TYLERPAGE

"I simply find animals funnier than humans to draw."

When did you first think about art as something you wanted to do? Were you encouraged or discouraged by family, friends, teachers, mentors?

I’ve been drawing since I was a little kid, for as long as I can remember. As a kid it was mostly something I did for fun. My parents encouraged my talents as they both had creative hobbies. I didn’t think about it much as a job or career when I was little, but I did realize that other people considered me talented or ‘good’ at drawing so when asked if I wanted to be an artist when I grew up I sometimes said yes. I got more interested in science when I got older so I thought I would end up doing something more along those lines. But I was always making art and felt like it was something I wanted to continue doing but I also understood how hard it was to make a living as an artist.

What kind of kid were you? Where did you grow up? What were your influences?

I grew up in Minneapolis, where I still live. I was active. I played with toys (Legos, He-Man, GIJoe, Transformers, etc.) and my little brother quite a lot. We played outside a lot too, biking to the parks and creek by our house a lot. I didn’t read many comics as a kid beside newspaper strips. I loved Garfield early on. My parents bought me those book collections. My parents were both big readers and my mom took us to the library frequently. We always did those summer reading challenges, to see how many books we could read. So I credit my mom with fostering a love of reading. I liked the Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes - both strips aligned with my sense of humor. I would buy random license comics at our corner store - Transformers, the Smurfs, GIJoe - as a kid, but knew comic characters like Superman or Spider-Man better from cartoons