- Interview format: Email
Anime Herald:First things first, let’s clear up something from Youmacon: You were not back on your ribbon-collecting bullshit. You were still on it. I present day two of Matsuricon, as evidence.
Coatsinkleaf: Uhh…I think the “back” in this case was referring to the prior year that I tabled at Youmacon! The first time in my life that I experienced ribbon collecting was at Youmacon 2023. Matusuricon 2024 was the second ribbon convention I’ve ever been to, after Youmacon 2023. Matsuricon was the con at which I decided, “Okay. I’m going to get into this ribbon thing!”
I think the most impressive part was that my entire haul at Matusircon I didn’t even have any ribbons to even trade back then! I just straight-up was willing to trade stickers and merch I was selling for the ribbons… I’m like, “Look: if you have ribbons, I’ll take ‘em.” I was so obsessed with collecting them. The post from Youmacon 2024 you’re referencing about being “back on my bullshit” was the first ever time I tabled ribbons, actually! Exactly one year after my first ribbon cons I finally made ribbons of my own.
Look at me now… oh, how time changes. Many months and many lungfuls of ribbon dust inhaled later… here I am. (Please scroll down to the ribbon section… there’s a photo of me knelt down next to my ribbon display that is literally larger than my torso)
(Editor’s note: I used the Instagram posts for the respective timestamps of the ribbon collecting.)
Anime Herald: What is your origin story as an artist?
Coatsinkleaf: I’ve drawn all my life, really. I guess everyone kinda says that. I truly started taking digital art seriously in college, where I was a part of a drawing club called UChicomics. We would hang out and draw (in and out of club time), and it was with the friends I made at UChicomics that I learnt of and got to go to my very first convention, C2E2, in my freshman year of college.
I was hooked. Beforehand, I didn’t actually know that people can make a living as an artist this way – tabling at conventions. My initial perception of the art world was that of pure, fine arts – galleries and museums; the illustrators and artists I looked up to who produced digital art kinda just stayed on my phone, in a separate world. But not here. At C2E2, they were here in real life selling their work! There were a lot of other factors that went into how I became a full-time artist, but I attribute it most to that first club field trip to C2E2.
After that, I slowly started building my portfolio, tabling my first con, and as I moved up in the ranks (got older), I became president of UChicomics and pushed for the club members to start selling their art at small events around the college.
The more times I tabled, the better I got. My first table was at UChicon (the convention that the anime club, UCJAS, puts on every year). The table was split between three people crammed together, and I had a total of five sticker designs that I printed and cut by hand. It was exhilarating. People bought my work! I’d like to think that I’ve come a long way since then (haha). Fast forward to June 2023: I graduate, pass on the torch of UChicomics to an underclassman, and try to look for ‘real’ jobs in the fields I studied in…
Nothing.
Post-COVID job market? I’m somehow simultaneously overqualified and underqualified at the same time? I didn’t have thirty-five years of experience by age twenty-three? Whatever it was, I ended up unemployed. I didn’t have any income. And with the savings from my student jobs in college dwindling, I had to find a way to pay rent and buy food without straight-up asking my parents for money (because that was NOT an option. Doing that means you have failed as a person, or so I thought). So I turned to the only way I knew how to make money: selling stickers. I started tabling conventions again: local ones within Chicago at first. Then, as I got better, I started going out of state, driving to neighbouring cities, and eventually to flying around the US. I tried everything I could, from small pop-up events to summer markets, where all of my things would get rattled and blown away by the wind (I later learned that the outdoor markets were not the niche for me).
I think it was really life or death for me, at that time. As I pivoted away from the endless rejection, failures, and no-responses of traditional job applications and into tabling my art, I had to come face-to-face with the fact that I either have to make it as an artist or go back home to Thailand in shame (fresh grad, no job, no rent money, no prospects). It was really the do-or-die mentality that pushed me to work and grow my skills and my business as fast as I could. Again, the more times I tabled, the better I got at it. 2023 post-grad, I think I did seven-ish events (some of them super small markets/ one-day tabling gigs). In 2024, that number rose to thirteen; and in 2025, I closed the year with thirty-one conventions under my belt. twenty-eight domestic, three international.
Here we are! You’re all caught up.
Anime Herald: Every artist who has done multiple conventions has at least one con story that they love to share. What is yours?
Coatsinkleaf: At Youmacon (Detroit, MI) one year ago, I was able to surprise my friend Landon (whom I met at Youmacon 2023 my very first year tabling there) with a custom illustration of Acheron from Honkai Star Rail! He really wanted to get a print of mine signed, but I didn’t have any of the characters that he knew or overlapped with the voice actors that were going to be at the con that year. It was also around his birthday, so I was like: “Easy – draw him a thing, print it out, and surprise him with it!” I think, to this day, it’s framed and hung up in his house somewhere.
PS: Funnily enough, I dont think I’ve ever told this story before. It’s just kinda one of those happy moments you look back on. Landon still talks about it to this day too (he says he owes me because I don’t really do commissions and he should be allowed to pay me for it, but I keep insisting that it’s a birthday gift)
Anime Herald: How dare you leave the house without petting the cat?! HOW DARE YOU!!!
Coatsinkleaf: I uh… do not know what this one is about. I do not have a cat…
If it is somehow in referral to this really niche Instagram Reel then… oh my God, how far did you go back? …. Also, fun fact: that was my friend’s cat, and we actually filmed that reel backwards! (we pet the cat first!! And then we took the train to the con, and we took photos ourselves setting up, reversed all the clips. >:) hehe)
So, no. We did not leave the house without petting the cat. Gottem.
(Editor’s note: Good kitty! Good dog too!)
Anime Herald: How are your cooking skills with and without Raccacoonie (from Everything Everywhere All At Once)?
Coatsinkleaf: I’d like to think that I’m a pretty good cook with or without Racacoonie, but I’m sure he (Raccacoonie) would disagree
Fun fact: not to flex, but I actually have a chef’s uniform signed by Key Huy Quan (he plays Waymond from the movie!!!!) i bought a new chef shirt for the cosplay after that and retired that one permanently
(Editor’s note: That’s cool.)
Anime Herald: Speak to me about your love of traffic cones.
Coatsinkleaf: It started in college, I think (as all traffic cone-related things go)… One time, I borrowed my friend’s traffic cone trenchcoat (of course? Who doesn’t have one!) and someone else in my dorm offered me their orange traffic cone pants (because, again…who doesn’t?) and I went as a traffic cone for Halloween. I picked up a traffic cone to put on my head that day (cue magical girl transformation) and the rest was history.
Ever since then, I’ve been Cone-man. Not sure how or why, but it stuck. I even had an orange-themed birthday party one year. Everyone’s party hats were cones. Now, I reserve my cone outfits for festivals or halloween and birthdays.
I wore a cone outfit to Lollapalooza one year, decided mid-way through the festival that I wanted to make stickers and hand them out, and it kinda stuck! The next year, I recruited more friends to join the cone-party and we even made it into the Chicago Sun-Times as one of the outstanding outfits of the weekend, haha.
(Editor’s note: Traffic cone trenchcoat? I know where it belongs.)
Anime Herald: How was your experience at Lightbox Expo?
Coatsinkleaf: Contrary to popular belief, I didn’t table at Lightbox, I just attended it for fun! I have chickened out of applying every year… But Lightbox, as an artist-first convention, was a very intoxicating thing to experience! Everyone was passionate about the same thing, and it made for a wonderful time as an attendee. I still have life-long friends I made/met at those conventions.
Anime Herald: Getting a drawing to look like ass isn’t as easy as people might think. How long did that piece take you?
Coatsinkleaf: Is this another deep dive into my Instagram Reels? SETH, I’M MORTIFIED…. Also, I don’t remember. That was a throwaway gag. I’m sorry… investigative journalism vs. my short term memory: who would win?
Anime Herald: “Higher beings, these words are for you alone.”
Why did Hollow Knightand Hollow Knight: Silksong speak to you so strongly?
Coatsinkleaf: I first played Hollow Knight in college, when my friend came over one day, and said: “hey i think you’d like this,” and sat me down with Hollow Knight in front of me… the way you would a baby and Cocomelon. Mind you, before this game, the only other prominent video game I played was Minecraft… I cannot understate this: I am very bad at video games. People seem to think that I’m good at them because I draw a lot of them. Haha.
I had to remap my Hollow Knight controls on my laptop to Minecraft controls. I was so bad at video games that I didn’t even understand how to move. I also don’t know if it’s impressive or stupid, but I also played Silksong years apart, when it finally dropped (last year) on this very same laptop. Yeah, I’m still using it… she’s so old.
Hollow Knight means a lot to me, as an artist. It was the first game of its type that I have ever experienced, and it started my exploration into other indie games to play and experience.
In a way, I owe my career to Team Cherry and to Hollow Knight. One of the first prints I drew and produced for sale was one from a series of location posters of the various areas from Hollow Knight. It actually still lives on, on my display, till this day! It still does really well at conventions. I’m surprised it held up for this long.
When I started making fan art for Hollow Knight, I didn’t know that it was this indie success story that had a cult following and a massive fanbase. It was just a game that my friend showed me. I think after I played the game, I became patient zero and infected all of my friends in college to start playing it too. I’ve bought over a dozen copies of the game for other people just because I wanted them to experience what I experienced. To me, I was just making fan art for a game that really moved me. I lucked out, really, when I started tabling people went: “Whoa, Hollow Knight!” “I’ve never seen Hollow Knight art anywhere!” I genuinely lucked into a niche I wasn’t even aware of and I owe a lot of my early success to Hollow Knight and the friend who showed it to me
I could genuinely talk all day about the little things in the game’s art and the game’s design that are so meticulously crafted and well done, but I will not bore you with that.
Silksong spoke to me strongly, to say the least. As one of the many, many people who have been waiting many years to play the sequel, but also as someone who has been constantly interfacing with a lot of the fanbase at cons and online, I played the absolute [ ] out of it when it dropped. Every time I sell one of my Hollow Knight pieces at a con, I get snippets of:
“When’s Silksong going to come out, man?,”
“I’mma be honest, I don’t think it’s real.”
“Its never coming out,”
“Silksong dropping tomorrow!!!!” and it always makes me smile to get to talk to someone so passionate about the same game that I am.
A lot of people already knew me as “the Hollow Knight guy” at cons. I’m usually one or one of a few Hollow Knight tables people see, which meant that I had a lot of expectations riding on me for Silksong merch. But when I got to play the game, I got to experience again that wave of inspiration and the urge to create that the initial Hollow Knight instilled in me.
Anime Herald: What are some of your all-time favorite anime or manga?
Coatsinkleaf: Great Pretender for anime, and Witch Hat Atelier for manga! I really enjoy the art direction for Great Pretender, and I thought the writing was really good. As for Witch Hat, I’m on book five right now. And so far, I really enjoy the art in it, and the allegory for drawing as a practice of magic is really powerful to me. Funnily enough, I don’t have art for either of these franchises at my table. I guess, when you like something too much, you’re scared to make something that will never live up to the expectations of the original piece of media (I feel this way about Hollow Knight and Silksong, too… haha)
You can find Non’s work at his Instagram, and on his Patreon.