Roll Call!

Let’s play: Describe yourself in 3 nouns!

Adam Ming

Jan 04, 2024

My artist group (it’s like AA for artists) the

illoguild

is doing a roll call, which is also a great opportunity to say hi to so many new readers!

Hi I’m Adam Ming, Startup Co-founder turned picture book illustrator.

I’m a Father.

I’m Dyslexic.

And I Illustrate Children’s Books.

I live in Malaysia with my wife and baby girl, Zelda.

Father

Being a new father I get to experience the world through the eyes of a toddler and it’s just an amazing experience.

It informs my work. And my work gives me the flexibility to spend quality time with her daily. At each stage of her development, I use all my start-up skills to redesign a working schedule around my kid’s schedule.

Optimizing both my work schedule and my family life to work hand in hand, it’s a brilliant adventure!

Dyslexia

Despite being seen as some kind of learning disability.

Being Dyslexic really means that the structure of my brain is categorically different that 90-95% of the population. This is sometime seen as being “Creative” to most people. In reality that’s just how my brain works.

The positive traits associated with Dyslexia are:

Big-Picture Thinking
Spatial Reasoning
Innovative Problem Solving
Narrative Thinking
Interconnected Reasoning

I lean into these traits in my work and my life and have tried to account for the negative traits associated with my type of brain.

Yes a school designed for the 95% of brains was very hard for me, since kindergarten, but that was my ‘hero’s journey’.

Once out of school, I started to learn through experiences like selling cars and later starting companies. The skills I took away from my entrepreneurial experience, my real education, helped me jumpstart my picture-book career at the end of the third decade of my life.

And that’s how I came to be…..

Illustrating Children’s Books

I’ve wanted to be an illustrator since I was 11, that’s when I first declared it.

Last year (30 years later) three books I illustrated got published.

One of them was in Barnes and Noble’s list of the Best Children's books in 2023 alongside many of my heroes. Another was in the Sunday Times list of best books for children in 2023. Both books are in their second printing. It’s surreal.

This Newsletter

This newsletter started as a kind of blog as I was starting my journey, but with nearly 700 posts, and 2300 readers, it’s become something more of a community, and I’m much more comfortable talking about topics rather than myself.

Every post now aims to help with at least one of these topics.

The topics are …

Thank you for being here and for making this community what it is!