Maf: The Road to 100k Part 1
How this webtoons artist built up an army of dedicated fans in 2 short years
What's your background and what are you working on?
My bachelor's degree is in computer science and most of my education is actually very scientific! Computer science gave me good job prospects and skillsets, but I just wasn't that into it for the most part. It can get pretty soul-draining at times.
Then I moved to the U.K. to do a one year master's degree in 3D animation, and while it was definitely a good experience, it didn't really help me with anything that I'm working on currently.
I didn't do a lot of artsy stuff professionally until I got contracted with Webtoon in 2019, so this is actually my first art job. Art has been always something that I did on the side but recently I quit my job to work on it full time for a while.
I'm also studying again, this time physics haha. I guess the moral of the story is that you don't really need an arts degree to get places with your artwork.
My mentality has always been: do something for financial stability then make art for fun. If you have the discipline to do it on the side, you should.
So what motivated you to get started with your art?
I'm the kind of person that says I've always done it, but honestly, I'm just a very competitive person. I remember back in primary or even nursery, I had these friends that were artsy when I wasn’t. I think that motivated me to start sketching and drawing. I just wanted to get up to their level.
I remember being like four and my friend would walk in to class and say, look what my mom drew (her mother was a fashion designer of sorts?). I was like damn, I want to do that too! Eventually art just naturally become a passion.
I also read the W.I.T.C.H. magazines, the Italian comics. All my friends would read them and the drawing style was really expressive and captivated me a lot. They also had this really basic website from the early 2000s that would show you how to draw certain pages from the comic.
I always kind of sketched but in 10th grade I started trying harder to improve and I got into digital art. It was around 2010 or 2011 that I decided to go on the Internet and see if there was any place for artists to share their stuff, and I ended up growing a little through DeviantArt. I even did some commissions back then, and kind of got into it.
I never actually thought about making it my job, but I did make it an integral part of my routine: I’d wake up earlier each day just so I could squeeze a bit of digital drawing in before I went to school.
Then I went to university and I basically stopped. During my computer science degree I could barely sketch. I wasn't motivated for it, but that was okay - it wasn’t my priority at the time. I only took it up again when I moved to the UK to study animation. Most of my classmates were artists, and we even had these sort of inspiration classes at the beginning. They showed you animation reels and industry stuff. You just look at it like wow, art is really cool. You know, when it kind of tugs at your heartstrings and you don't know why, you're just like wow that shiny!
I started trying to go for a comic at that time, but I didn't have have an Internet presence anymore. I’d been away from DeviantArt for three-ish years and lost all traction there. Then I discovered the art side of Instagram, and trialed-and-errored my way through it at the beginning.
Things started to pick up again, slowly, and starting a comic was a way for me to catch up on my art skills and see where I wanted to go with them.
2018 and 2019 were quite social media intensive years. I was just like, “this is my chance. I'm going to take the year and make this work.”
We’re not done yet
This was only part one of our interview with Maf. Next article we talk about her expirence working for webtoon, tips for new artists and how she took her instagram from 0 to 100k in just 2 years. If you want to know when it comes out subscribe below or check out @m_maf_f and @art.insights on instagram.