Comic book artist Will Sliney on filming a new show during the pandemic

Will Sliney talks to Roisin Burke about the pleasure of teaching and the challenges and strangeness of filming during a pandemic

FROM rescuing people at sea with the RNLI to sketching Spiderman, Ballycotton’s Will Sliney is a man with many strings to his bow.

Will, who is also the frontman of a new Sky learn to draw show, ‘Draw with Will’, credits his local neighbourhood for keeping him grounded despite enormous career success.

“Everything will always be very very normal in Ballycotton, that’s what I love about Ballycotton,” he says.

“I don’t think you would ever be allowed to go around saying ‘I have a show,’ you know?!”

Will said he also benefits from a very supporting family.

He highlights how much his wife Laura took on when he left to film the Sky drawing series at Ardmore Studios in Dublin in the middle of the pandemic, during a lockdown.

“I’ve two kids now, Aria is one and Tadgh is three in August and when Tadhg sees me on TV, he thinks it’s a different person, it’s Will Sliney from the telly, not daddy,” he explains. 

“To do this,(film the sky series) I obviously had to leave Laura, who had a newborn baby at the time, so my family, mum and dad and her parents would have helped out.

“Your support network definitely gets smaller during Covid, you can’t exactly call over the neighbour. Thankfully we were very blessed with both sets of parents. You wouldn’t be able to get up and film for the day if you had gotten no sleep the night before from a newborn baby. Laura basically took all that on her shoulders.”

Will describes a surreal experience of filming in the time of Cvid.

“I was gone for two weeks, to Dublin, in the thick of lockdown, with an exemption letter from Sky for making TV, to show the guards,” he says. 

“I was rehearsing in the hotel, finalising all the scripts and getting the hair and the costume tried on which was all new to me.

Before I knew it, my eyebrows had been plucked! I didn’t even know what was happening, which was a funny experience.

Will hopes that for any future projects, it can be more of a family affair.

“Hopefully in the future, we might be able to rent a house nearby and stay there but at the moment that is not possible.”

Locally, when not drawing for Marvel, Will is part of the Ballycotton RNLI team, a role his father, grandfather and great grandfather have all taken on before him. While he generally rescues people, Will was once part of a team that guided a dolphin trapped in a water pool after high tide back to the sea.

“I’ve been involved for the past seven or eight years, its in the family and it’s very easy for me to do with work from home.”

Will, who set up his own production company with his friend Johnny Lochan before approaching Sky, said he was happy with the way he had approached the drawing series.

It’s no secret people love how to draw shows and we realised we were onto something with homeschool hub.

Will appeared on RTÉ’s Homeschool hub series, which ran during the lockdowns last year.

“It started off with the ‘We will draw’ initiative and then the Homeschool Hub and then there was all of a sudden this buzz around me in terms of wanting to get me on TV,” Will says.

"So, me and my very good friend Johnny Lochran set up our own production company so we could control all of it and put together a few new ideas for TV shows and before we knew it we were up in Ardmore studios filming.

“There were two ways of doing it, handing it over to an established company and they would own the idea and I would just be the presenter, or the smarter way, do it ourselves, thankfully I had the people around me to be able to do that and Sky came on board quite quickly.”

He enjoyed the experience of planning a show from scratch, even within the constaints of the pandemic.

“Obviously if it wasn’t lockdown times I would have flown to London and met the team, everything was done over zoom, so nothing ever felt real until I walked onto the set at Ardmore Studios,” he says.

“It was quite an amazing experience from planning out the series, planning which characters we would draw and figuring out the classes and I would have designed the set in pencil and paper and everything.”

Describing presenting the show, Will said it was amazing.

It was a massive learning experience for me but everyone made me so comfortable, they had all been working in TV and film for years and it was fab,” he says. “I thought I would be way more nervous than I was.

“If I was thrown into the deep end and told to do something that I had never done before on camera I think I would have been but I have been drawing for so long and teaching for so long and to be honest all of the stuff I do on Twitch and YouTube was all for practice in front of the camera, talking to people.

“I know it is just me at home broadcasting online, but at the same time, it is a lot of the same skills.

“From that aspect, it was quite straightforward and enjoyable and I was just full of excitement and energy for the whole thing because it was such a big thing and a great opportunity.”

Ironically in the Black Friday sales before lockdown, Will had bought a decent enough camera and a capture card with the idea of putting together a few YouTube videos.

“Literally when I figured it out it was day one of lockdown and then I did a YouTube video and thousands of people watched that and then all of a sudden I was on Homeschool Hub,” he says.

“There was no plan to move into teaching but now I will always be known for that, you know?”

Will said while he never had any intentions of teaching, he does enjoy it.

“I remember when I was younger hearing that that was the natural progression of an artist, that you achieve all you want to achieve and you naturally move to teaching and I never thought it would happen.

I always just wanted to draw Spiderman and then I got to draw Spiderman quite early on in my career and then moved on to Star Wars and then without thinking moved onto teaching.

The Ballycotton comic artist said the feedback from his audience has been very positive.

“It’s been very exciting, there are a lot of people watching. It’s going really well.”

Will said technology had a huge part to play in the popularity of his new drawing show.

“One thing that really really helped the show, I know every kid now can pause things on the TV, so I can fit more tricks in there ‘cos they can pause and catch up, which is a big thing with this kind of show.

“Before, if you had six minutes you would barely get through a tutorial of the eye, whereas now, I can show so much and they can digest it at their own pace, that is what we are seeing from the drawings coming in, that people are able to draw through it piece by piece.

“When we were growing up, art shows were different, they were simple and digestible and you could draw at the pace he was drawing at, but in a craft show, you would have to be lucky to have the materials you need alongside you at the time, or you had to record and go back.

“But now, there is a lot of proper art tutorial skills hidden in among the season, as much as I can.

It’s my job to sneak in as many ground-up art skill tutorial fundamentals, piece by piece and most importantly, explain to kids, there is no need to be frustrated and they want to get better they will with practice. That’s all it takes.

While the new show is keeping Will busy, along with his day job, drawing for Marvel and volunteering with the RNLI, he is also working on his own comic range.

“I’m doing a few things at the moment, I am doing my first book for Image comics, where you retain the ownership of your characters. It is a natural progression and I am broadcasting live, drawing the characters and answering questions online, while drawing.

Will said his next big task was time management.

“It’s weird, I now need to learn to balance the two. This has essentially unlocked a new career for me and as much as I love it, I love drawing comic books as well.”