[00:00:00] Kelsey Hauer: I wanted to be a storyteller, but I didn’t know what to do yet. She was like, why don’t you just tackle a project that you can actually publish? We were like, “Well, it doesn’t cost anything to make a YouTube series.”

[00:00:13] Christian Hauer: At the time too, I was doing video game tutorial stuff on YouTube. I was like, well, I know how to handle YouTube. I’ve been editing videos. It was like, why don’t we just do a partial animation?

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[00:00:31] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Demme Learning Show. This is Gretchen Roe. I am so excited to welcome this lovely young couple that I happened to meet at a homeschool conference nine months ago. I was so excited to walk past them and watch them working on their cartooning skills and their storytelling skills. I want to welcome Christian and Kelsey Hauer today to talk to you all about the art of cartooning, but also the art of storytelling because I think we’re going to have a fantastic conversation today. Let’s get started. Will you all please be so kind as to introduce yourselves?

[00:01:11] Kelsey: I’m Kelsey Hauer. This is my brother Christian Hauer. We grew up as homeschoolers.

[00:01:20] Christian: Right now, primarily, we work on comic books, but we tell stories. Now, I’ll let her continue.

[00:01:26] Kelsey: We grew up homeschooled. I always loved to tell stories. I would always be like, “Okay, Christian, you got to listen to me tell you this story because I need to get this out and I don’t have time to write it down.” Then Christian would be like, “Okay, that’s fine, but I want a character in this,” because we would act it out as we would walk around our neighborhood and get our PE in. Then that grew into a couple of realizations. One was, he grew up and he didn’t like writing until he got into Running Start College Prep Association.

[00:02:02] Christian: It was like a college classes for high school students. It was like my last two years of high school, I went into a community college and did some college. I got to do English 101 and different things like that.

[00:02:15] Gretchen: I’m going to interrupt you all for just a second. Christian, you’re saying that you were not fond of writing until that point in time?

[00:02:24] Christian: Yes.

[00:02:26] Gretchen: That’s going to be an encouragement for a lot of moms out there who are just banging their heads against a wall trying to get their sons to write.

[00:02:31] Christian: I certainly hope so. I did not like the whole parsing a sentence. I didn’t like the whole– I mean, Mad Libs were fun because you got to put in some of your own goofy things, but I never really considered that writing when I was a kid. It was always just like, this is a game. Even though if you’re looking at it through a homeschool perspective, it’s like, this is still learning. It’s still technically working on a subject.

[00:02:53] Kelsey: Because it’s like, excuse me, what nouns are adjectives, verbs, things like that, and where to put them and stuff.

[00:03:00] Christian: Yes. For whatever reason, totally was the Lord. When I was doing English 101, the teacher that I had, the way he was instructing things and talking about the books that were there or that he was particularly going through and the types of messages that were being said that weren’t being outright said were so fascinating to my brain that something clicked and I was like, “Oh, there’s way more to writing than just what you put down. It’s also what you’re telling the audience subtly by not saying something or what you’re visually making a character wear.”

Sometimes they do this in movies too, is where they have a character say something at the beginning, and then a second character later in the movie will say it back to the character. It means something different, maybe something better. Maybe it’s like that moment where the character’s going to do something sacrificially and they say the thing back to show that kinship between the two characters or whatever. It’s that essence of they say something beyond what’s actually being said. We can do that even in conversation and things like that, but it’s more ad-libs than when you write a story. You’re making it more planned and intentional.

[00:04:15] Gretchen: Christian, were you a reader at that point in time? Did you enjoy reading or?

[00:04:21] Christian: I enjoyed reading more than I did when I was a kid. I didn’t exactly enjoy the types of books that they were having me read in the class, the way it was going because we were in Washington State when I took college. It was more of like, oh, read the books like 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 or these depressing books. We got Great Gatsby, which I actually like Great Gatsby.

[00:04:47] Gretchen: You’re probably in a vast minority for young men to say that. That’s pretty interesting.

[00:04:56] Christian: We had Great Gatsby and then we had some other off-the-wall ones. About the time I was going to Running Start, which is what it was called out in Washington for the college high school crossover, Kelsey went to DigiPen Art Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington.

[00:05:14] Kelsey: Yes. Earlier, I had started taking art classes in community college, which helped me a lot because I realized, “Oh, I can draw anything.” I don’t know why it helped me click that way, but you did a lot more like observing real things or doing the bowls of fruit things and stuff like that. It was painting and it was charcoal drawing, which are difficult mediums to just jump into. Because I got the chance to practice at them and really spend some time getting them to look good, it helped build confidence.

Then from there, DigiPen was of interest to me because it had an animation degree and it was close enough that I could still live at home, which would help with cost. I did a couple years of that. The best part about their program was that they had folks that had worked for Disney. They’d worked on Lion King. They’d worked on Lilo and Stitch. They taught me a lot about even how to draw creatively. I had one teacher who pointed out, you think about things like it’s coming up off the page, but you need to think about things like there’s no page at all, like you’re drawing in space.

That helped a lot with starting to even get my nuts and bolts figured out for drawing. Then there were other disciplines as well and books as well that were great help. Then after the couple of years, I was getting into 3D animation. I didn’t have a taste for that. I slowly realized I didn’t have– there’s two ways to bring something to life through two-dimensional art, I would say. The one way is animation. That involves making something, one drawing, look like it’s moving by adding a bunch more drawings that look very close and similar to it until you get to another drawing that’s still–

[00:07:07] Christian: It’s not the finale or whatever.

[00:07:10] Kelsey: The other way is to– basically, what I do here, and that is to render it like it’s a painting and give it a background.

[00:07:19] Christian: Then sequentially, where maybe you have the same scene in the background on this page here, but all the actions that the character are doing are not necessarily one-to-one. Your brain can put in that it’s like, “Oh, the character has to do a couple other things before they get to this frame.” Not necessarily is that a perfect example with this page but I guess here, he’s shocked because his phone vibrates. Let me see if I can zoom in just a little bit. He’s shocked because his phone vibrates. He puts the stick down. We also have to know, like in this shot, he has to, the top one, he has to grab the stick to put it down. There’s a couple of things you have to fill in, but you still get the motion in your brain. You fill in the–

[00:08:02] Gretchen: His reaction is the same one I have when my phone vibrates in my pocket. You would think after all this time, we would reach to the point where you’d be used to that. Some of us aren’t.

[00:08:12] Kelsey: Especially like you’re listening to something or you’re sitting and working and like, “Oh, I got to think about this a little harder.” Anyway, the point is that, you can put in more background. You can put in more details on the characters and stuff because you don’t have to make them move. I feel like that’s the two ways two-dimensional artists, cartoonists, bring things to life. I really like the book version of it.

The more painty look and putting in a background and hopefully draw in the reader into this picture of a world that then they can imagine and can tear you on.

[00:08:53] Gretchen: What is the primary medium that you work in now?

[00:08:59] Kelsey: For this one, the primary medium, I would say truly is pencil. When we’re doing a finished work, it’s digital coloring. Christian will ink it on paper and then we’ll scan it, separate it from the white, and then–

[00:09:17] Christian: This is one of our comic pages in the pencil stage.

[00:09:20] Gretchen: Wow. It’s very detailed.

[00:09:24] Christian: Yes. Kelsey uses a blue pencil to go over the initial details. Then she’ll use the graphite pencil to finish it out. Then I will do inking over the top. Just so you get an idea of how Kelsey uses paper.

[00:09:45] Gretchen: This really requires a great deal of collaboration between the two of you.

[00:09:51] Kelsey: I don’t think it does for everybody, but for us, it helps a lot to collab.

[00:09:55] Gretchen: As siblings, were you always collaborative? I know that’s a question that’s probably in the back of some mom’s minds.

[00:10:05] Kelsey: That’s fair. I think up until I was– I know for sure up until I was five, I was like, why did my perfect single only child life get interrupted by a sibling?

[00:10:18] Gretchen: [laughs] I think my eldest daughter might have said the same thing about her brothers. We just kept interrupting them so we gave her four more siblings on top of her younger brothers.

[00:10:33] Christian: There you go.

[00:10:34] Kelsey: We did eventually get to a point a few years after that where the two of us were like, “Oh, man, it would have been so great if there had been three.” It wasn’t because we disliked being with each other, it’s because we enjoyed being with each other so much that we were like, “Surely three siblings would have been better.”

[00:10:51] Gretchen: As an only child, I will tell you that sibling bond is fascinating to me. That’s probably why I married a guy who’s one of five because I think there’s something unique and really special. At what point did you guys say, wow, we really should professionalize this and become a team working together?

[00:11:14] Christian: I feel like that’s hard to answer in one particular moment. I think the first moment probably where it started was actually before Kelsey even went to DigiPen. I think it was 2011, right? Because that was when we started the YouTube channel.

[00:11:33] Kelsey: I think it was about then.

[00:11:34] Christian: In 2011, our mom– well, it might have been early 2011 or maybe 2010, our mom was like, “You guys need to get a story out somewhere.”

[00:11:45] Kelsey: I had graduated. I was going through a phase of turmoil of knowing I wanted to do something artistic. I wanted to be a storyteller, but I didn’t know what to do yet. She was like, “Why don’t you just tackle a project that you can actually publish?” We were like, “Well, it doesn’t cost anything to make a YouTube series.”

[00:12:06] Christian: At the time too, I was doing video game tutorial stuff on YouTube. I was like, “Well, I know how to handle YouTube. I’ve been editing videos.” I was like, “Why don’t we just do a partial animation?” I think Pixar actually labeled them animatics. It’s basically where you have still images and maybe a couple objects just moving gradually just to hint that there’s supposed to be some motion and things like that. We did animatics on YouTube.

We started with the story Caged. We finished the story in 2020. It took us nine years to complete it. That was because Kelsey had school. I had school. We had different things going. Then we’d hit certain points where we weren’t sure if we wanted to finish the story. No, we need to finish the story. How do we want to finish the story?

[00:12:59] Kelsey: Artwork-wise, it’s all over the place because you have a couple episodes that are full color, but the artwork’s not very good. Then you have later episodes that are scribbly, very storyboard-looking episodes. Then you finally have–

[00:13:15] Christian: Kind of a more refined episodes, but they’re black and white. We were trying to find our feel for the story. As we went along, we were like, the story really feels more 1920s, 1910s-ish. It would be fun if it was black and white. Because we transitioned from color to black and white to go into the storyboard stage, because we just wanted to get the story out, we decided to stay with the black and white, but make it more detailed and more sophisticated-looking. Right now, the story’s all over the place. We have ideas to go back and do it again. We got other projects that we’re also trying to do right now, too.

[00:13:53] Kelsey: If parents are interested in watching it, there is some violence in it.

[00:13:59] Christian: I mean, there’s gunshots, but nobody gets hurt except robots.

[00:14:05] Kelsey: Well, one guy dies, though.

[00:14:07] Christian: One guy dies? Oh, that’s right. The bank. That’s right. We don’t show any of that.

[00:14:10] Gretchen: You guys, it’s your story.

[00:14:12] Kelsey: There’s blood in it. Let there be parental discretion. It’s on YouTube. They can check it out on The Whimsical Sort Channel on YouTube and watch all of it.

[00:14:24] Gretchen: Of course, we’ll make sure that that gets put into the show notes so parents can go and visit that afterwards. This is not then the only gig that you all have going on.

[00:14:36] Kelsey: We currently are working on a commission for Flip-Flop Spanish.

[00:14:42] Christian: They made a little AI book. Really, what it was is they won a competition, and so they got to make a book with AI. It’s called Flip and Felipa. They didn’t like how it came out because they didn’t really have control over the visuals in a lot of it because it was basically just throw all this stuff into the AI, and then we’ll give you this book. They meet us at one of the conventions that we were at last year.

Brad, the husband of the duo that do the Flip-Flop Spanish, he saw what we did, and he was like, we’d really like you guys to make a comic for us because their curriculum has a very comicbook-esque theme to it. That’s our curriculum. Kelsey’s in the midst of doing concept art for it, and we didn’t feel right showing concept art because we don’t really have the okay to show it yet. We are working on it, and we’re hoping to do some updates on our site as well because we have a newsletter that we put out with all the projects that we’re working on and stuff like that too.

[00:15:43] Gretchen: As siblings, how is that collaboration as adults? What happens when you all disagree, or maybe you don’t?

[00:15:50] Kelsey: No, we do. It’s usually a matter of you get hot, you get mad for a little bit, and then you say, “Okay, I need time to process this.” You take a step back. This doesn’t always work out this way, but I feel like usually the ones I remember are the ones I lose. The deal is that when I step back and think about it, I start to realize, “No, there’s logic to why Christian thinks this way.” It actually would be either more efficient or more reasonable to do it the way he’s thinking, right?

[00:16:26] Christian: A lot of the times what we will probably get into arguments over is we’ll try to analyze Kelsey’s pencil work in the comic before I even ink it because once you ink it, it’s basically permanent unless you have the ability to go onto the computer and do some editing there, which we have occasions where we do that. We try to keep that to a minimum because we like it on the paper.

A lot of times we’ll try and look it over before I start inking it, but then sometimes there’s just certain things that I only catch because I’m staring at it so much when I’m inking that it’s like, oh, I can’t ink this panel yet because this character’s leg is way too long, or this object that they’re supposed to be handling is much smaller than in the previous shot. Those ones, especially if Kelsey’s gone several weeks after working on the page, she’s gotten to that point in her emotions where she’s settled to, it’s done.

Then you go, “Oh, I need this, this, and this changed.” It’s like, “I thought I was done. I thought I was done with that thing.” It’s not so much like she’s necessarily upset because I’m wrong or because maybe mom sees it and like mom’s wrong, but it’s more like you had this security blanket that you put over the top of it, and now the security blanket’s been ripped off. Now your emotions are like, “No. I don’t want to have to do that.” A lot of times she’ll calm down after like an hour or so and be like, “No, you’re right. I got to do it.”

[00:17:57] Kelsey: I’m usually happy I did.

[00:18:00] Gretchen: There is a certain degree as an artist, you’ve put your time and your effort and your energy into it, you don’t necessarily want to say, “Oh, well, sure, I can redo this because I didn’t get it right the first time.”

[00:18:16] Kelsey: That’s true. Although it is funny, I’m realizing a lot of life, this is for better or for worse. I worked for a time as one of the food demo ladies at Costco. Whenever you would do dishes at the end of the day, it was never all the dishes that you did well that someone would see. It was always that one spot that got missed on this bowl or that bowl. I remember so many ladies talking about, “Oh, so-and-so, she’s so bad at dishes, she missed that spot on that bowl again,” and things like that.

So much of life is like that. If I get it wrong in the comic and it’s just whatever whenever, everyone’s going to see it. They’re not going to see the rest of the page. It was the most gorgeous page ever done on earth, and it had one spot that was someone’s index fingers too long or something. Everyone would see that finger. Nobody would see the rest of that page.

[laughter]

[00:19:23] Gretchen: Isn’t it funny that in our human condition, we tend to focus on the things that are out of order instead of the goodness of the things that are in order?

[00:19:32] Kelsey: That’s true. I think there’s good and bad to that. I think you’re right. In a lot of ways, it’s negative. It’s like, is that showing we’re not thankful for the things that do go right? On the other hand, it’s like if it makes us better, then it actually is good that we do see that. I don’t know if there’s good and bad to that.

[00:19:51] Gretchen: How is your collaborative process then when you all go through from beginning to end for a drawing? How long does that take to do that?

[00:20:00] Christian: It can depend. The story that we’re currently working on, at least our fantasy story, because each of our comics comes with two stories.

[00:20:11] Gretchen: Now you’ve got to back up because I knew that, but I had forgotten it. Answer my question, and then we’ll go back to why is it two stories.

[00:20:22] Christian: At least with our fantasy story, the storyline for that one has been in development for about 12 years. The script writing has gone through probably 10 drafts. Most of that is because when I started, I wasn’t very good at writing, and I didn’t have a lot of practice writing. That I would say is probably most of the reason why it took 12 years, but definitely six years of that was developing it with the basis of the story where it’s at now, trying to get certain things tweaked out and stuff like that. Potentially six-ish years for this particular story where it’s at. Then it took us–

[00:21:12] Kelsey: I was going to say, if we can get into a comic itself. We’re a comic itself. This one took us about– this one took us over a year to do, but this one took us– this is both stories, by the way. This one took us over a year. This one took us less than a year.

[00:21:28] Christian: I think it was 18 months for this one, and then 8 months for this one.

[00:21:36] Gretchen: Because this would be an encouragement to someone who’s learning the process, you get better at the process, so it becomes more efficient.

[00:21:47] Kelsey: To add to that, this one is fewer pages than this one is. First one, longer, fewer pages. Second one, shorter time, more pages.

[00:21:56] Christian: We understood the process better and how to do it.

[00:22:00] Kelsey: Anyway, it takes– I know about that eight to nine months. We have the script. I go over the script. I put a mark around how long I want a page to be because Christian will number the frames. He won’t necessarily give me actual pages because he gives me the flexibility to say, I want this many on this page, this many on this page, et cetera. Then I will create a storyboard version, which is basically just taking letter paper, folding it in half, and then scribbling out what I want the pages to look like. You basically have a rough comic done by then. Then I get into penciling. That was the blue and pencil pages, full size.

[00:22:41] Gretchen: I love what you’re saying about this because it parallels a writing process as well. Probably one of the most difficult things we have as instructors for our kids is teaching them that the first draft is not the final draft. You have to expect that there will be iterations along the way.

[00:23:01] Christian: Part of the reason with the story it took so long to write was because I knew I didn’t want Kelsey to have to draw a bunch after I’d only done three drafts. Then, oh, we got to change this draft drastically. Then she has to go back and draw a lot. We actually even had a point where I was working through the script, and we had someone that we knew was like, “Are you just being a perfectionist about this? When are you going to be to a point where she can actually just start drawing?”

It was like, to some degree, being perfectionist. To another degree, it’s like art costs a lot more money. She’s my sister. I don’t have to pay her, per se. The more art we do, the more time it takes and the more it costs timewise to get then the next round of storyboards or whatever out. To do the entirety of this fantasy story, it took Kelsey a year to storyboard it out because there was 24 to 26 chapters. It took her a whole year just to storyboard that out. We have a storyboard version all together, so we know where this story’s going. We’re really excited about it, and we’re really pleased with it, but we didn’t want to have to do storyboards more than a couple of few times at the most.

[00:24:17] Gretchen: Sure, and that makes sense. You’re planning your work, and then you work what you’ve planned. What advice would you have to the aspiring cartoonists and storytellers who will watch this? How would you give them encouragement? Where would you tell them to go?

[00:24:34] Christian: Do go to our website because we do have some videos.

[00:24:39] Gretchen: Name the website for us.

[00:24:41] Christian: Thewhimsicalsort.com. We have some videos. We try to put them out more regularly, but they’re not always as regular. We have some videos that are called Finny Doodles, and they explain why you do certain steps of the process. I would, like Kelsey said earlier, definitely recommend going to the library and looking up comic book, inking comic book, lettering comic book, illustrating comics the Marvel way. Is that one book?

[00:25:08] Kelsey: Yes. I’m not sure how accessible that is at libraries, but illustrating comics the Marvel way is a good start. Storyboarding books is a good start. I’d recommend, cautiously, the Flight series. It’s an anthology of comics, of different comic artists putting in short stories. It introduces you to a bunch of different styles and a bunch of different storytelling. It does get weird in some of the stories. [crosstalk]

[00:25:37] Gretchen: A little parental guidance along the way.

[00:25:38] Kelsey: Yes. Be open to discuss it.

[00:25:42] Christian: Because we do wholeheartedly believe in looking at different comic books and things like that just to study how did they do things and things like that. One of the ones that we found that was really fun was The Doppel Ganger Chronicles. He does partial comic, partial novel. It was actually the inspiration for us to actually start getting into comic books, or at least for me, because Kelsey was like, “Oh, we could do pages that are part novel, part comic.” Then we had a friend who said, “You need more pictures,” so then we just went full comic. It’s a really good series. As far as I know, he only has three books out, but they’re all really good.

[00:26:17] Gretchen: On The Whimsical Sort, you had said to me– now, let me make sure I say this correctly. That through the 23rd of September, if folks want to really see your comics and climb into them, there’s a discount code, and it’s TWS925. Of course, I’ll make sure that that’s included in the show notes because I think you should dig here a little bit further. You might find some really interesting stuff from these clever young people who are collaborating so awesomely.

[00:26:49] Christian: Really quick on that code, it’s if you buy anything $30 or more because we have a bundle with both comics, then we also have a biblical reflection guide that we make that highlights some themes from one of the comics. That’s a $30 bundle that we have on the website.

[00:27:03] Gretchen: That’s awesome. I really appreciate it. It was a pleasure to host you both today. As you guys can see, they’re taking off with something really amazing. I hope you find merit in visiting their website. I want to thank you guys for joining me today. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation, and it did not disappoint. Thank you all so much. We thank you who joined us today live for allowing us to come into your living room, and we’ll look forward to doing that again soon. Take care, everyone. Have a wonderful afternoon.

[00:27:35] Voice-Over: Thanks again for joining us. We’re glad to be a part of your educational community. You can help us grow our community even more by rating, reviewing, and subscribing to the show wherever you may be hearing this. Don’t forget that you can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show or on our YouTube channel. We’ll see you again next time. Until then, keep building strong foundations for lifelong learning.

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