S:2 E:17.5: Artist and Creator of Reckless Deck, Clark Huggins

welcome back all my nerds geeks blurbs and freaks to another episode of geeky sexual and intellectual i am your host q and today's guest is mr clark huggins the creator of the reckless deck series for artists and writers uh it's basically you know what i'm gonna stop right there i'm gonna let clark tell you because he has perfected the way of explaining and expressing the greatness of his product but this is a note-taking episode please get your paper get your pen because clark about to lay it on you um disclaimer i always tell y'all technology don't never want your sister to be great so around mark uh seven minutes uh it breaks and then it goes back so don't don't don't don't come for me i tried it ain't me it's skype it's zoom it's all that stuff maybe because i won't pay you know what off the subject enjoy clark he got that knowledge for you all right welcome back to another episode of geeky sexual and intellectual i am your host q and today's guest is mr clark huggins from reckless deck how are you today i'm great thank you thanks for having me no problem it took too long when we talked about that beforehand people are busy yeah and i'm so excited to be here with you today and trying to keep themselves sane all at the same time and standing upright yeah so basically what i've been doing these past couple episodes because of the special and unique situation that we're all in i like to do a mental check-in and ask you how you're doing during this quarantine um you know my i'm okay i'm okay um definitely didn't change like my day-to-day life like the way it did a lot of other people and i feel a little bit lucky in that way because i was i've been working from home for years um you know a lot of the illustration work that i do um like my sort of day job illustration is in advertising and i have been able to do my job as you know for my advertising clients the same way i did when i was living in new york you know from from my studio here for a long time now so it's not it didn't change my day-to-day very much it certainly has disrupted my wife's job a lot more she's a massage therapist and it is really limited what she can do um and my son was supposed to start kindergarten and that really just sucks that he is you know basically doing homeschool now with us yeah and i totally understand that my daughter she's in the sixth grade but you know she she has those stepping stones your son is building those stepping stones so i could see how that could be horrendous for a young child i mean in that like his life didn't change either because it's it's been a long time since he was in kindergarten so i think it's been a long time since he was in kindergarten so i think it's been a long time since he's been in kindergarten so i think it's been a long time since he's been in kindergarten so i think it's been a long time since he's been in kindergarten so i think it's been a long time since he's been in kindergarten so i think it's the park and seeing who randomly happens to be there. He, I feel he doesn't necessarily feel it as much as I feel it for him. I wanted that for him really badly. Yeah. And I briefly saw something on CNN where they were saying that we may not understand the ramifications of at-home learning until a couple of years out, especially for stepping stone children, like first grade, kindergarten, first grade, because they're missing that in-class experience and that teacher and student experience that I don't know a lot of sixth grade math. I hate to say that, you know, it goes with that. Are you smarter than a fifth grader? I'm like, no, no, I'm, so I'm not qualified to be teaching a fifth grader, sixth grader. Totally, totally. You know, it's the same way. I don't know the correct way to teach a kid like beginning math. And, um, you know, I mean, I were sort of teaching him to read. My wife's doing a much better job with that than I am right now. Cause my plate is full. With this Kickstarter. So she's kind of doing a lot of the heavy lifting there until this wraps up. Yeah. And so emotionally, how are you? Cause it'll creep up on some people. Some people are totally fine. Um, you know, it's definitely stressful. It's like a super stressful time in the world right now. And it just seems to get like more stressful and more stressful and more stressful. Um, I felt strange about launching a project in the middle of all of this. You know, how do you get, how do you reach out to people and be like, Hey, I started a new project, like back my Kickstarter when it feels like the news is blowing up every day. Uh, and that was, I don't really like say, you know, it is this adding value. Why, you know, what, what do you feel like this adds to the conversation right now, instead of just distracting from the conversation that plus like, I still got to make a living, you know, we can't just all like throw our hands up and like become full. Sometimes social justice warriors, like still got to pay our rent. We still got to pay our rent, feed our family and like pay our bills. So you still have to do your job. Yeah. And so in that way, you brought up, say that again. No, just in that way, I feel like it, it just adds, that's just another level of stress of being like, there's risk involved in putting a new project out there and there's extra stress in trying to putting a project out there now. Mm-hmm. But it's, it's beneficial. In a lot of ways that I guess people are starting to understand because sometimes good distraction is necessary and what you've created is a necessary distraction. Thank you. Thanks. So you have a bunch of like the original, we, you got a bunch of the original Ragnar stack. Yes. So, and I'm going to get to that and you talked about the Kickstarter and I want to get to that too. But what I want to do is I always dig way back deep and talk about you in the beginning stages. Of your genius starting to produce you as an artist because you're an artist, you know, foremost. Yeah. And was an actor actually as well for 13 years as a professional actor. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. I got a lot of actor friends now. Yeah. I, you know, in like my whole life, it's always been like, do I want to, do I want to act? Do I want to continue to illustrate? Do I want to act? Do I want to illustrate? And so, so, you know, that when you, if you kind of roll the tape back, the whole, my most, my twenties and, um, mid thirties, my mid thirties were all like, I went, was in like my master's degree in acting and was in New York actor. Wow. Okay. So, well, talk to me about that. I want to talk to you about your childhood. What were some of your influences, um, to bring out both of those things, you being an actor and you being an artist and then, you know, fast forward as soon as you like, as far back as you like, just talk about who you are. I think that, uh, you know, I grew up, I live in Providence, Rhode Island now, and that's where I grew up. But, you know, as soon as I got out of high school and started college, I was gone. I hadn't lived here for 20 years until my wife and I moved back here five years ago. And I was kind of like an art kid, very much. You know, I was always drawing ever since I was a tiny child, since I was like two years old. And all of my education had been focused on, you know, being an illustrator. And then when I got to college, I mean, I did plays and stuff in high school. But I didn't necessarily think I was going to be, I was going to throw illustration on the back burner and be a professional actor. When I got to college, I started. A little bit, if that's okay. I'm always having technical difficulties. Technology just does not want me to be great. But I am going to continue on. Should we back that up a little bit? We'll be right back. Oh, okay. I felt like I really wanted to be with people and I really wanted to connect with people. And I wanted to have these, like, really peak emotional experiences. I found when I was, you know, in college that the loneliness and the solitude of the visual art was more than I could stand. It was actually, like, kind of bearable. And it made me want to, like, peel my skin off a little bit. Yeah. And so when I, and. You know, being an actor was the total opposite of that, where you're very much in these, you know, hyper dangerous emotional situations with other people. And there's, like, lots of cute girls around. And people are saying and, you know, doing things that are very beyond their usual comfort zone. So for, like, a kid in college, that was, that was, like, my, that very quickly became my religion. Okay, cool. So when you decided that you wanted to be. You started. Without acting, but you decided at some transition point that you wanted to be a full-time artist. What, how did you go about that transition? Because a lot of people have different transitions in life. They have a full-time job that pays the bills. But I have this dream of a career. And they just don't know the steps to get there. Totally. You know, and I, I didn't start illustrating again until after grad school. I got out of grad school. And I was, like, my early 30s. And. moved back to New York from from Boston and uh was waiting tables again and I just was like if I keep waiting tables I'm gonna blow my brains out I just cannot keep doing this I've done restaurant work for like 15 years and I had the sense that like you have all this illustration training can you find some way to like monetize that or professionalize that you know and the two things that I was kind of aware of that were possibilities was um being a storyboard artist which I didn't know necessarily what the money was there or being a mural artist and I actually tried mural art for a little bit and I really did not like being in cold dusty construction zones basically you know like you come in when a place is under construction and you do mural work and I was just like this kind of sucks I don't really like doing this I don't like being here and doing this and I took a storyboarding class and and pursued had a friend who worked in an advertising agency she's like let me let me see if I can get you a meeting with the guy who does the you know who runs the art studio part of things and I met with him his name was Richard Chandler and he worked at Ogilvy and Mater and he was like my mentor and invited me in uh to work after like a number of trials he gave me some stuff to go away and do I came back did it and after like two or three of those he said I'm gonna offer you a desk you know it's not it's a freelance position it doesn't pay you get paid when when I give you the work like you get paid by the job you know you come in here you're being here you're doing this you're doing that you're doing that you don't get a salary you don't get paid by the hour but like you're basically on deck for when work comes in and very quickly that started to happen and what I found out was that I could make a really good living doing that and so I was able to leave restaurant work kind of immediately that actually yeah I was able to it happened once it happened it happened really fast and there was a lot of work so I was super super busy all the time and I was a lot of people even when you're in the in the business of it People never grasp the concept of how much work and time and hours it takes to produce or create artwork. In your case, ads. It's not something overnight. And I don't know how I can stress that to like even some of my clients. It's like, hey, I need this. Here's the rundown of what I need. How soon can you get it to me? So I'm looking it over and I'm like, oh, give me about four days. Oh, well, I need it tomorrow. Well, I'm not your girl. Yeah. And it took me a while to get to that spot. And I would just make myself crazy like I got to produce this stuff, lose the money. Like I'm at a point now where I'm just like, it's not really all about the money. We love the money, but you got to know when to say hello. Well, the funny thing about storyboarding is it actually does really run on those kind of like breakneck schedules. It's really intense. You know, when you get a job, you're going to be working for like 10, 12 hours. It's not it's not like, oh, I'll take four days and treat this like a normal job. When I get, you know, when I get into a pre-production advertising job, it throws like the whole household upside down because I'm chained to my desk. It's just. Yeah. And I'm starting to understand that. And I don't know if you noticed from my post on Instagram, I was asked to illustrate a comic book. And I'm like, the most I've ever illustrated was children's book. So this is a huge undertaking. So when you talk about the storyboarding, like I'm quitting already. Because, you know, it's a learning curve. But I'm like you. It's the way she wrote the story is like a script. So I break it down by the script. Well, you know what she says, paying to this or blah, blah, blah, drinking coffee or whatever. So I'm breaking it down. I'm like, I may have to call on you for like some free advice. Absolutely. And so I was I was in New York. I was doing the advertising work and I'm still auditioning. I was still going on auditions and I was going on a lot of like commercial auditions and that kind of thing. I tried to produce. I actually did with some of my grad school classmates co-produce a play in New York City. And it wasn't the most rewarding experience. It was actually it was really a long process. We rehearsed it for a long time because we kind of like created it as we were rehearsing it. And it was just exhausting. And it wasn't rewarding. It really I might. Am I sorry I did it. I wouldn't say that, but I didn't walk away feeling like I had fulfilled myself artistically. I felt like I had like sucked my soul completely dry. And as I was continuing to audition. And as I was continuing to, you know, go on to have the New York actor experience, which is a very, very rough experience. It is not it's not easy and it's not nice. And I just started to feel like I'm not enjoying this at all anymore. You know, theater was a thing that I did that was really like I said, it was like my religion when I first started. And it did a lot for me and changed a lot about who I became. But the actual profession of it started to feel like I was in a bad. Marriage and while that was going on, the illustration work continued to work out and work out and work out. And there was more work and more opportunities and more. And I love to draw, you know, so I started to really say, I don't know that I want to keep acting. This doesn't feel good to me. This doesn't feel healthy to me. And I think that, you know, the illustration career that I was building was teaching me really rapidly what like a healthy professional life looked like and what a rewarding professional life looked like. I don't think that, you know, it's not like if I had decided to say I'm going to go and, you know, sell timeshares, I'd still be acting, you know, but luckily I had another thing that I was equally passionate about just in a different way that I got to do and that I get to do for a living. And so I think there came a point where I was like, I feel like I'm ready to not do this anymore. And there was rarely really any moment where I felt like I am sorry that I did that. Yeah. And to speak to that, I always feel like as artists, we always have something to fall back on. It could be, you know, little crummy jobs to great, magnificent opportunities, but we always have something to fall back on. If somebody else loses their nine to five, they're like, well, what am I going to do next? We're like, well, I hate that I lost my nine to five, but I can always do this until I find another one, if that's what you choose to do. Yes, yes. And I think that I think artists really need to do a better job. Of looking at their circumstance and being like, is this working for you? Like, do you feel like you know where you're going with this? And it is is this vague idea of having like an artistic career, making your life like an unlivable hell? Like, are you just miserable? How long has it been this miserable? How do you see that circumstance changing? And like, if you don't have a good answer for that, you need to change your game up really seriously. You can't just, you know, continue to plow through a job that you hate. Hoping that. Likes a rescue is going to come along. Yeah. And this is reality. It's not going to happen. You have to rescue yourself. Yes. Yeah. So with that being said, being an artist, sometimes you come up against pitfalls. What is it? Writer's block or artist block, as you would say. So when I found you, it was just doing an Instagram search, basically. So I think I was looking up artists, some hashtag for artists, and you popped up. I was like, gee. Yes. So I know that writers have books on how to be a writer. And I know artists do, too. But this is more, it's like the, what is it? CliffsNotes. CliffsNotes of how to be an artist. Well, okay. There's an important detail that I feel like there's a link to the story before we can really talk about the card deck. As an illustrator, I decided to do something good for myself art-wise. And I took a week-long course called the Illustration Masterclass. That was the first year that they were going to do it. It's been now happening for over 10 years. But I went to the very first one. It's a week-long thing held in Amherst, Massachusetts. And it's all of these really top-tier science fiction and fantasy artists who got together to do almost like a summer camp. You know, to teach illustration at a very, very high level. And I didn't really know the names of these guys. You know, they were very well-known, you know, with Magic the Gathering artists and, like, really, really big-deal book cover artists. And I just really just kind of, like, took a chance. I'm like, this could be a terrible week. This could be a great week. And it really changed my life. Because what I saw, it really almost, like, reawakened, like, my inner nerd. I think that I was very, very into all that stuff growing up. And I think that when I became an actor, I was much more focused on, you know, like, being a successful actor. You know, I think I left that little nerdy, like, beating heart core. In a box somewhere. So that I could go off and, like, be a fancy actor. Yeah. And this really, I was like, oh, my God. I forgot that I loved this stuff so much. And it was almost like somebody gave me a big piece of myself back. Because, and I didn't realize that it was a job. It was like, oh, I never actually realized that all that great stuff, like, some artist makes that as a living. I just never put it all together. And so, when I saw that that could be where this illustration. This illustration thing leads to, you know, it's not about the advertising. I mean, I am grateful that advertising has paid my bills and had, you know, was a thing that moved my life forward. But I don't live to do advertising storyboards. It doesn't fill my heart up. You know, the nerdy stuff, I realized that that stuff is really, really exciting. And that the level of skill is very, very high. Like, in order to succeed in that world, the bar is very high. And that's what I've been striving for for the past, like, 10 years. 10 years or so. And that introduced this, like, opened the floodgates of, like, nerd stuff. Just. hitting me full on in the face again and it's you know and it's that that's the stuff that led me to create rack the stick okay yeah so because i've come up against it a lot and i want to say in the last 10 years i i drew every day of my life since i was five years old no way my daughter she's yeah she's 11 now and that whole stance of time i stopped drawing so when i finally like you know i don't have to wipe her ass anymore i can draw now so i was like okay what are you gonna draw i'm like i don't i don't know okay well just start sketching out some stuff and just do some practice drawing and i was like but i don't know how to use my my hand basically had atrophy i think it was like i had used in so long things i would draw magnificent hands just all types of hands can't draw a finger to save my life and it was crushing like it was like dying a little bit it's a it's a shit like it feels very like personally like indicting of your of yourself and you know and one of the reasons why i look back and why reckless deck was such so urgent for me like why i thought that this was something that i really had to put out there was i had that feeling too a lot you know um back really before the the real acting days and back in like the drawing days i had a lot of feeling like that do you know that feeling that you get what you really want to be down below the surface of the water creatively you want to be like in flow you want to be like in that creative flow state and instead it's like you're you can't get in there like you're just on the outside of that knowing that it's there and that you can't you know you can't quite get in there and that is a terrible feeling yeah yeah so to speak to that could you tell the audience exactly what reckless this deck is and how it was born in your head and you had to move forward yeah sure and i did it you know i made it as a as a game just as a studio game for myself as a like it's a fun thing to do as a way to get out of the loop that you were talking about um it's a it's a card deck series that is an it's an idea generator and it's a character creation system that i made and what it does is it grabs all of its prompts from all of the the sort of iconic stuff from all across science fiction fantasy and it's and it scrambles them together and gives them back to you in very uh unique and and unexpected combinations and it forces you to to really um turn in your mind what you believe those things are and how they look and how they fit together so that you can then like meld them together and make something completely new out of it um i hadn't haven't had to do that in like i hope that sounded okay that's usually like yeah i have to say that a hundred times at every convention day but it's i've not been at a convention for a long time um because we're not allowed to have them anymore yeah but i feel that a lot of people run up against that and they've tried to do what you've perfected even myself i want to say this time last year i pulled out one of my composition books and i'm like okay this is the type of uh character i want them to be whether it's the race their height um if they have um animalistic features uh what's the color scheme um and i never thought about backstories like you go all into that they're what the type of world they're from um that you can pick from to build this this character yeah and any little piece of information can lead you a long way you know everything about the regular reckless deck or classic reckless deck is i've come to call it now that there's like a new project on the on the docket um original reckless deck is really built around vision visual tropes you know um and they're all things from sci-fi fantasy that we all know and we've all seen you know in in the movies that we love you know there's the the gun belt the blaster the lightsaber or the bow and arrow or the crossbow the trench coat all of these iconic things that have been used in different ways by different heroes here and there you know like hellboys trench coat versus neos trench coat uh give me another good trench coat guy um you know the sam spade trench coat or gambit's trench coat you know so a lot of these iconic tropes can be pushed and pulled and and interpreted and translated in lots of different ways the other cards that you surround them with you know let's see you got that you get that trench coat card you put that trench coat together with a like a lantern and a flintlock versus a laser and a some sort of like um the power source suddenly it's not the same trench coat anymore like it changes based on it starts to change its shape based on the stuff that you surround it with and it's almost like the idea starts to form in your mind when you see the combination of three or four cards almost against your will it just happens automatically and one of the things that i really find delightful about doing conventions and demoing this in person is is watching that happen in people's minds like watching their eyes like you can just see it form in their eyes and the surprise that they feel that they were able to do that that they were able to make that character happen um just uh in their own mind from looking at a hand of cards exactly and i'll take it a step further um i put a post on my instagram about the card um just all the dicks and a uh an avid reader wrote to me she was like you know i wonder if you can use these for writing stories i'm like you yes you can yeah right characters yeah so this can be a prompt to building that character for your novel or short story or whatever so it has so many ways it can be used and i'm just fascinated by it and role-playing gamers really dig it a lot too and i didn't i didn't see that going in and it wasn't until i made reckless deck and started doing conventions that role playing gamers started to really flip out about it that i started to see how powerful a um like a world the gamer culture was you know and how much like i'd never heard of gen con really or seeing gen con and when i went to do gen con i was like oh my god these people are crazy for this and that was cool to see the level of dedication and the level i didn't realize that people you know who had these dnd groups that lasted for years you know that they were crafting and writing their own narrative and they were writing their own narrative and they were writing their own narratives they weren't just buying the module at the hobby shop they were basically creating a world they were creating their own universe that had been you know going on for years and that level of dedication was really impressive and i saw like how this could help them and how excited they were about it and um it just gives you that feeling of like okay this wasn't a totally terrible idea this people actually get that this is cool and that feels great i mean you could have classes in college with these days college now you know and i went to um savannah college of art and design uh when we before we before covid shut all the stores down we were having a lot of luck getting it into uh bookstores and you know retail places like comic book stores and uh and and art colleges were really gravitating towards it a lot and they told me the faculty and at scad when i was there they were like this is going to be great for my students because my students um they always say they don't know what to do and they're like i don't know what to do and i'm like i don't know what to do and i'm like i don't know what to do and i'm like i don't know what to do and they always um they don't iterate like they they find their first idea it's usually pretty um cliche and they get stuck there they don't keep going forward and they don't keep turning it around and around and it always feels like the thing that they saw in the video game they played last night or the movie that they watched over the weekend so they were excited they were as faculty they were like this is going to break my students out of their their their core their lane exactly because it's a lot of things are reproduced it's you know like what do they say um um i can't even think of that trope for basically you you you you produce something that you've already seen it's like a um a compliment basically to that artist but you can only have so many people redrawing storm in different types of ways like break out of it yeah yeah and the other you know the other big realization about all about creativity the thing that's taught me is that your new idea always looks stupid you know spider-man always looks amazing batman always looks amazing because that he's had 80 years to be amazing you know people have been crafting batman and making him look terrific for 80 years uh and most of what you see coming out of dc either like on the page or on the movie screen has been you know art directed to be perfect if they don't and so batman looks great spider-man always looks great and i think that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing looks great wolverine always looks great it's because he's had forever to become great next to that your idea is always going to look awkward and stupid that's just a fact and that's not because it is awkward and stupid it's just new you've never seen it before and it i think that there's so much pressure that we as creatives put on ourselves to make something great immediately and that we're not willing to tolerate living with something that feels feels awkward and weird for a while. Like you gotta walk around with that new idea and of its awkwardness and all of its like wonky edges and you have to be willing to tolerate its wonky ugly parts yeah and in order and you have to kind of like get used to that new character or that new idea or really kind of just walk around with it in your heart for a little bit or in your mind and keep sketching and sketching and resketching it and live with how weird it feels and if you can tolerate that suddenly that character starts to not look so weird anymore it starts to feel like it exists in the world and feels a little more real and feels a little bit more like oh this is this is actually kind of cool or there are parts of it that are really cool and i can continue to you know sand it shape it you know glom some new clay onto it put a new costume on but new ideas are hideous and ridiculous when pretty much as a rule when they're born yeah and you just keep you keep at it like you can you could have started on a character five years ago but if you keep adding to it taking away from it like you said refining it it'll be just as beautiful as batman superman one wonder woman yeah right like how many times in your creative life have you come up with something you're like oh that's stupid oh i'm drawing this i hate this this is terrible i mean so many times i go back to my old sketchbooks and i'm like what was wrong with that like that was a good start and i just basically freaked out and and said oh it's horrible and and you know slammed the sketchbook shut and i feel like a big part of our job as creatives is to hang in there with awkward feeling stuff and i learned an important lesson from a high school teacher oh my god it was so long ago he was like how do you feel about this i'm like i hate it he was like well go put it away and we won't look at it for 48 hours nice we'll come back and then you can see it with new eyes and just start picking out what you want to change and then it will be like like it was somebody else's work at that point i hadn't seen it for 48 hours right and then i would have it and then i went oh i almost trashed the whole canvas right and i think that you know that people don't talk about that enough i think that there's a lot of um really silly stuff that people believe about creativity i know i used to believe all kinds of stupid stuff about creativity and the process of being an artist and how that's supposed to look and you know how it's supposed to go and i don't think that there's enough permission to be sucky because that's that's what i'm trying to do i don't think there's enough at the at the you know at the end of the sucky is when the good starts yeah and another thing that has given people um i guess license to forgive themselves when it comes to art style when i was coming up and when you brought up scad i wanted to go to scad i went to atlanta college of art but i wanted to go to scad for sequential art and in my mind my 18 year old mind i was thinking there's only one way to do sequential art and that's like the dc and the marvel you know the chiseled body onesies and cakes so i was like well i mean i'm good but i'm not that good that's just not going to be my dream so now that it hasn't always been there but it seems to be trending now with the indie comic book industry like your superheroes can look any way you want them to and it doesn't have to always be a superhero it could just be um basically slice of life story of trials and tribulations that we all go through so it can connect us but it's just all about the style and so it doesn't have to be perfect a one superman you can still have a great character and a great story with your passion that created it yeah i think that part of the process is about learning to dump your preconceptions um and man people hang on to them tight like their money like it's not like this this is good that's going to get you nothing by hanging on to the stuff that you thought before you started to talk to people um who knew more about the industry who know more about the process uh and the sooner you can find those people and who can help you divest of your preconceived notions the better you will be and the longer you hang on to stuff that you thought was right from when you were 10 or when you were you know in high school or what your parents your grandparents told you as well as well-meaning as they might have been at the time the longer you hang on to that the more stuck you're going to stay exactly so i know we got off track with the artist therapy corner that we just had no it's it's you can't not go there with this because it is i think that it really speaks to a universal um like your hang-up or sticking point and that feeling that you get when you're stuck the feeling when you're staring at the ceiling going like what do i draw like i finally have five minutes what do i do uh and i feel like that sense is so personal and it's not personal it's actually it's completely common it's not about you like that is part of it and everybody feels that way it's completely a normal way to feel and it's just a question of what are you going to do about it how are you going to get out of that and i made reckless neck as a way to completely short-circuit that whole that whole loop of you know what should i draw oh my god i must mean i'm not talented i'm a terrible artist something yeah you just said everything that's been in my heart for the last 15 years it's such a like it's such a like a mean little gremlin that whole loop is just so awful and it's very common and it's really destructive and reckless deck is there to be like okay three cards boom boom boom go make that character and suddenly you're and suddenly you're working you're moving again you're moving forward you're on the page you're not self torturing yourself yeah oh okay because i'm like a genius at that but what i want to talk to you about is your kickstarter yeah oh sure sure okay okay so new new project new um creative system you know reckless deck as it exists now classic reckless deck you know this is very much an actor way to look at things there's you know you can approach a character from the outside in or the inside out uh and you can put on a costume or a mask or a hat or a pair of shoes and it'll make you know it'll feel interesting on your body you'll be like oh really this is like oh it's like a leather jacket like a moto jacket like a motocross jacket it's really tight and it feels almost like i'm wearing armor it makes me feel a certain way about myself and so i'm going to blow that out further and make a character that moves that way and that's that's how i'm going to build my character and that's what classic reckless deck is about is like here's how you look this is what you're wearing this is your weapon these are your you know interesting uh fantasy or science fiction body modifications like do you have like devil wings or like half a robot face or whatever and you build your character based on how it looks psyche reckless deck psyche is very much about the mind of your character and building your character from the inside outward starting with and you know and i could not have made psyche without my acting training without the years that i spent as a professional actor and the years i spent you know really more specifically in grad school um really learning acting at what i was a really challenging at a very high level you know from super talented and skilled experienced you know teachers and professionals um and i really showed me a lot about like when you go to the act of character creation it's so much it's equally about what what not to do as it is what you do and so and i saw a lot of silly stuff also when i was in grad school and being an actor a lot of pretentious baloney you know stuff that people do mostly because they're scared and they don't want to look like they don't know what they're doing or they don't want to be caught with their pants down so they do a whole performance of like how painful it is and like how torturous it is to dig and it's like oh my god who is buying this uh and so this system is meant to be very accessible you know all the i wanted to give the categories of each one i feel like is really powerful and they're very grounded in something actionable that you can grab onto and make something out of as opposed to being like go sit in a dark closet and think about like you know when you were sad when you were five that's not that useful like in a lot of cases you know it looks cool certainly like that's quite an impressive performance of how like a tortured artist you are i don't know how much like real gold you're gonna find there when you do that um and i've built the psyche system based on how you know how writers write and how actors act in terms of building their characters and i tried to really fuse those two things together some that is like a hybrid of actor and writer process about how to make a character and grab on to the things that are going to give you the most juice okay you know and then like uh things like the the super objective category it starts with let me let me back up psyche comes in two parts it's eight categories the first four categories are things that are um universal to all characters regardless of you know whether they're a shakespeare character whether they're a you know a jane austen character whether they're a star wars character there are things about just characters as narrative things that are universal to the board the second the last four categories are genre specific their world they're meant to be you know like a specific to the world you're working in or if you mix them together you get like a weird mishmash which is very you know reckless deck style um and you You make a new world by, you know, taking two different worlds and just shuffling those cards together. So in the second half, you get a genre-specific thing about this is your occupation. This is what you do for a job. This is a secret that you might be keeping, but secrets are usually specific to the world we live in. You know, the kind of secrets that I keep are probably different than secrets that Han Solo kept, or that, you know, somebody in 1690 kept. So it's really meant to be, to put you in a specific world. Yeah. And when I think about Psyche, because that never, when I was growing up, that never entered my mind about their Psyche outside of Batman. He's like royally fucked up. So yeah, I'm like, those guys were Jesus. So when I think about the show, The Boys, and how. Yeah. They're like a meat grinder, you know, in their Psyche. But they have the outward appearance, the beautiful aesthetic, but I'm a fucking beast on the inside. So whoever wrote their Psyche was a genius also. Totally. Totally agree. And you know, it was conventions, doing conventions that prompted me to create this system, because that was the thing that we were getting asked for the most, is do you have anything about, like your character's inner world? You know, writers really wanted it. Gamers really wanted it. And it came up again and again and again. So on the list of to-do, that was like at the top, where this is what the, you know, the people are asking for the most. And I started to see that maybe this product had a much wider appeal than regular Reckless Deck, which is about, you know, there's a fair amount of us that want to draw fantasy orcs and elves and robots, who want to draw fantasy and science fiction characters, but there's a much, much. There's a much bigger universe of people who want to write. Yeah. And so, and I think that I'm seeing that, you know, I'm seeing the response to this being a lot larger than, you know, regular Reckless Deck, and also from lots of different genres and lots of different places, which is why we built, I built, you know, Psyche to not be necessarily just like a nerd genre vehicle. That's why the core set comes with, you know, all the universes. Yeah. The universal cards and the cards for contemporary life. I didn't want to make it, you know, I could have easily made it come with the epic fantasy cards, but not everybody wants to write epic fantasy. Some people just want to write about the world we live in. They want to write about characters that, you know, that are people who you'd meet on the street, like yourself or myself. And so that, but then, you know, you create these other, we created a series of companion decks, you know, so like you can swap out the genre, you keep the first four cards and the second four cards. You can plug in and out based on the world that you want to write in. Epic fantasy plugs right in, and you, now you have eight categories that work in like a D&D world or a Game of Thrones world. You take epic fantasy out and you plug in the espionage companion, and suddenly you're writing about government conspiracies and, you know, black ops teams and, and spy stuff. Yeah. And that's, you know, that's a whole world of writer that I never had, that with regular Reckless Deck. I didn't have anything to really offer. Yeah. So with this, I'm not gonna even lie to you and it's not, you know, I'm not biased or anything. I was like, I'm never buying another art book ever again, because this is limitless. So I was like, I'm so excited about this. And then I have to tell this story. So when I, when I got on Amazon and I found your box, beautiful box here. So I was like, Oh my God, I'm going to get the whole shebang. Oh my God. Cause it was for my brother. And I was like, Oh my God, I'm going to get the whole shebang. This birthday during the quarantine, I'm going to get myself something great. And so when the box came, my daughter was like, Oh, it opened it and I opened it. It was empty. I was like, Oh, that's what happens when you're dyslexic and you don't read. And then we reached out to each other and you made my dreams come true. So that's basically how I relate to people like this is a limitless source of information for artists, story writers, show writers. I mean, that's what I do. Yeah. Show writers. Anybody can use it. It, it, it, it taps into all those genres. So when does the Kickstarter begin? Oh, it's on now. Like you can go on kickstarter.com and it's, and it's happening right now. Um, uh, it ends on October the 13th. Okay. Tuesday. So it's got another from, from the date of this conversation right now, it's got, uh, another like eight days. Okay. And so do you want to, um, break down the Kickstarter? Like what, what, what's the date of the Kickstarter? Like, what's the date of the Kickstarter? What's the date of the Kickstarter? Like what's the date of the Kickstarter? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. we did espionage urban fantasy is another one steampunk is one uh horror cyberpunk is one uh and post-apocalypse is one so like dystopia so you've got all these different worlds that you can plug in to the system or swap in and out of uh there's we did play mats we have a like a whole hold everything box which is probably going to be like a large game box we have to see how much stuff we're actually going to end up producing before we can design the box because we've got to yeah let's just see what we're making to fit in the box first um oh oh my goodness i can't believe i didn't mention this earlier we're doing there's going to be an anthology of short stories that we're that we're creating uh and there is currently a contest right now for um for a short story contest through our website reckless deck.com you go on there um and there's like the psyche contest and you write a short story on our website you can download a free 54 card preview like a print and play that you can print out at home and cut out of the psyche cards and it's like a mishmash from all the different companion decks and the and the and the core set that give you 54 cards so you can really get a sense of what psyche is how it works and what it does for you if you use that print and play to write a short story you send it in and you might win to get your story published in the anthology and the anthology is going to be uh it's going to be a very much a ping pong of style and genre you can write and you can write in steampunk you can write in anime you can write in whatever because i know you hate anime so much so like you can write in any world you in any world in any style you want to the connective tissue for all the stories is going to be the prompts you're going to see the same prompts come up in different stories and they're going to get used in completely different ways um and they're just going to be like these weird little like um you know buoys out of the ocean that are just like blinking being like oh that again and that person used that in a completely different way to make a tell a completely different story it's really going to be a collection of stories that's about how to use these um you know like these kind of impersonal standardized prompt cards and make something extremely personal and extremely unique from and use them in a way that and to show that they can be used in ways that no one else would have thought of and i think it's going to be a really exciting compilation of stories and we just secured greg manches who is a great mentor and friend of mine he's um one of the illustrator teachers at illustration masterclass um and he wrote a book called above the timberline and uh it's a gorgeous illustrated novel uh that's like a kind of like a future uh dystopia like frozen earth kind of uh story about like a a boy explorer and he is going to write the like the masthead story like the he'll be a featured author and he is going to write a new using the prompts he's going to write a new story that takes place in his in his world that he established in his book above the timberline so he's using he's using it as like a testing ground to write a sequel to to that story oh my god okay this all sounds so fabulous i just get so inspired by people helping people and you know it's not free but you're you're helping people and they don't even realize how much you're doing for them like saving them so much time i hope so i hope i hope that because that gremlin has got to go you know we just got to get rid of that thing that is like standing on our ideas in and one of the things i realized about using prompts is for some reason it takes the pressure off suddenly it's like it's just a job it's almost like somebody gave you like an idea and said here draw this now go do it and it's suddenly not about you anymore and it becomes something more mundane like doing sit-ups or vacuuming the floor it's it takes the pressure off of you and makes it so that you can you know create get around the high stakes of like is this any good am i any good and you can work on something and just do it and have fun with it exactly so and i hate to ask you this because we're talking about your kickstarter now and i want to know what are you uh working towards for the future oh like i haven't even finished this yet why are you talking about that well you know i kind of wish our first kickstarter was three years ago and it took a while to produce that stuff took a while to fulfill that kickstarter uh and i'm constantly like i've got lots and lots of spreadsheets which is why sometimes it's really hard to post on instagram because you're like do you really want to see me looking at spreadsheets that's not cool that's not interesting for instagram but what i'm making is cool that's not cool to look at um so we've got these and i mean of course to your podcast people this means nothing because they can't see this but volume one and volume two are getting re getting a new edition and they're gonna look pretty fancy and shiny with a like that i'm really excited about these um not to disparage the current volume one and volume two that we sell but this is a little bit of a um a revamp because it was able i was been demoing it for three years now you know i've done it i've done all and i can see like oh that card it's a little bit of a clunker or you know like i feel like um something is missing here that there's just a feel there there's a space that needs to get filled by a card that doesn't exist yet and so there's there's some changes made to the to the content um and so they are going to be very pretty on a heavier uh heavier card stock and they um i think are going to deliver a little bit of a of a cleaner more um wealth i don't want to say wealth because that again makes it sound like the current version is no good uh which i definitely do not believe but it's a little bit it takes the it takes the system and the sophistication to a slightly higher level and so once now that we've established this as the standard we want to go back and revamp all the expansions you know there's going to be a much higher just the physical quality of them is so going to be so much nicer and they really are not going to match our expansions right now because we couldn't afford to do the foiling like if you look at the expansions you'll notice the card back is different than slightly different and that's always bugged me and so the we're going to take the expansions up all to so that the system is all like unified design wise even even with that your your artist is showing i'm like they're beautiful you're like no it could be better one of the things you're going to find in the um in the volume two that you have there's a category called reinvention and i really like to reboot existing characters and put them in you know weird worlds like you know the what's the revolutionary war captain america or the or the iron man look like or the post-apocalypse version of vision uh that's fun for me i what i found is that that card category didn't integrate as well with the other cards it sort of like was off to the side so as much as i love doing reinvention we're going to retire the reinvention category for now and we'll be introducing the that category placed by the superpowers category so volume two will come with um superpowers now and we will be doing more with superheroes in the future and you're going to see a lot more of the superpowers category you have once i get like a breathe like a moment to breathe from the comic book i'm working on i'm like i'm gonna start laying the cards out all over my little office floor so i can create me some new gals i like to draw women i think a lot of people do use it for your comic do you have your script all done is your script all like laid out and set up well yeah the script is done it's just it just needs my storyboard okay all right and you're doing all the art you can do the penciling and the inking as well yes yes and i'm doing everything through procreate so oh cool all right but it's not going to be any digital it's all going to be digital you're not going to have any like original art and stuff like that yeah it's just going to be all digital that's awesome how many is how many issues is it um it's actually just one graphic novel now i think i want to say it's between 20s and 30 pages um yeah yeah so i think it's going to be really great and what's so crazy is corona um it was supposed to be a tv show but nobody's making show well people are trying to ease back into it but at the height of it nobody was making shows they had to you know basically shelf it so the author was like well let me make a graphic novel you won't do it i'm like yeah that's great so it was not just written to be a tv show but they he actually had like he had sold it to a studio i don't know the intricacies of it all but i think they had a couple people that were very interested but they're like yeah no we're not shooting anything right now right hey if you can they want graphic novel properties and you know anything made that's a graphic novel is going to have a much better chance of being sold and getting produced than just some script so the graphic novel version of this can only help your your concept i will spread that good word it'll be over the moon but yeah uh clark it was so great talking to you today i've learned so much i feel like i i'm just too personable i just feel like i made a new friend oh you definitely did uh you know and the weird thing is is you know i feel like i know you better than you know me because i'm listening to your podcast and uh you know so i'm like oh i feel like we've hung out all the time and then i'm like oh wait we've never actually spoken you so i have this like i have this weird like sort of creeper stalker relationship with you that you don't realize because i've been listening to your show that makes me feel so good because quite literally i just feel like i'm talking into the dark like into the wind because i like to talk to people i like to know their stories i like to swap stories and see how we connect on certain issues we may have walked us on the same path at some point in life right and it's that that's crazy to me that we were like ships in the dark like i had one interview uh we both lived in atlanta at the same time and my dream job was to work at cartoon network and he worked at cartoon network oh and the same time in life so i was like it's just crazy like we're passing each other in life and we don't even realize how interconnected we all are um so i have a question for you do you have do we have a couple of more minutes or you gotta go okay so here's a question for you regarding psyche as a as a thing that's being built that we've done a ton of writing for it but we still have a lot more writing to go for it and i have i have a favorite ask i have a question for you um it's pretty clear i'm listening to your show that you have a pretty strong audience in the african-american community you know a lot of your guests are black and and you talk a lot about like your experiences in your life um clearly i am i'm not black um but i'm very aware that i'm not black and i'm not african-american and i think that psyche needs to be accessible and useful to all kinds of people and uh i want to know if you have any advice or knowledge of your audience or your friends or your fellow creatives how can psyche what does psyche need to have in it to make it feel more inclusive to uh to black people to hispanic people to people of other you know races and other experiences um not to be topical but even what we're going through today um with the climate of america um it doesn't even have to be present times it could be at any in history somebody had to go through adversity um how did they go because that's so it's sad to think that's a lot of backstory of people of color just adversity so how does one how does that change a person how does someone get through it how does someone and that changes them for the worst or for the for the better um i think that's basically what a lot of indie comics of people of color that's pretty much an adversity or tragedy happened to them to make them the hero or the villain that they were so that's i think i answered that question okay okay because i don't feel like it's not inclusive of them right now because i feel like the prompts are meant to be picked up and you could apply them to you know any race or gender or creed that you want to but it's really important i'm like this is just one of those when you make things like this and you put things out in the world you're like don't fuck this up you know like just this is you got to be really careful to make sure that you don't like really miss something that you know afterwards people are like yeah but what about and then you're like oh my god i can't believe that i didn't think of that or include that or take the time to expand my consciousness a little bit more um and oh yeah and that's that's too that's a given okay you know what i mean like i try to okay so let me play devil's advocate like to place myself in your shoes not that you don't think about it because you know i know that you do but let's just say you're an individual that you don't think about um social issues that take place there's a reason for that because that's not your everyday life it's not an excuse but i can understand why so you flip that back around that's my everyday life whether i read something on the news i hear something on the news the radio a friend of mine called me to tell me that something happened to their nephew or their son or what have you. you so yeah i mean it's good to ask basically that's what i'm getting around to and don't ever feel like oh well i'm a trash ass human pink human being because i'm not thinking about this yeah i'm not thinking about this and maybe you should delve into it every once in a while not to get oversaturated with it but you know to be present okay right on all right good that's that's super helpful and i really do hope that when this comes out you know once we print it and and have it available that all kinds of different people will find it you know equally accessible and useful and can create extremely cool stories that relate to you know their lives and their imaginations exactly well that's the end of our show right on thank you for taking the extra time for that yeah no problem i just want you to tell the listeners where they can find you how they can get all the information and i'll see you in the next one bye goodness from you so just hit him okay my personal art you can find at clarkhuggins.com um you can find the kickstarter on the kickstarter website and just type in reckless deck psyche into the search bar and it should come right up um and and again there's still a little more than a week to go for the kickstarter um and regular reckless deck you could classic reckless deck as we're calling it now you can find at reckless deck.com and you can also find the free 54 card deck download of psyche on reckless deck.com and information about how to enter the writing contest the short story contest which i hope lots and lots of your listeners will do yes and send me some information on that because i want to post that too because i have a lot of people that they're not really into comic books but they're into sci-fi novels and things of that nature so they would love that great all right i'll send all that to you like right now okay no problem all right clark well you have a great day and i may have to skip you up a couple interviews because i love art well that's all thanks skip me up that sounds great okay like yeah sure yeah oh yeah all right well thanks so much totally this was so fun thank you yes all right all right y'all i hope y'all learned something and for those of y'all that did that will never tell me you're welcome i picked a goodie yes clark he got that knowledge because you know he's been in the business for a minute and he's doing his own thing and he's going to cons and talking to other artists and seeing what they need and how he can assist so i thank him for his magnanimous brain i have my set and i'm going to start using it as soon as i find some free time um from working on this comic book that i'm working on i know you probably have seen it all over my social medias ah so i hope you take your notes if you didn't please go back you may have missed something you may have learned something that could help you excel in your career as an artist or any other aspect of life we talked about some shit okay so again you can support the show through um that is the cash app is dollar sign gadgets and geekery you can also support the show through anchor um and give a donation we also have some merch over on the gadgets and geekery website um tons tons of stuff there something for everybody um give us a call on the hotline and i'm such a piece of trash i don't even have the number in front of me i hate doing stuff like that i'm so ill prepared um and we also have a discord 21 and up if you are 21 and up don't play with me send me a message and dm on instagram and i will try to get you in um but eventually that will be a option through patreon um i think that's all we got today uh head over to the blurred fleet um on instagram and check out what we're doing over there uh again blurred fleet is a collective of black online creators artists uh etc give us a a look a like a comment a share all that good stuff so until next time y'all be good y'all be careful out here in these streets you know where we from