Nips: Virtually Famous

At 24, Nicole Echeverria has never worked a steady job in her life. She pays the rent to her apartment in Las Vegas entirely through her digital drawings in the form of commissions, donations and a crowd-funding platform called Patreon.

“I have fears all the time of every sort. What if people don’t like what I’m drawing? What if, at one point, no one wants to support my art?” she says. Fears aside, she has 8,447 Twitter followers and 17,318 likes on Facebook (a number that grows every day) and they likely don’t even know her real name; instead they know her by her internet handle: Nips.

She comes from a family of artists. Some draw with pen and pencil, others are oil painters while she works with Photoshop and a stylus. But in terms of the challenges artists face in their career, Nips has a unique set of her own. Her worries of making a living and a name for herself go hand in hand with the new, digital age she lives in.

From video game fan art, to her own original content, to NSFW content (not safe for work, or 18+), Nips draws nearly every day on her digital tablet, which acts like a high-tech sketchpad. A large portion of what she draws revolves around League of Legends, a competitive computer game with professional teams and players. Some of her recent work has been watching matches happen live online and sketching in-game characters in commemoration of a team’s great game or play.

In the world of eSports, or electronic sports, a player or content creator can be the talk of the town after a spectacular play or piece of work. Unless they continue to perform or create at a consistent tempo, the masses quickly latch on to the next hot topic, leaving those who aren’t as constant in the digital dust.

Although Nips often accommodates her League of Legends followers, she does her best to keep her other fans happy. “My audience is really diverse, and it’s not like a melting pot. They’re separate groups. I have the League group, then I have the people who follow me for NSFW. I have people that follow me for comic work, then I have people who’ve been following me on DeviantArt for a long time. So it’s just random sects, and I have to semi-please all of them,” Nips says.

“Sometimes you don’t always want to draw, or you don’t always want to do whatever it is the content you’re putting out. But sometimes you have to do it anyway, because we’re in this age where if you’re not active on any sort of social platform, you become irrelevant. It’s really scary to me.”

Within the eSports world, Twitter is the go-to medium for anyone who wants to be heard. Through the popular social media platform, fans of creators or players can see the latest news and content put out on the Internet. Some of the most popular entities in the League of Legends community tweet an average of 33 times a day, and receive 50 retweets per tweet. On average, Nips sends out 5.1 tweets a day, often of finished projects or works in progress, and receives 20.2 retweets per tweet.

“The weird thing about my art is I could not post anything for like a week or two, that’s fine. But whatever I come back with better be fucking amazing,” she says.

On occasion, Nips uses the streaming website Twitch.tv to give fans a way to directly interact with her and to get an inside peek at how she draws. There she can display everything that’s on her computer screen and even include a webcam and microphone if she wants to interact with viewers. On her Twitch stream, viewers can talk with each other and the streamer through a chat box on the side of the screen. Sometimes the fans can be welcoming and complimentary, but other times they can be a hindrance.

“Backseat drawing is when people will say ‘doesn’t that face look a little off? The arm looks a little out of proportion,’” she says. “You see these comments and it kind of distracts you. You think, maybe it is out of proportion, and sometimes it leads you astray and makes things take longer than they need to, and sometimes you get art block where you can’t draw anymore.”

In addition to the intermittent art block, Nips has had to deal with issues in her wrist. She graduated from the Florida International University with a degree in biology and missed one of the first lessons of art class: don’t flick your wrist while drawing. Because she draws so often on a small four-by-five inch tablet and uses her wrist as opposed to her whole arm, the stressed nerve has forced her to stop drawing to allow for recovery. “There was a time I had to stop drawing for a month, and it was the weirdest, hardest and worst time ever, because I wanted to draw really badly, and I couldn’t. So I tried to draw with my left hand and it was really bad.”

In a life filled with continuous pressure and doubts, Nips doesn’t let anything deter her from doing what she loves. “Nothing makes me happier than drawing,” she says. “If I continue doing what I like, I’m going to end up doing something I like, so it doesn’t matter what my goal is. Seeing how I’ve grown and the phases I’ve gone through, I don’t tend to look back; I don’t like looking back because it’s keeping me from looking forward. I worked hard to get here. It’s not an overnight thing and I need to take it one step at a time. There are still many more days to come.”

Check out Nips' Twitter, Facebook and Twitch for more on her artwork or to commission a piece for yourself!