Meet Keely Mikkelsen | Background Painter, Color Designer & Comic Colorist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Keely Mikkelsen and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Keely, what habits do you feel helped you succeed?
The habits that help me succeed are all centered around maintaining both happiness and longevity in my career. For me, that means constantly learning and growing, while maintaining my physical and emotional health. Practice alone doesn’t improve my art very quickly, but learning new skills and practicing those does help me grow. I like to study shows, comics, and other artists I like.

To maintain my health and happiness, I make sure to stretch, exercise, and get up from my desk frequently so I can keep drawing without pain. I roller skate or hike to clear my head. I talk with my friends, and we critique each others’ work, send each other job opportunities, and force each other to take breaks. Getting second opinions from others helps you see your own work from other perspectives.

I regularly check in with myself to make sure I’m having fun with my art and am excited about the direction I’m going. Knowing what makes me passionate to make art has allowed me to focus on developing skills specific to the careers I enjoy.

Having fun and taking breaks has been just as vital to my success as practice.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I like to create a wide variety of art. I like to work with color as a career, but I still enjoy creating character art and abstract art. I don’t want to stick to just one style, I want to experiment.

I started drawing because I liked cartoons and comics and wanted to make my own for fun. There’s a lot of SpongeBob SquarePants and Sonic the Hedgehog in the margins of my old school papers. I’ve always loved learning about art and improving. If I didn’t know how to draw a hand, an expression, or some type of lighting, I learned how to get better at it. Whatever I looked at, a cartoon frame or a comic page or the shadows cast in a room, I was thinking about how I’d draw it. I wanted to get better just because I thought it was fun, and just wanted to make some of my own comics on the side. I didn’t realize it was something I could do as a living until late in high school.

I went to Cal State Fullerton to major in Fine Art with a concentration in Entertainment Art/Animation. Because I like making different types of art, it made it hard to narrow down what I wanted to do as a job. I think it was really valuable for me to learn about all parts of the animation pipeline, but I quickly burned out trying to be perfect at all of it. Just because I enjoyed something didn’t mean I’d enjoy doing it as a career when pressure and deadlines became involved. Since I was trying to run on empty, there was no passion behind my work anymore and it all felt flat and dull. With the help of my professors and friends, I took a step back to reassess what I really wanted to focus on. I realized I really enjoyed illustration, primarily color and lighting. I found it was something I could keep up with at a pace that would be required for a career. My particular skill set fit in best with illustration since I had spent a lot of time observing real-life color and lighting to improve my digital art. Now that I had picked a focus, I didn’t have to spend time trying to be perfect at other areas of art anymore. My passion came back and my art improved. Since I had healed from the burnout, I found that even the types of art I didn’t want to do as a career improved. I gained art back as a hobby, while also getting to do art for work.

I picked up some freelance work, first doing background painting on a short film by Kay Caines, then doing color for MariSole, a comic for Nike SNKRS. I really loved getting to collaborate with other talented artists on these projects.

Working with friends is a huge motivator for me, and it’s something I hope to keep doing on future projects.

Ultimately, passion is the main thing that drives me to create, so I had to find different ways to cultivate passion in my life. For my career, I’m passionate about the process of using color and lighting, and I’m passionate about working with other artists to see a larger project come together. For personal sketches and comics, I’m passionate about the stories I tell but had to learn that I couldn’t pressure myself or I’d burn out. For abstract art, I’m passionate about capturing a feeling for myself, but I don’t mind if it’s not something that resonates with everybody. I love a variety of work, so I embrace it. I still create focus in my life, but I don’t force myself to be defined by one thing.


Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I really like the museums in LA because they’re fun places to draw and study. My favorites are The Getty, LACMA, La Brea Tar Pits, and the Natural History Museum. One of my favorite places to go with friends is Requiem: Coffee, Tea, and Fantasy. It’s a really cool sci-fi and fantasy themed cafe in Anaheim that hosts a lot of fun events.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
My professors Garrett Kaida, Cliff Cramp, Chuck Grieb and Wendy Grieb from Cal State Fullerton have given me so much knowledge about art and the business side of the animation and illustration industries. They’ve been so supportive in helping me hone my skills and reach my goals. I also have to thank Pencil Mileage Club for providing art students with so many career resources, and for fostering such a great community where I met lifelong friends. I want to thank my family too, for always being supportive of me.

Website: https://keelymikkelsen.wixsite.com/portfolio

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yigloo/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keelymikkelsen/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/KeelyMikkelsen