How to draw a How cover
How:Design Ideas at Work is a great magazine, primarily for graphic designers and art directors. It has a lot of practical advice as well as coverage of the leading edges of design, advertising, and art. Recently, I was asked to write an long (8-page) article about how drawing and journal keeping can feed one’s creativity. It was a topic I’d long wanted to address to the professional image-making community because so many of those folks have lost their touch with drawing, though it was probably the very thing that got them into their chosen field at the get-go.
I am pretty happy with the article and was delighted when the senior art director for the magazine also asked me to draw the cover for the issue, a special one dedicated to Illustration. How has a fairly strict format for the cover, one that revolves around their enormous logo, so I did a design that integrated the three letters into my idea. Because illustration is a personal medium, I liked the idea of putting a thumbprint on the cover, maybe the thumb of an artist sighting his subject. I did a quick sketch of myself in that pose, colored it on my computer, and fired it off to her.
Unfortunately, the magazine’s staff felt that the image was confusing. Some didn’t like the fact that the fist might interfere with the coverlines (the titles of the articles inside). Then some others thought it was a person giving a thumbs up, rather than sighting.
Back to the drawing board. The art director suggested I just draw a hand drawing the logo filled with clouds with some art supplies scattered around. I resisted this idea and instead thought I could make a little design out of pens and stuff. I cobbled together a collage from drawings I’d already done to convey the idea.
My client didn’t like this design much because it doesn’t play up the logo enough and was a two 2-dimensional. Instead she brought up the idea they’d proposed earlier: filling the logo with sky and having a hand drawing it. I gave that a try but thought the hand looked so lonely. Instead I sketched in the artist’s head and torso too. I did another self portrait but shaved off my beard in case that was a turn-off.
The email arrived the next morning:
There are still a few hang-ups. Something about the person coming from the back of the logo is off-putting. The focus needs to be on drawing not on the person doing the drawing. The viewer needs to be in the place of the artist.
I’d like you to draw the cover as if it were a page in your sketchbook where you drew the act of drawing the cover. Forget the hands. Just draw the set up since you’re so good with everyday objects. Leave the middle just a wash background or blank so the focus is totally on the logo. I’ll attach my thumbnail. That may help.
Yesterday I started again, following the art director’s sketch. Just to put a little bit of myself into it, I added her sketch as part of the assignment, lying on the table where I drew from it.
I sent the final image to her last night but don’t expect to her about it till Monday. We’ll see. It was an interesting experience; I may have been stupid to have resisted the idea she clearly wanted me to execute and insisting on other interpretations. It’s a hard lesson to learn for a stubborn know-it-all, but I am trying.
Recent Adventures and a New Venture
I have had several interesting drawing experiences over the past month and neglected to share them here. The first was soon after I had arrived in Los Angeles and attended a sketchcrawl arranged by the SoCal Drawing Room, a group that was initiated by Karen Winters and grew out of the Everyday Matters Yahoo! Group and has been a lot more active than anything we’ve managed to hold together in New York. If you live in the area, I urge you to get together with this group.
We started out in Union Station; the weather was a little unpleasant but we managed to do some drawing in the courtyard and then headed over to Olvera Street, the oldest part of LA where, wrapped in several sweaters and a cap, I found a patch of sunlight and drew the old market. We concluded by lunching on French dip sandwiches and sharing journals. It was amazing what a variety of lovely work the group members have produced and I left happy and inspired.
The following week, I visited the Drawing Club on San Fernando Rd. The Club was started in 2002 by Bob Kato who is also teaches at the Art Center in Pasadena. Bob had been giving workshops to a lot of the animators at Disney and Universal and decided to create a place where people could do life drawing and share their work. Each Thursday and one Sunday a month, a model dresses as a character and poses to a story theme. Scenes have included Jedi Knights, Borscht Belt stand up comedians, comic book heroes, divas, and the morning I attended, a boxer in training. It was an interesting scenario and during the three hour poses, I made a half dozen photos in ink and watercolor. Other artists worked in pastel, charcoal, oil, and even on their laptops. It was a blend of polished pros and complete beginners. I do love that buzz that comes from a room full of concentrating brains; time flies and suddenly you realized you are dehydrated, exhausted, and utterly satisfied and three hours have flown past.
Last Thursday, back in New York, my pal, Tom Kane told me we simply have to go to the Drawathon in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I had seen posters around for the even atnd it certainly looked, well, unique. Up to a dozen models in bizarre poses with specially composed music deep in the heart of New York’s artistic hub. And the event is hard core: from 7 pm to 3 a.m. We arrived at The Flux Café on Bedford Street at 8:00 under a full moon and the room was hot, steamy and packed. The music was intense and blasting and at least fifty artists were at work and not a stool or a chair was available. Fortunately, our pal Butch had wrangled us a seat and so we fortified ourselves with Pabst Blue RIbbon and got to work. The theme of the first pose was ‘Graffiti’ and the models, one a buxom babe, the other a withered old man posed with spray cans. Next three three models posed with fabric straps and shrouds interpreting ‘Elasticity’. At 10 PM, a model dressed as Van Gogh, complete with a red cardboard beard, painted another model in the nude, and an hour later, two women, one apparently with scoliosis, created ‘Tango gestures’. At 12:30, after members of the audience were invited up to pose for various prizes, we left, sated and spent. It was one of my wilder drawing experiences, part art class, part rave, and I can’t wait for the next one.
This has been a rough week for me but I appear to have survived it. One of several sickening things that happened was the total death of my trusty 17″ PowerBook. Earlier in the week, it absolutely refused to start and then I discovered that, because it’s three years old, my AppleCare contract has lapsed and can’t be renewed. I worked on it for three days, using every bit of software and friendly advice I could assemble, but it seems like the motherboard (its second) has gone south. My old PBook helped me write two books, five hundred blog entries, dozens of articles and billions of emails, and I’m sad to see it go. But I do love this spanking new Macbook Pro and it seems to write blog entries just fine (and man, it’s fast!)
Finally, I have the first Podcast ready to go. You can get it here. I urge you to subscribe and look for this symbol (probably in the news column on the left) for all future PodCasts. You can get it fed to your ipod like any other podcast (it may appear on the iTunes stores in the next few days) or just listen to it right there on the webpage.
I do it 'cause it's trendy.
Recently, I was asked why I thought journaling, and Internet journaling in particular, has become such a phenomenon. I rattled off a bunch of bullet points but I’ve continued to think about my answer and thought I’d share my thoughts with you to see if you want to refute or amplify my hypotheses.
First, there’re the tools at hand. The Internet and blogging let us share our personal work with like-minded people more easily. In the past, one might keep a diary that some descendant could unearth in the attic after we’ve passed, but the practice was basically solipsistic. In the new millennium, while our stories and drawings may not find an audience in our homes or communities, the Web lets us find interested readers from Belgium to Brisbane. The fact that someone else is interested helps to keep us going.
But technology also helps to create the need. I think that all this technology and titanium has made handmade things much more appealing. Even if it ends up as a jpeg, putting ink, graphite, and good old watercolors down on paper is a warm and pleasant break from email and cel phoning.
The next factor is our zeitgeist. We live in the age of memoir and confession. Anything goes and everyone’s an audience. Reality TV, James Frey, Augusten Burroughs, Oprah, Bill Clinton, everyone is sharing their story whether anyone asked or not. You don’t need to be a celebrity or a world leader to be worth listening to any more; now, if you get a publishing contract your personal life is, well, an open book. It follows that we all have a heightened need for self-analysis and -exposure.
Our culture has also become increasingly about individual achievement: the star athlete, the maverick CEO, the non-aligned President, etc. Despite a brief window of collective focus after 9/11, ‘s not about community any more; instead ‘s about self-absorption.
Most if us have the leisure time for journaling. Oh sure there’re a zillion diversions and distractions but if we want to make the time, we can have it. Turn off the tube, the Crackberry, the RSS feed, and do a bit of self-analysis.
And more and more of us have that need because of a growing sense of our own mortality. Baby boomers are the largest group in the population and we are in mid-life. Beginning to sum up, to think about what we’ve learned from life, and interested in sharing what we find.
Another aspect of modern life is reflected in the last essay I wrote here, about the effects of globalization on our environment. The more homogeneity there is, the more we seek quirk and particularity in others and ourselves. If everyone’s wearing clothes from the same stores and eating food from the same restaurants, we have all the more need to make our own mark, to stand out from the crowd.
While the world imposes consistency on us through megabranding, it is also providing us with a lot of tumult and anxiety. We are looking for answers and perspective and sitting down with a blank piece of paper and a pen is a great way to start looking.
It also seems that organized religion hasn’t managed to give us a strong enough sense of meaning in the modern world. I don’t feel that the Pope or the mullahs or the Christian Right are providing any answers I can relate to; instead it seems ‘s up to me to get to the bottom of things and chart a path for passing through these troubled waters. Again, slowing down and meditating on the moment with a pen in my hand brings me peace and balance.
Why have you started journaling? And what role does drawing play in it?
Creeping down the Promenade
Near my hotel in Santa Monica, there’s an outdoor shopping mall called the Third Street promenade. It’s one of the rare places in Los Angeles where pedestrians are free to wander and, as a New Yorker, I have always been attracted there. The first time I visited Third Street, 10 or 15 years ago, it consisted primarily of old stores that seemed to have been there for decades. Five and dimes, second-hand clothing stores, bejeweled movie palaces, a couple of great old bookstores, that sort of thing.
It’s completely unrecognizable now. Or should I say it’s completely familiar. That’s because all those old, local businesses have been replaced by the march of globalization.
Barnes and Nobles, J.Crews, AMC theatres, McDs, Jamba Juices and, of course, Starbucks line Third Street as they do streets around the planet. I have seen the same line up in New York, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Cleveland, and all points in between. The inexorable creep of multinational corporations rob us of one of the main pleasures of travel. When every street looks the same, you feel as if you might as well have saved the airfare.
While, it’s true that, on one level, human beings crave the safety of consistency and like to know that we can dull the anxiety of being in a very foreign environment with a Big Mac and fries, this dull homogeneity feels threatening to all of us. As animals who are the product of evolution, we know deep down that trying to erase all variety from our environment is a very dangerous game. Katrina showed us what happens when we delude ourselves into thinking that we can control our world, can set up camp in Louisiana as if we were in Kansas, can treat an ocean shoreline like any other line on the map. We are just fragile critters, despite our hubris. Third Street may look like the Champs Elysees but it won’t if the San Andrea fault rebels.
Globalization is not the only story these days, of course. There’s also the backlash, seen most prominently in the Middle East, where the mullahs would take the people back five hundred years, long before the invention of the internal combustion engine, the thong, and the double decaf latte. Here in America, right between the Olive Trees and the Banana Republics, folks are growing fed up and reactionary. They’re also using religion as a levy, trying to hold back the rising tide by opposing Brokeback Mountain and Bolivian busboys. But right-wing politics, which is after all, complicit in enabling the corporations that now dominate the world, is in no position to fight back against it now.
While I completely understand the impotence one feels when facing the faceless, godless corporate landscape, I find comfort not among the supreme mullahs or the Supreme Court but in my drawing book. By slowing down and taking my pen in hand, I can always see particularity in the world. I am able to look at the Third Street promenade and see more than corporate logos. I see people, I see trees, I see the edges of buildings against the bright blue California sky. And I see beyond. I pack up my drawing gear and look for the rest of the city, the real city. I look for moldering buildings, tangled telephone lines, the homeless, the taco stands. If I was content to be a garden-variety, guidebook-toting tourist, I wouldn’t spend half an hour in an alley looking at broken windows. I wouldn’t sit on the curbside watching pigeons eat fast food wrappers. (Now that’s a vacation!)
One of the many great things about drawing is how it helps you find the beauty in anything, anywhere. Really seeing something helps you appreciate and understand it, and to know it from all others. I can draw a pebble or an apple core and see the universe within its pits and dents. With a pen and paper in hand, I am sure I will never feel utterly dehumanized. My drawings show me the world as only I can see it.
Sure, it’s dull drawing the engineered lines and committee-selected colors of a Burger King, but even gleaming plastic and fake brass give up interesting reflections and shadows that can confound its designers attempt at uniformity. The golden arches glow differently under the Pacific sun than they do in the North East, and so I can find beauty there. I have drawn them on Broadway, in Paris, in Florence and Hollywood. It’s my small gesture against the corporate creeps. They can try to force the world through their gleaming cookie cutters but artists will always see the truth.
Home again, home again, clippety clop
God, has it really been three weeks since I last wrote anything here? So much for everyday mattering. Sorry for the absence. I have just come back from Los Angeles to find that the weather in New York is far more springular. It was pleasant to shed my layers of sweaters and prance about the daffodils in our garden (well, one daffodil so far).
I had a nice enough time in Los Angeles but a certain mechanical loneliness sets in after so many nights away from my family and my bed. Patti and Jack came and spent the last few days with me in Santa Monica and we drove about, visiting friends and being touristy.
I was shooting a new round of five commercials for Chase and your TV will probably be inundated with them in a few weeks. I am quite pleased with the new batch and it was nice to reunite with the same people I have shot and edited with several times before. It’s a pleasant, comfortable routine one falls into with people whom one spends every waking hour with for a month and then never see again for six. Jim, my director, just released a movie (Glory Road, a basketball flick) and the drawing habit I seeded in him last spring is still with him. He now feels comfortable drawing ideas for shots and for the sets he wants, something he’d never felt okay with, despite twenty years behind the camera. Our video assist guy, Ed, became completely hooked on drawing when I first gave him a first lesson almost a year ago and this month he pulled out some incredibly detailed drawings done painstakingly in pencil and most quite amazingly accurate. I’m so pleased he’s discovered the pleasures of drawing.
I find myself in a dubious place, mentally and spiritually, these days. On the one hand, I am in the midst of producing commercials which I have always enjoyed (I have three more shoots scheduled for the upcoming month); there’s nothing quite like spending millions of dollars to turn your flimsy, in-the-shower idea into something that runs over and over in people’s living rooms (or gets zapped by their Tivos). But whenever advertising work takes up too much of my life, replacing my family, my self, my journal, my leisure, even my blog, I start too feel melancholy and adrift. I start to question all of my priorities and the roads not taken. Even the free time I have becomes contaminated. I stop reading ( I have been on a long sequential jag of lovely Dicken’s novels, forsaken for trashy novels and magazines), I stop dreaming big thoughts about what I might do next, I stop talking to friends not involved in my current project, I become overly touchy about other people’s judgments, and I feel trapped, like a wild animal hunkered over his prey and now anxious some scavenger will pull it away. It’s not pretty.
In spite of all this melancholia, I have actually done (or should I say, forced myself to do) a fair amount of drawing in my new red book and I’ve had a couple of other drawing adventures I’ll share here in the next few days. I also have a couple of observations about the world and drawings place in it I’ll post soon.
So, please excuse my absence, and be patient with me as I get back on the horse.
Booking to LA
I just started working on my 45th illustrated journal and decided to give myself a treat by binding up a variety of really nice papers into a special book. My new journal is an inch thick slab of 8×12″ 300 lb. cold press watercolor paper, interspersed with some colored drawing paper, and so far it’s been lots of fun to work in.
I haven’t worked in watercolors in a couple of months after my detour through kraft paper and white pencil. My monochromatic sojourn has had an effect on my use of colors that I really like.
I painted this while sitting on the john. I wasn’t constipated, just inspired by our coat rack.
Painted standing at the stove while stirring the sauce pan.
A painting of a photo of a painting of a photo.
My first spread in the book, a great horizontal opportunity, 8″x24″.
Unfortunate painting of my lovely boy.
Airports are great places to draw. All those plane gizmos and bored people.
Painted from the New Yorker and then my first afternoon in Santa Monica.
A few drawings that were interrupted in process but I tried to make lemonade out of them.
Again, drawn while waiting, in one case for my colleagues, in another for the pot to boil.
Drawn while waiting for Karen Winters and her husband. I painted it off site and I’m afraid it shows. Plus one of my waterbrushes isn’t happy about being in California.
A very faintly tinted drawing of Ocean. It reminds of something very old and I like it.
I am sort of lonely here in LA, so far from my family (a sentiment that tends to make me draw more). Nonetheless, I will be meeting new friends while here. Last night I was too exhausted to make it to the Drawing Club but I will be at the rainy day Sketchcrawl planned by the SoCal Drawing Room. Then I start shooting on Monday and will be on the set for the next two weeks. I shall post what I make as I do. I doubt I shall have much of particular profundity to report but I’ll do my best.
Gran
My grandfather had a small stroke last week and now one of his ankles is paralyzed. After a depressing day or two, he got a splint and is, by all accounts, quite happily mobile again. Gran was a doctor and has always looked after himself quite well — a brisk walk each day after lunch, a balanced diet, all his shots, quitting smoking at 80, etc. but I think genetics are primarily responsible for his living to this ripe age of 96. His sister, Shula, is still alive too, despite a several-pack-a-day habit.
Gran more or less retired when he was around seventy and has filled the last quarter of his life by writing every day. He writes stories, essays, observations, and his memoir (three times). He writes so much, in fact, that he has worn out a half dozen word processors (he’s not a computer man) and produced enormous stacks of work, many of which he has hand-bound with shirt cardboard and wrapping paper.
For most of his life, Gran certainly never would have called himself ‘a writer’. He was a doctor — he got his degree in Germany in the early ’30’s, then, when Jews weren’t allowed to practice medicine under Hitler, he went to Rome and took his degree all over again; then he fled to India where he and my grandmother had a practice in what became Pakistan for 35 years or so, and finally moved onto his current home in Jerusalem. He and my grandmother published a book on diet in the late 1940s but I have never heard that he did anything but work at medicine until he retired. Still, his passion for writing seems like something that must have alway been burning deep inside him. As soon as he earned the luxury of spare time, he didn’t head for the golf course or the local saloon. He started to write. Early in the morning and late at night, his fingers clattered over the keys, and the piles of paper began to stack up.
Image
I tend to think of 9/11 as this enormously defining moment, one that has made me reconsider the possibility of a long life. Seeing the Twin Towers collapsing a mile from my home flicked some switch deep within. Ever since, like many Americans, I have assumed that life suddenly became a lot more finite.
Gran lived through 9/11. He also survived the Flu epidemic and World War I. He lived through the Holocaust (but many of his relatives didn’t). He survived 6 years in a British internment camp where he and my grandmother, mother and uncle were incarcerated because they were of German origin. He survived the Bangladesh War which split his adopted country. He endured the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, just to the west. He lived though Yom Kippur War in a bomb shelter. He made it through the Gulf Wars when Scud missiles were aimed at his home; his gas mask is still in the coat closet. He survived the endless Palestine-Israel conflict – the barbed wire and barriers are visible from his living room window. He survived the death of his wife after more than a half century of marriage and partnership. And despite all of that, he is still here, in his walker and splint, keys still clattering.
Image
How long will your life last? Have you got seventy five years left? Or a day? So what are you waiting for? When will you allow yourself to be creative, to be the person you have always wanted to be? Can you overcome the trauma of the news and have faith in the future? Can you make things not to be famous (Gran has no books on the bestseller list) or rich (Gran’s writings haven’t earned a shekel) or influential (Gran has had a half dozen readers at most) but just because you must? When are your keys going to start clattering?
Advertising and Its Discontents – Part II: Charity
I like nice. I like sweet. But even more I like raw. I like real. And Ilove Charity Larrison. She and I have been corresponding for a couple of years ago and she always cracks me up and take my breath away with her honesty. Charity’s story is pretty different from Trevor’s and it is far from resolved. I won’t say much more in the way of introduction but to say, Charity is the real thing. We can all learn a lot from her bravery, creativity and independence.
The Fundamental Distraction by Charity Larrison
At 18, the idea of going to art school, being a real artist, whatever, you know – seemed basically useless. My family was poor – college was not even an option really. And college for something as abstract as “being an artist” – ha ha. I might as well not even think about it.
I remember spending my whole senior year of high school in a corner of the art room working on paintings - buying extra time here and there doing the whole fluttery-eyelashes thing, “Oh come on, *please* Mister Whatever Stupid Teacher - I finished the assignment in five minutes! Can't I *please* go down to Miss McKannicks' for the rest of the period?? - i'm working on A GREAT PAINTING!”
So like any good comic book loving skateboard punk rocker with no way out of small town America hell – I joined the army.
I remember when I was in basic training my drill sergeant secretly pulling me over to the side and saying: “ONUSKA, take these markers and these flags up to the latrine and draw E-328 Predator faces on them so I can give them as prizes at the end to the other drill's. If you get caught you're in trouble, so don't get caught!”
And then there was the Sunday afternoon when I was in advanced training, learning my 68G10 - Aircraft Structure Repair crap; I was walking through the platoon area on my way to the smoking table when I was accosted by my Drill Sergeant to report for detail to the enlisted club, where I ended up spending the rest of the summer assisting his wife painting a mural of a bunch of Blackhawk helicopters landing on the wall in front of the dance floor.
She yelled at me one day: “YOU DON’T BELONG HERE!” Then it was a few really a lot louder sentences in Korean that I am still glad that I couldn't understand & I remember shrugging my shoulders at her and saying: Don't worry, Sun, I have it all worked out.
I got married. We had fun for a while. I got pregnant. He got kicked out of the service. I decided to opt out and follow him home. Our marriage didn’t survive the strain. I packed my baby and what belongings I could fit into his gold Fiero (dear god) and never looked back. I was twenty. Worked and worked and worked. Lots of crap jobs. Night shifts at the convenience store. Short order cook. Bank teller.
I remember it is two am and I am standing under fluorescent lights in an all night convenience store slicing endless little piles of lunch meat, passing the time wondering who it was that got to have the job where you made all the dumb signs. I would be good at that job.
I remember hanging out at my teller station when I worked at the bank, copying pictures out of comic books every moment of time where there were not incredibly crabby people in front of my face blaming me for all their money problems.
I remember lucking into a seasonal civil service gig with Pennsylvania state parks. Where I got to take care of the computers. Burning another boring afternoon clerking it in the office, doodling on post-its when Kevin, the Assistant Boss Park Ranger dropped a stack of instructions in front of me and said: “Larrison: if you can figure out how to network all our computers and make it work, you can have the internet. (THE INTERNET!!!! FINALLY!!!)
I decided I needed to cave in and try to go to college. To get out and get something better. Thinking to maybe get some kind of IT certificate, as I was so swell at computers and all. Looked it up on the Internet. Looked halfheartedly at stuff, then saw it. The graphic design program. You know: the “oh, that’s what i’m supposed to be doing” moment. (omg – like art school! But like – you could actually GET A JOB) (try not to cry laughing at me :D) anyway – once i saw it, it was too late. I had to do it. So i did. It was insanity. I worked five million jobs and went to school and somehow held everything together with just, pure will. (because seriously, this was the stupidest gamble of all time WHAT ARE YOU THINKING etc.)
See – I loved graphic design. I loved it more than anything in the whole universe. There was nothing like it to me. I knew how to make the pages talk. Then i learned how to make the pages sing. I made pretend magazines and taught myself how to make web pages, and I demanded that i get a REAL internship at a REAL place. Because even though i was just some jackass with an Associates’ degree from a tech school – that didn’t make me not THE BEST. (quit laughing :D)
Anyway, i got my internship. They hired me right out of school. Their art director moved to Atlanta, and I got his job. I was never, ever, ever, so miserable in my entire life than how miserable i was for those six months. I remember my favorite part of the day was whenever I could go down and sit in the restroom just so that I could spend five or ten minutes not having to be in the same room with those people. I mean, holy shit – these guys were some serious assholes. I was so depressed. I mean this? This is what graphic design is for? Lying? And lying and lying forever? GAH. And I’d spent so much of myself learning and it felt like, all for nothing.
I lasted about six months till they fired my ass. I remember dancing up the street Fred Astaire style the afternoon they fired me. Sure it sucked and I was doomed, but lunchmeat at two am was better than that crap.
Not to be thwarted, once i finished celebrating being fired from the ninth circle of hell, I threw my resume up on monster.com and got a call. Some company needed someone who could use Photoshop. Okay. I can do that. Went. Interviewed. They ended up hiring me on the spot. Was a small engineering company. Tired of getting raked over the coals from the ad agency that was doing all their stuff previously, they wanted just someone who could use Photoshop to fix some images for them.
I was all like, well, you know, i can do everything those bastards were doing for you, except better, and cheaper. So they hired me and gave me a million raises and built me a giant office and bought me every toy I asked for. It was fantastic for about a year. I made everything for them from out of nothing. I was like a great hero, rescuing my company from the tyranny of the great evil of advertising agencies.
I suppose you see what’s coming by now. I mean, there’s only so much you can do. After a while my job started to consist of just updating and tweaking and pressing buttons. I joke that it is my George Jetson job. I just rush in push a button then put my feet up on the desk. Which everyone says is so great. Which I suppose it is, but what happens if you are crazy and actually LIKE to work, but have no work to do? It sucks. But you can’t leave your great job when you are the sole support of your tiny family. You gotta just suck it up and go to work.
So, I sit in my giant office in the middle of nowhere America and spend my days floating around the great now of the Internet. I don’t know that I had a plan really when I started out. I mean, I just did the things I already liked to do. I followed comics websites and comics artists and followed their advice about how to learn how to draw, and i just kept trying to learn how to draw. Because that’s what I wanted more than anything. To learn how to draw for real. So i could draw comic books. For real. So i just kept drawing. I made myself websites to put my drawings on, cause that kind of made it feel like an activity. I made horrible comic books. I made friends and enemies.
I have some friends who are writers, they asked me to draw their stories, so I did. Because I love them, and I love that they write stories, and I love making words into pictures, and the challenge of making the pages read and flow. Figuring out just the right thing to draw to make the story move the best way. It’s the funnest game ever. It makes me work hard. I could do it till the end of the universe.
And slowly I started to learn how to learn.
It’s funny about learning. It’s never what you expect. I am starting for the first time ever, to actually get the hang of it, and make some things that are kind of cool and that i really love. I am starting to learn how to see the world, and my heart is constantly in like this odd vice of joy. I want to draw everything all of the time. But time is precious – which things to spend the time on? I want to draw that tree – but really shouldn’t I be working on something serious? I mean, that is the kind of thing I have been thinking to myself lately.
See – honestly, I hate my job. It’s awful. I am all by myself all the time. There is no one to talk to ever, except the dumb internet, and I want out. Having basically one client only for the past four years, my portfolio is utter crap. And, Jesus, I don’t want to be a graphic designer anymore anyway. I want to draw. But how do you make a living from drawing? How do you make a living from drawing without starting to hate drawing, is the main thing i think. I have been trying to figure it out. Trying to figure out what way to push so that I can still love it, and still get out of here.
So I have been trying to remember why I started this. Why I am here. What did I want when I began? To maybe find some kind of clue that will help me figure out what to do. What is important? Why do i do all these things that I don’t actually care about anymore when I would really rather be out drawing trees?
These days I just wake up every day and do what I have to do to buy the extra time down miss mckannicks' to work on the paintings. And think it is pretty awesome that I get to stay here this time and don't have to go to the Army again, because that sucked.
Advertising and Its Discontents – Part I
Above: Notes taken during a really important meeting I no longer remember.
One of the chief obstacles many creative people face is how to cope with the intersection between our creative and our professional lives. Is drawing, painting, photography, music, whittling, just a hobby? Or are we serious about it and wiling to throw ourselves over the cliff’s edge and base our livelihood up on it? Anxiety over this issue is what derails a lot of us when we are young. Do we go to art school or a “real” college? Do we spend the rest of our lives in a split-level ranch or a garret? Do we break our parents’ hearts or become accountants?
Like most things in life, it’s not that black and white. People who make money doing creative things usually reap a varied harvest. It’s never 9 to 5 and the paychecks are rarely steady but there are more and more ways to sell your creative products. It’s not about getting your slides accepted at a New York gallery. And your patrons may be people just like you, not just investment bankers looking for investable art. For example, the internet means you can show and sell posters of your work and never leave the farm. You can sell drawings and jewelry and t-shirts and greeting cards and zillions of things.
And most importantly, you can call yourself an artist, regardless of how much money you make or how many pieces you sell.
I make a smallish percentage of my living from my personal work. I write books, I write articles, I do illustrations, but the lions’ share of my income is from my job in a company, working for the Man. I am pretty comfortable with this arrangement. It means I don’t feel desperate, I do the projects I want to do, and the extra money keeps me in 24 karat fountain pens and hand-bound unborn-calf-velllum sketchbooks.
Recently, I asked two successful illustrator to share some of the details of their lives, particularly to explain this issue of commitment and financial survival. First, Penelope Dullaghan, whom you may know as the originator of Illustration Friday. She took the leap from advertising into full-time illustration a Notes from a really important meeting I no longer remember.
A few years ago, I temporarily detached from the ad teat. It had been a good run. Ad agencies had provided a good steady income, kept my family health-insured, taken me on some all expense-paid junkets to interesting places. But the experience has often been depleting, humiliating, demoralizing, and I had to see what it was like it cut loose. Eventually I got sucked back in but I still question the wisdom of succumbing.
I’m not alone in wondering. Most advertising creatives would like to break free. A few brave ones do. A couple of weeks ago, I asked some pals who had jumped ship to tell me what drove them to do it, how they did it, and how they feel in retrospect. I was going to gang them together in a single post but when the first one arrived, from Trevor Romain, it was so good, I had to get it to you right away.
Have you had a similar or completely different experience? Please let me know, either by posting a comment below or by writing me a longer description. And stay tuned for more in this series.
The Very Moment by Trevor Romain
I’ll never forget that day.
It was the morning after I had pulled an all-nighter creating an advertising campaign for a client. The campaign was a good one. I felt great about it. With a number of Clio awards and dozens of Addy and One Show awards under my belt I felt confident that the client would love the ideas we were presenting.
The cigar-chomping, excessively-sweating client – who I created the campaign for – was reviewing the work. He was looking over the ad campaign with disdain.
He said. “This is bad. I hate it. Why don’t you just take the logo and fill the page with the entire thing? Now that would be branding.”
My heart sank. Then I felt anger. Extreme anger. Not at the client, but at myself. I remembered a promise I had made to myself twenty years before. A promise I had not kept.
It happened when I was in the army in South Africa. I was walking through a field hospital filled with kids from small rural villages who had been brought to a clinic for treatment from the army medical corps. The conditions were abysmal. There were almost six kids per bed, it was nauseatingly hot and there were flies everywhere, especially around the corners of the children’s eyes and mouths.
As I was walked down the center aisle I caught sight of a little boy who was about five years old sitting on the edge of one of the hospital beds. I looked into his huge brown eyes as I walked by and then noticed with shock that he had no legs. Instead I saw dirty bandages wrapped around two stumps. The boy had lost his legs in a landmine accident on the Angolan border.
As I walked by, the little boy put up his hands and said “Sir, can you please hold me.”
I will never forget the haunting look of sadness in his eyes. Huge tears rolled slowly down his cheeks and dropped to the floor, their significance lost in the dust and grime of war.
The Sergeant Major, who was walking alongside me, grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the child.
“Romain,” he grunted. “Leave him alone. Don’t get emotionally involved. We’re here for security, not child-care.”
As the Sergeant Major pulled me away the little boy, in a broken chocked-up whisper, spoke again. His voice tugged at me from behind.
“Sir, please, please can you just hold me?”
Something happened to me that moment that I will never forget. My life changed instantly. It felt like a hand came out of the sky, reached inside me, and flipped a switch that turned on my soul.
I pushed the Sergeant Major’s hand away, turned, walked back and picked up the little boy. I have never been held so tightly in my life. His trembling little body clung to me for all it was worth.
He put his head against my chest and he began to cry. His tears ran down my neck and inside my shirt. I held that little boy with my arms, my heart and my soul and every ounce of compassion in my being. I never wanted to let him go, ever.
At that second I promised myself that I would never waste a second of my valuable life. That I would use my creative talents to change the world for children.
But I didn’t.
I went into advertising because it was safe and the money was good and everyone told me that it was almost impossible to make a living writing and illustrating children’s books.
I believed them.
I got sucked into the advertising vortex. I allowed client after client put my work down, destroy my exciting ideas and turn me into a cynic, who spent every day, using my talents to convince consumers to buy things they didn’t need.
The inner explosion had been building for months. The cigar-chomping client wasn’t the reason I quit that day. He just lit the fuse.
My wife and I discussed the situation and both decided that I HAD to follow my dream.
I woke up the next day, sat in front of my yellow pad and started my new job as an un-published children’s author and illustrator.
Although getting started was difficult and sometimes frustrating, the sheer passion and joy of doing what I love was there. And it still is. I have been hungry, rejected, under-appreciated and often ignored but I LOVE what I do. I have been writing full time for ten years now and I am one of the happiest people I have ever met.
During my journey, after every book rejection I received, I heard the little boys voice in my head saying, “Sir, please can you just hold me.
And in my heart and soul I did.
And I still do.
I now have 30 books in print with over one million copies in circulation in twelve different languages.
And I’m not done yet. I still hear the little boy’s voice.couple of years ago and I remember how suspenseful but ultimately very satisfying the whole process was for her.
Second is Torontian Alana Machnicki. I like her drawings a lot and am inspired by the broad range of ways she applies them. I have learned a lot from both their stories. I hope you find them useful too.
Penelope Dullaghan
I think that leading a creative life is both rewarding and really really hard. It’s not just creative painting and being messy all the time. It is a real business, like any other. (Well, maybe not like any other. I think this is way more fun.)
To manage a creative life, I think first and foremost you need to be a good planner. You are not guaranteed a paycheck or steady income, so sometimes it gets really thin and you have to adjust accordingly. If you have a bad month, you better have some money left over from a good month to float through it. The people who work at the phone company and the power company have steady jobs and will not understand if you tell them you’ve had a bad month. 🙂 So you need to budget!
But planning goes beyond financial. Time is also yours to plan. A good balance of work and gathering inspiration and personal time is important (I struggle with this a lot). Being an entrepreneur is hard. No one makes the rules for you and no one is there to tell you to work (or to stop working). If you decide to take time off and accidentally miss a deadline, you’re in trouble. At the same time, if you work around the clock and burn out, that’s no good either. Balance is in planning.
Secondly, I think it takes faith. Faith that the next job will eventually come, even if it sometimes feels like no one will ever call again. If no client has called with a new job or assignment, it can be really scary. Self doubt creeps in and you start to wonder if you’re really cut out for this. Working at the mall starts looking really appealing. But this is something to be waited out…and not sitting down. If you are bored, you’re doing it wrong. If no paid work is coming in, do something for your business. Start working on a new image for self-promotion. Update your website. Write some thoughts down about avenues to get your name out there. Work on personal work for yourself, while at the same time, bettering your skills. Give yourself an assignment…challenge yourself to think conceptually. Read a business book to hone that side of things. There’s always something you can work on. Always room for improvement.
Or, if you are a workaholic like me, try to relax and take some downtime. Go to a movie (a matinee to save money) or go for a walk in the park. Fill your well. By the time a client calls again (and they will!), you’ll be ready and inspired to do the project at hand.
And thirdly, it takes a lot of plain, hard work. I have a lot of things going on all the time (maybe too much) to help me pay my bills as well as keep the creative fire burning (for both me and others). But it’s work I enjoy doing. I get a lot out of having fun little contests (just finished up a “Draw a Witch” contest for Halloween) and doing free things like Paper Doll Mix n Match to help promote my new tshirts. I have an online store to sell prints and stuff to help financially and just for fun (I like thinking up new tees and postcards to print).
I also started Illustration Friday as a way to challenge myself…to grow my portfolio and force myself to think conceptually. Then I opened it up to others because I figured they would like the challenge too. And now it’s a huge, fun thing that many people participate in each week. I love seeing all the new names pop up in the column and checking their illustrations to see how their minds work. It’s also become a great form of self-promotion… even though that’s not why I created it (I think of it as a perk for running it!). The site was recently named a HOW Top Ten Website, which I thought was cool not only because it’s good promotion for the site, but because it kind of speaks to the creative community at large… maybe we’re not all isolated artists, but we seek to be a part of something bigger by supporting each other and talking to each other. Illustration Friday helps with that.
I’m also a part of a local illustrators group. I look forward to getting together with them once a month to chat about the industry, ask questions, give answers and just be with like-minded people. Part of a community, again…
I’m going to be honest and say that it is sometimes really hard to have so much going on. I get stressed out and unbalanced. Keeping up with my normal workload, Illustration Friday, doing self-promo, creative-community things, running an online store, gallery shows and trying to maintain a personal life… can be a bit much. I sometimes miss having a regular job with regular hours and regular paychecks. But I really can’t imagine giving it up. I feel like it’s kind of built itself…each thing I do is a part of me. It’s good for my creative spirit and hopefully feeds my business, too.
More on Penelope here, here and here.
Alana Machnicki
As a creative I’ve always found it important not to put all my eggs in one basket, so to speak. I like to have a little going on in different aspects. I have a tendency to get bored really easily and having a cornucopia of outlets to choose from keeps me happy.
I also find it much easier to live as a creative when I’m not under financial pressure. Because of this I’ve come to accept that having a part time job in the background is essential for me. Also, having the foresight to keep the job, even when I’m having a particularly profitable month, is even more important. I never know when a dry spell is going to come along and leave me scrambling to pay the bills.
I try to promote myself as best as I can. I hand out business cards at every opportunity, even if it is to someone who will never need my services. There’s always that chance they’ll pass the card or my website on to someone who does. I also travel to Comic Conventions with my fiancé where I sell prints of my work. This has lead to jobs, commissions and sometimes the print sales add up to more than what I would have made selling the original. It’s also a great way to expose my work to the masses and hand out more business cards.
I also sell my prints online, but I’ve found people are quite wary of the whole system. The orders I have processed have been through email and the “I’ll mail you a cheque” method, rather than Paypal. I guess people prefer to deal with a real person.
I rarely turn down any job that comes my way, unless I’m totally swamped. Even those with a lower budget could be seen by another art director who wants to offer me my dream job. I’ve also done a couple “sample” jobs where I’ll work on a piece just to show them what I can do for them. Sometimes I get the job (this is how I got my Absolut Vodka ad) other times I’m left with another piece in my files. A few of these filed samples have lead into other jobs.
I do a little graphic design here and there. I design websites occasionally. I used to even have a part time job where I altered travel photos to make grey skies blue and erase trash from the street. I think it’s just a matter of being open minded and knowing what you’re capable of. I’m also a very quick learner, so I usually know if people just give me a chance I’ll pick up on the skills needed.
A lot of artists have issues with being labeled a “sellout,” especially when working commercially. Personally, I think I’m very lucky to be able to do what I love and get paid for it.
Currently I’m trying my hand a sculpting my wedding cake topper (maybe this could parlay into some kind of wedding topper business), and have plans for a line of t-shirts. I’ve also been thinking of different things to sell at the comic conventions, such as smaller pre-framed prints. I’m also working on a children’s book for Scholastic that features intricate paintings of carousel horses, as well as 400 spot illustrations for a Kitchen Dictionary.
Danny Gregory 