About Laura Kajpust

Past

I grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. I'd always been drawing and was always into comics, but my first comics were all the manga books art teachers seemed to loathe. So, I had to try and keep my love of this style a secret to protect myself from their wrath...

Even though I liked art and drawing, I hadn't really considered it originally as the career for me. Actually, I'd never even really thought of it as a career at all. Then at about 11 or 12, I began to teach myself programming (and all to take part in the virtual pet site fad of the time!). It was fun for a while, but became too stressful and I ultimately lost interest in that and shut the site down. I still liked programming, and then took the few programming classes offered at my high school. I thought I would go into programming video games because, hey, I like to program and I like video games.

Hearing of the highly competitive nature of it combined with the stressful hours (every time I hear "stressful hours" I now have vivid horrid flashbacks of those few years spent obsessively programming in the wee hours of the night)...well, it just didn't sound like the life for me. And, of course, people then taught me that you don't have to be a "starving artist", so I started to look at the possibility of an art career a bit more seriously.

Really, what got me to make the switch from techie (well, I'm still a techie) to artsy was my webcomic Fruitful Confusion. Every time I asked someone if I should go into art or programming, they always responded with the same question: "Which one are you more passionate about?" Well, I had no idea. I wasn't sure if I knew what it meant to have a passion. Drawing and programming were just things I liked doing, but I wasn't sure I was passionate about them...

My webcomic changed that though. Not immediately, but over time, I started to really love doing it - but not completely. That was the difference for me to know what it meant to be passionate about something. I'd have temporary obsessions or infauations I suppose with ideas or stories, and I'd go with them for a while, but then I'd drop them. I never had a "dropping out" with this story though, and I soon realized I also didn't want to. Even though sometimes it was a pain to work on, I still knew there nothing else I'd rather be doing.

So I learned then that this was what I was more passionate about: art.

Present

I am currently attending Ringling College of Art and Design, majoring in Illustration.

Future

My future plans are still a work in progress, and at the moment I'm just waiting to get a better idea of where the road I am is heading...but for now, my goals are to continue improving as an artist and to perhaps create graphic novels as a career.