rat artist gabrielle drolet on monetizing your art
"as soon as you monetize anything, it becomes labor, no matter how much you love it."
Today, sweet ratlings, you get a Rat Chat and a Rat Tuesday rolled into one.
Gabrielle Drolet is a cartoonist, artist, and most importantly, a great appreciator of rats. She’s also been painting a rat every day this month for “rat February.” You’ve probably seen her viral rats on Twitter. For this Rat Tuesday, she talked about the pressure to monetize as an artist, the hellish state of the journalism industry, and of course, rats.
Can you tell me about your art, separately from your rats? I want to talk about how you got into that but mostly about you as an artist first.
My background is actually in journalism. I worked in journalism for a few years, and then a few years ago, I started doing cartoons. I feel as though a lot of people during the pandemic started taking little hobbies they had more seriously because you had so much time on your hands.
I was a student, and suddenly school wasn’t really happening. So I was drawing a lot more, and I started submitting my cartoons to like magazines, and just submitting them incessantly every week. And so in that way, I was lucky I already had connections to a lot of newspapers and magazines because of my journalism work. I started to do cartoons for the New Yorker, and now I do cartoons for the Globe and Mail, which is a Canadian daily newspaper. I’ve been doing cartoons, and then it’s just in the past six months or so, since August, they’ve been more and more rat-themed.
Going back to your past as a journalist, making that jump to being a cartoonist. Obviously, journalism is a terrible, horrible industry right now. But tell me more about making the transition to cartooning, and being able to turn your hobby into something monetizable.
As you know, journalism is hard. I know you mentioned being laid off. It's a tough industry to be in, and that was it. I was working as a freelance journalist. I still do, like I work as a freelance fact-checking now, which is fun.
But I think at the beginning, when I was in grad school, I realized that freelance journalism, it doesn’t pay very well. It’s not very stable. It’s really hard to get work if you’re just writing articles and putting them out. And then in Canada, there aren’t jobs in journalism. And so yeah, it was just between writing projects, I had all this time, and so I was drawing a lot.
I don’t write as many freelance articles as I used to, but I have the fact-checking side of journalism. I’m in the cartoons. It was a slow process to be able to start monetizing the cartoons because initially, similarly to any freelance thing, you don’t know when a cartoon is gonna get purchased and when you’ll get paid for your work.
I got really lucky. Back in August, I started doing the rat thing. That started paying my rent. I was able to expand my print shop and it’s only been since then that that’s a much bigger part of my income. And not to just talk about money, but as a freelancer, as someone in this industry, it’s a really big part of it, you know? I have student loans to pay off and I’m really lucky that the rats are helping me do that.
Okay, wait, so why rats?
I think it was August, it may have been early September, but around that time, I was just starting to do more traditional art, which is funny. I had always done mostly digital, because with digital illustrations, like in the kind of cartooning that I do for magazines, it’s a lot easier because if an editor is like, “We don’t like this,” you can just change it. Whereas you can’t do that with a watercolor thing, right?
This past summer, just for fun, I bought a set of watercolors. And I saw on Twitter, this video that I thought was so cute. It was these rats poking their heads out of a sewer grate, almost like a game of Whack-A-Mole. It was like one rat at a time. And the person who tweeted it had this caption like, “I’m never going to New York. This is so disgusting.”
I was like, “Wait, but that’s really cute.” I had never been a big rat person before, but I was like, This is awesome.”
And people wanted to buy prints of it. At the time, I didn’t have a printer, I had a print shop but I had to get things printed elsewhere and it was a whole ordeal. I was like, you know what I’ll do? I’ll offer to make the paintings to order. So if you buy a rat painting, I will paint it for you and then send it to you. Which was so much work. I put it on my website and sold like 100 within a day. So I had to stop the orders because I was like, I can’t paint this many rats. And for a month all I was doing was just painting rats.
The same rats over and over again?
It’s the same like sewer grate with six rats. They were all a little bit different. Like the rats were all doing different things, but it was the same setup of painting. That was a full month because I sent an email to everyone who ordered, and was like “Thank you so much. This is too many. It is gonna take me a few weeks.”
People were really nice. But then people also started being like, “Can you draw a family of rats going sightseeing in New York?” I was like, yeah I guess so. So I would do that. And then people were like, “Holy shit, I want to see them go watch a Broadway show.” I was like, ok, here are the rats doing that!
I think it was especially fun because Twitter is not a very fun place to be right now. Ever since Elon Musk took it over, there’s something kind of dark and weird about it. And I was like, this is awesome. I’m not really doing anything on Twitter other than just drawing rats and it became really fun.
When October rolled around, I don’t know if you’re familiar with like–
Inktober?
Yeah, so I had Ratober where I was just drawing a rat every day in October. Like they were apple picking, they were pumpkin carving, and since then, I’ve been able to draw other stuff too.
And then February rolled around, which I think is the most depressing month of the year. I know you’re in LA, but I’m in Montreal, so it’s so cold. So I was like, I should do a rat every day for February as well.
That’s so cute. I’m really curious to know like, you’ve gone crazy viral for your rats. But why do you think people love rats so much? Why do you think there’s such an affection for these disgusting little creatures?
I’m sure you’ve thought about that a lot. I think part of it is just, they’re so misunderstood a lot of the time. They don’t mean to be evil and gross, right? They’re just little guys and I think the way I draw them also, it’s very cutesy, right? You’re not seeing the part of rats that people usually are.
I think in the past few years, we’ve had a sort of turning of the tables for pigeons as well, like the quote-unquote “vermin” that people are now being like, “Wait, it’s not their fault. They’re just little guys.”
No, I feel the same way. Like I felt so strongly about it that I had to write about it. But I agree, it’s like with raccoons or mice. People just flipped and are suddenly realizing that what we consider vermin didn’t ask to be vermin. They didn’t ask to be scrounging in our trash. They’re just trying to live.
Exactly. I think there’s something relatable, like seeing these little creatures who are just trying to get by, and they’re doing their best, there’s something like, “Oh, that’s me.” Every time I post a rat, especially if it’s a pair, people are like, “Me and who?”
People love to see themselves in these little guys.
I also wanted to talk about, as an artist and a creative person online, do you ever feel a kind of resentment over having to monetize your work? Does that ever take the joy out of it?
Oh yeah, totally. I know this is an interview, but I want to know what you think!
I mean it’s less of an interview and more of a back-and-forth!
As soon as you monetize anything, it becomes labor, no matter how much you love it.
A year ago, two years ago, when I was first really trying to find my footing in the industry, I felt really resentful of that. I think it’s tough because I’m very lucky to be able to make art full time, but I just felt this really big sense of being like ... As soon as you monetize anything, it becomes labor, no matter how much you love it. That’s a really tough realization to have, and it’s not the same, to do something for money, for rent, to pay off my student loans, as it would be just to do it for fun.
But I also think I’ve come to accept that this is the happiest I could be doing a job. I’m so grateful that people are willing to pay money to have my art in their house. I do still draw for fun, right/ But then if I post a drawing I did for fun and people like it, I’m like, “Okay, I’ll turn this into a print.”
I don’t know. How do you feel about that as a writer?
I think I feel the same way, where it’s something I love doing and something I can’t imagine not doing. I don’t know what else I would do if not this. But I feel the same way. Like the minute you start monetizing something and adding the pressure of turning the thing you love into your income, I do think it makes it more tiring. Because then you’re like, “Am I writing this because I love it or am I writing this because I have to sell it?”
Yeah, that’s exactly it. I think the parts where it becomes tough, if you just happen to write something you love, to draw something you love, and then it performs well, you make money off of it, that’s so great. But having to be like, okay what can I draw that would perform well and people like?
Right!
I think a harder part of it is when you’re thinking about the job aspect of it before the art. Again, I’m very lucky to be doing this. I’m happy that I can still draw for fun as well. It’s complicated, but in the end, I’ve come to accept that this is just the way it has to be when you’re working, and yeah, it definitely feels more like a chore. It’s weird to write my little to do lists in the morning and it’s like, “Draw rat prints,” you know? That’s the only way to make this work. And that’s okay.
I had one more question. Going back to the conversation about monetizing our work, and having to constantly sell our creativity, what is the difference for you, between selling a cartoon to the Globe and Mail or the New Yorker, and then selling a print of your rats?
I’m really happy you asked, I was thinking about that too. We talked earlier about media as an industry and how finicky that is and how difficult it is. And the way the cartoon thing works with the New Yorker, is that you send a rough sketch. And then either they’re like, “Yes, we’ll buy it,” or “No, we won’t.”
With the Globe and Mail, we have a contract where every three weeks I do an editorial cartoon for them. It’s really editorial. What are the big news stories this week? What’s happening politically? It feels different, because you’re thinking about audience and current events and tone, you can’t do whatever you want.
With the rats, obviously I do have to think about audience and I have a specific audience. Sometimes I post things and I don’t know if they’ll like this. The other day I posted a big rat king. I love it, but I don’t know if my audience will, because it’s kind of scary, right? And so that’s part of it, but it’s really freeing to be like, I can post whatever I want. I’m not limited by a paycheck or a publication.
And yeah, I get requests to really push the boundaries of what I’m doing. Some of the rats I’m drawing are very different from the ones I usually do. I’m sure you know this, it’s the same thing as when you’re writing a newsletter with your friends. It’s very different when you’re writing a freelance piece for a magazine.
Exactly, there’s a checklist for whatever I’m actually monetizing and actually selling to like, institutional journalism.
Yeah, versus being like, “I think people will like this. I normally do.”
Okay, last question for real this time. Do you ever worry ... you’ve built an audience off of this very specific niche of painting rats, and obviously there’s a massive demand for it and people love it. But do you ever worry about being pigeonholed into this and limiting yourself as an artist, because you’re known as the rat illustrator? Not just like, Gabrielle the artist.
Yeah, all the time. Not a lot because right now, I’m having fun. It’s still pretty new to me, but I do make an effort to post things that aren’t just rat art. It’s tough to be working with what is essentially a trend or something people are liking right now, but I don’t know if they always will. But I just have to hope that if people ever stop liking rats, and I change with the times, that’ll be okay. Or if I stop wanting to draw rats. I just hope that the audience I’ve made is secure enough for that.