the timing could have been better.

“Everything was happening then,” she said. “It was the worst timing with midterms and grades given back, but writing every day consistently really saved me back then.”

She knew then that writing was her calling.

GOING FREELANCE

With penciling done, Gray turns toward the next step in creating digital art: inking. For this, she turns on some music, readies her tools and zones out as she carefully retraces the comic and its characters with thicker, darker lines.

“Inking is probably the easiest part,” Gray said. “I just zone out while listening to music or a podcast.”

While Gray attended LeTourneau, she had serious doubts on finishing her four-year degree.

“I had my associates from PJC,” she said. “I always felt like I had to go to a university, a four-year one. People told me that I have to do this.”

Meanwhile, she kept polishing her writing and drawing, but the two remained somewhat separate. She considered going freelance, but it seemed like too much of a risk. That changed one day.

“I was going through YouTube videos, and I watched one where the guy said, ‘If you don’t take risks, you die,’” Gray said.

She was talking about YouTuber Conrad Collins, better known as Digibro, who was addressing risk and reward in a 2016 video. He took his own risk in launching his YouTube channel where, according to Collins, he has no work benefits, little stability and out-of-pocket taxes.

He played a snippet of video from another YouTuber, Casey Neistat, known for taking dangerous risks for unique camera shots.

“As a guiding principle, life shrinks and life expands in direct proportion to your willingness to assume risk,” Niestat said in a 2015 video.

Hearing this, Gray decided to assume risk and went freelance, dropping out of LeTourneau and focusing on her art.

She made her dive into comics that combined visual elements and narrative storytelling, and she found creating them was “satisfying.”

“I love to sit down at the end of the day and have something that I made,” Gray said.

When she first started, Gray could create two pages a day, but then she developed carpal tunnel syndrome which, though she has treatment, limited her output to a single page a day.

Then, her vision in her right eye disappeared.

“It hit me right when I was hitting my stride,” Gray said. “I could see out of my left eye, but the right was just white.”

She had four surgeries to reattach her retinas, and then she developed cataracts some months later that were also surgically removed.

This impacted her work, Gray said, because she could not see much detail and had tunnel vision restricted to her only working eye. It also threw off her sense of perspective, but she said that having contacts has helped.

So, she soldiered on.

“In between the four surgeries and the cataracts, I illustrated a children’s book for a Swedish author,” Gray said. “I did it in about one month.”

Hans M. Hirschi published the children’s book The Dragon Princess in September 2018, and Gray, under the pen name Felicity Swan, was the illustrator.

HER ART &

INSPIRATION

Gray turns off the music and stretches after sitting for some time. She considers the black and white comic before her, characters and dialogue all filled in. It’s technically ready, and she’s made black and white comics before. But she feels like something’s missing. Color splashes onto the comic’s characters as Gray adds vibrant mixtures of hues and shades.

“Coloring is usually the final step in making a comic,” Gray said.

To trace Gray’s inspiration, one has to go back to middle school, a rather hard time for her, and to the Japanese comic Loveless by Yun Koga.

“It made me feel understood back then when I was an awkward eighth grader,” Gray said. “It was a huge influence, and that got me into making mini-comics though it was after LeTourneau when I really started doing this.”

She also points to the comic essay collection Brick By Brick by Stephen McCranie as inspiration as it details the process of sustaining creativity and mastering an art.

As for her style, Gray said she prefers realistic elements, but she is working on understanding and creating more abstract art.

“Abstract is almost foreign to me,” she said. “It’s something I’ve never touched, but I’m doing some allegorical projects to build more of that abstract base.”

Gray’s biggest project, Final Break, stands at two chapters so far with a third launching its first pages Sept. 7. According to Gray, the idea for the comic was based off a crazy dream, but when she began to write it in novel form, something didn’t sit right.

“When I sat down to writing it, I suddenly had this idea that it would make a better comic,” Gray said. “And I was happier that it was a comic.”

When she first started posting her art, Gray said she had been a bit nervous, but she followed the thought of “someone’s going to hate it, and someone’s going to love it.”

With the one-page comic finished, Gray uploads it to the internet under her current pen name, Finn Swan, inspired by a Irish legend and her heritage. As the views tick upward and some money comes in, there’s something else Gray hopes to achieve with her art.

“I want to reach somebody,” she said. “And I want to pay it forward.”