Katie:

Happy New Year from The Good Ship illustration. We are hopefully arriving in your ear balls, your ear holes, at the start of the year, but if it's later in the year, just ignore that. We're going to talk about goals, planning, setting, intentions. And I think that's applicable all year round, but just, it's really exciting to do it in January as well. Yeah,

Helen:

we're gonna have a planning party, aren't we? Uh, 16th January. Is that right? 16th of January at half one. If you're on our mailing list, you'll get the invite to the Zoom call.

Katie:

Yeah, it's half one UK time, so I think that's early in the morning. If you're in America, middle of the night, early area, you'll figure it out. You can do time zones. You're clever.

Tania:

Which ones do you Where are we with that goal planning idea this year? Yes, a good thing or a bad thing.

Katie:

It's a mixture, isn't it? I think you've got to know what works for your brain, because I've kind of swiveled between the two, between being like, I set loads of goals and I'm gonna smash all the goals to be like, don't make me set any goals. I've got a small baby. I can't even Hoover the house like, so that was me maybe the past few years. But this year, I feel more goal, goalie. I don't know how you do. I feel more goalie, but I think still in a loose a loose way. Like,

Helen:

yeah, I don't know whether I do, maybe loose goals with no urgency about them would be good. But for years, yeah, I was really pro goals. I would always have a list of books that I was gonna I would always know in advance what books I had to illustrate over the next year, and so they'd be in my plan. But then there would be, well, what I want to do personally, you know, I would really set goals, sort out my website, all that kind of stuff. But yeah, the last, I think, a couple of years ago, when I made the picture book course and was still doing the same amount of picture books that I've ever done, it felt like I ran a marathon at full speed, like it was a sprint. And so it was brilliant. It was just the most amazing year, but so exhausting. And so last year, when we had our planning party, I was very anti planning. It was like no plans, except for jigsaws. I will not be making any plans. My biggest plan is no

Tania:

which was, in itself a plan. It was stuck to it, that valiantly I

Helen:

stuck to it. I've really, really stuck to it. I've had a very, very nice time just taking things more slowly. And it's been brilliant, and I'm not sure I'll ever go back to Super Helen sprinting through a career again.

Tania:

Yeah, suffering, and it's migraines, yeah, yeah. I mean you were so you really, really worked so hard that year,

Helen:

yeah, so then I've just been walking for the last year, and I've really enjoyed that walking. I don't think I'm ready for goals again. Yeah, I set some intentions of things that will make me happy in the year ahead. You're still working on. You still working but I'm working like a normal person. Yeah, exactly.

Tania:

It's just fine balance, isn't it? You can't go hard year after year, and maybe having the goal of not doing anything is about is a fabulous goal. Obviously, you got to do something in you to bring and new to bring the money in and find a way to go a bit slower. But I was always anti goals, just in that stupid like, I'm not having a goal. I don't like them, but this year I feel really goal orientated. I've got, I can't wait for the planning party, but I'll probably be completely off kilter as everyone goes, Yeah, let's just not plan this year. I'll be like, but I've got some plans. I really got some real ones. This time

Katie:

I like that thing. So like setting intentions, that's it's a nice feeling. It's always like a framework, isn't it? Because I've loved it in the past, when I've drawn a picture and included visual reminders of all the things that I kind of want to aim for and ways I want to feel and how I want to approach the year, because then to look back on it is really exciting, because you can see I did that. Oh, that's Have

Helen:

you still got your piece of paper that we made at the planning party up on your wall? My I've still got mine is stuck to a box of pencils, and it's still there. And every now and again I have a look at it. I've managed quite well with it. Most of the things I've done, some of them just look like random, sprout into an idiot. What did I write up for? But some of them are good.

Tania:

I love the planning party because it makes it doable and makes it human sized. Instead of that. Don't get them, which is kind of too much and overwhelming, and you can't control everything, but as long as you get some of your own goals in there, and at the end of the year, you can say, I did at least three or four of them. That's a win. Having some being able to exercise some choice is a real privilege. Feel aware when you kind of talking about goals. Some people are like, I've just got to go to work every day and do the same thing. I

Katie:

saw a brilliant thing this week, and it was, it was like a prompt. So the prompt was, I know I'm being successful when dot, dot, dot. And I was like, oh, that's exciting. Because then the things were like, I wake up and I can say, What do I feel like doing today? Or I don't have to travel for work, or I only travel for fun, like, little things. And it was just like that mindset, like just thinking of it from that perspective was really interesting. Yeah,

Tania:

that's a good way to start the goal goal planning. I

Helen:

really like goal setting in that way. Like, I think just before lockdown, I had the goal of one of my goals was to see as many of my old friends as possible that year, to make the effort and go and travel and see them. And in that year, I saw loads of people that hadn't seen for sort of 10 years or more, and that was amazing. So they don't all have to be work goals.

Tania:

That's my 60th birthday. Plan is to go and spend lots of time with friends, because no point having a giant party. Well, you could have a giant party, but if you get everyone to come from all over the world, and then you just stand there dancing to all your favorite songs, which is what I would do, and not talking. I thought that was the plan. Is that not the plan? What kind of is the local party?

Katie:

I'm disappointed now. I wanted to meet everybody you'd ever met.

Helen:

Such a good part

Tania:

you're coming with me to come meet all my friends, just every weekend, spend a nice time with all the best people that you've known in your life, rather than squid you into a party, and then think I did a really bad job of that as a home. That's

Helen:

true, because you don't get to talk to each person individually. Yeah, visit them all. They're

Katie:

stressful. Yes, married, you don't see anyone because you're too busy getting married. I have

Helen:

a dream for the for the yeah, I've just took in what you said. Sorry. I was looking at you while you were speaking, but I was thinking about something else. Sorry, please. That's good.

Unknown:

I think I know what your dream is. Do you? Is it the caravan dream? Sort

Helen:

of, I think the good shape, we should hire some sort of van, and we should drive around meeting some illustrators. That would be brilliant. Would be so camper van. And we

Tania:

have VW vans each, because I keep entering all the electric competitions, yeah, off grid VW fans, just in case. Let's do that.

Helen:

Imagine, please make

Katie:

those flags Helen, because we could have each a big 60 flag for streaming on top of the camper van, yeah. And then maybe I was gonna have, like, The Good Ship illustration, oh,

Helen:

I imagine driving right down the motorway and convoy with The Good Ship illustration, good ship

Tania:

on tour. Be a bit like spine of tap. Should

Unknown:

we go to Cornwall? Yeah,

Helen:

we can visit some of the exciting illustration fest. Does a Hartley pool? College of Art has an illustration festival. What other ones are the Scooby half there big illustrations, I was gonna say a symposium conference, I don't know, one day we will do it. Katie looks like she's gonna yawn. Now, I think, before

Tania:

we start rambling, we have got some questions. We're gonna do quick fire questions. Now, yes, so if the answer to your well thought out question seems a bit fast, please forgive us, because we want to answer lots of them and keep it simple. Any tips on how to combine backgrounds with picture book characters? Helen, your startup potential.

Helen:

That's so hard. But you know, the main thing, I think, is that often people think they imagine backgrounds picture books scary, because I've got to draw everything. I've got to draw really good be able to draw really good, really complicated backgrounds. And I don't think that's the case if you there are so many picture books with barely any backgrounds, if you imagine Maisie the mouse, they are just mostly plain, bright colored backgrounds might be like a very graphic image of a staircase or a potty or something, lots of picture books like that. Or you can go full on and do a Brian Wildsmith, gorgeous field of flowers background. But I think if those complicated backgrounds that jump into your head when people say backgrounds is what you imagine, you really don't need to do that. Go to a book shop, look at all the different backgrounds on there. And Don't set yourself too big a task, too far away from what you do naturally, just edit it down. Yeah, it's like that. You always say Tanya about when you're drawing from life squint, because then you really edit out anything you don't really need. You get proportions Nice. Same with backgrounds, if you think, Well, what's essential to the story? So in this, in this bit of the story, I don't know, maybe we're talking about potty training or something. Maybe you only need a potty and the edge of the bath with a duck or a, you know, a bath toy. It's no more complicated than that. You can draw some lines on the wall that indicate tiles. It's much easier to suffocate your

Tania:

character. Can't if your background is too full on. The aim of your the idea behind the the the image is drowned, and the character is drowned. With too much going on, there's no sort of physical space and distance between the background of the person. Yeah, too much. We'll just think there's some

Helen:

really. Nice, easy tricks for solving those things as well. When I was trying to tackle this, like, if a publisher would ask me for something quite complicated that involved a quite complicated background, and it was necessary for the story, I used to really struggle with it. And then I got absolutely obsessed with Jean Jacques sompa, the French illustrator who does lots of he did lots of New York, the New Yorker covers, and he works in watercolor with a dip pen, which is similar to the way I work. So I think that's why I got so obsessed with him. And if he had a really complicated background, like there are some, there's one really famous one of a bicycle shop. And there's either a little boy or a man with a bicycle in the middle of a bicycle shop. And there's rows and rows and rows of bicycles on the walls stacked above each other. So it's really, really complicated. What he does really cleverly is all of the line drawings, all the complicated line drawings of bicycles are all around the side, and then there's a bit of a gap around the main character with no color in it, no line in it. Gap like breathing space. And then the way he wants you to look where your eye is being drawn is this nice little drawing of the boy or the man with his bicycle in the middle. And you know where to look. And that enables you to be really fussy and complicated with the rest of the drawing. But as long as your eye knows where to go. You can be really clever with that.

Tania:

You can also choose Line. Can't you like soft line or light line? Yeah,

Helen:

I try and hold it my pen lighter if I'm doing a background. So I hold the dip pen looser in my fingers so that it's a looser line and it's not as thick. It's

Tania:

a good trick. The volume turned down on the background, and the volume turned up on the subject. So like you say, it's where you're teaching the eyewear to look and creating physical space between subject to the background. There's a lot more about this in the course, yeah, picture book, yeah, it's

Helen:

a whole thing. It's a whole thing.

Tania:

Yeah, exactly, a whole piece about background, yeah, alone, yeah. Okay. What's next 10? Yeah, tips on how to produce, how to approach a prospective agent.

Unknown:

Do it.

Helen:

Yeah, that's it. Just do it. And

Tania:

also don't see, see them. Don't see. So don't put other people in the email. Who would people put in? What do you mean? Well, lots of people will go through a list of agents and put dear sir. Some people put the seat,

Helen:

or they put lots of agents. They CC in a whole load of agents.

Tania:

Yeah, whoa, that the agent will be in that email. Then sometimes they just write a blank one and just change the name on the dear but no reference to the actual agency. You've

Katie:

got to think like the agent. Like, what would you like to receive? Would you like to receive a copy paste, generic inquiry, or would you like to receive one where they've actually researched to the agent who you are as an agent, why they really want to work with you, specifically, why they think you'd be the best agent for them.

Tania:

They said, look for an agency that looks like your kind of people, visually, work wise, but make sure they haven't got one of you. They need to be missing you so that you can offer something that you do specifically, like whatever food and drink you do really well on portraits or maps or whatever. So look for someone who's got your vibe but they don't have one of you and

Helen:

you they don't need you to describe your work because they're visual people. So you send some samples, they can look at your samples and understand what your work is. You don't need to write a letter that says, My work has a romantic, ethereal quality. You don't need to write any of that, though. That was just wasted words. Agents

Tania:

have said they're just like, one paragraph, I'm based x, y, z, this is where I live. This is my work. Oh, and also, check what their submission guidelines are, because nearly every agency has a totally different submission guideline. So don't just bung a load of JPEGs. Also,

Helen:

I completely ignored all the submission guidelines completely. When I was looking for a publisher, I got the writers and artists yearbook where it said, No submissions, right? I'll send them something

Unknown:

as soon as Tanya said

Helen:

that also don't do it.

Tania:

Rebel Helen

Unknown:

Talia says, read the rules. Helen says, Don't

Helen:

know whether they wanted to see my work. If they just write in the book, we don't want to see it. They might love it. So I just sent it. I'm not saying that it worked. I don't remember whether I ended up being published by any of those people, but I just, I just stick an old that they were

Tania:

probably like, I wish I hadn't put that in the artist writers new yearbook, because I'm not getting

Helen:

any letters that it says that that's true.

Tania:

Next question, is it safe to post illustrations on Instagram where AI has access to them? Oh,

Katie:

dear. Well, there's that thing where you can apparently Go on and tell meta not to harvest your

Helen:

stuff for AI, but then go in your settings. But does it work? Yeah, but

Katie:

people in different countries saying it's not available, but Australian people messaging me saying, Oh, it doesn't work for me. And then, obviously. There's a whole trust thing like, does that really work? I don't know.

Tania:

You can. Well, there's going to be some opt out in if you go onto the site, have I been trained.com sign up with them, which if you fancy it, and your nerves can take it. You could actually see if you if the AI bots have been trained on your website few years back? Yeah. And literally, to warn you, most people who've got websites will have a version of their work that's been AI trained, but that's normal. They might have had a couple of cracks at trying to be you and then given up. But now the people who I think it's called spawning, to the people who set up, have I been trained.com they are developing a software which will apparently stop them, stop the AI bots being trained on you, but kind of, if you don't show your work, you'll never be an illustrator. So there's catch 22

Katie:

Yeah, it's like looking at the pros and cons, isn't it? Because even sharing your work AI aside, a human can copy your ideas. Because if you don't share your ideas, you're not sharing your ideas. So you're gonna make yourself tiny and invisible just in case somebody steals your stuff. I know it's a imperfect answer, but I would say it's just positive.

Helen:

It's the same. When people worry about sending publishers samples of their work, they worry that if they send the samples or the picture book idea, the publisher will go, Oh, great idea. We'll get somebody else to do it. It's so unlikely. And if you don't send them it, how are you ever going to get in there in the first place? You've got to put yourself out there. You just have to,

Tania:

I'd love to hear your tips on client management to preempt overrun a nice situation to be in, wouldn't it? It's tricky.

Katie:

Yeah, I think looking in advance and being really honest with yourself about how much time you do have, and almost time blocking it into your calendar, and also overestimating how long it's going to take for each client. Yeah, things go wrong and imagining you've got less time than you do, because you don't want to be working back to back, back to back. You want time off as well scheduled and wide

Helen:

margins. Yeah, wide margins. I

Tania:

think we did go into depth on this on a previous podcast, so I think we did a whole podcast about it.

Katie:

Yeah, I think we write it down, and it's definitely in the business course. Yeah. And

Tania:

this was the podcast was about three or four months ago. So if you have a quick route through the podcast bag, you'll find it,

Helen:

should we do one more question? Oh, there's so many. What should we read you liked?

Tania:

How to deal with the overwhelming choice of things to draw and work on.

Helen:

Oh yeah, I do like that. Because I do find I have so many ideas that I know that if I try and implement all of them, I will go insane, and I've got to work more slowly and calm down. So, yeah, I like the idea of making a list, like the list of things that you would that you've got excited about and you'd like to start on, and then, yeah, just, you know, pick the idea that seems the most exciting and only work on that. Put the others aside once they're written on a piece of paper. They don't keep popping into your brain all the time and annoying and dragging you off in another direction. Stick it on your wall for a while, while you concentrate on one thing, like Katie's car park, yeah? Katie's car park idea exactly, yeah,

Katie:

yeah. Have a car park, park your ideas, and then they can relax, because they're not being ignored. Maybe, think ghosts. You know, when people exercise a house and they're like, We hear you, you could go away. Now. Idea ghosts,

Helen:

it's hard. She's saying how to choose what to draw. I'm just thinking about maybe if you think too hard about what to draw, you end up drawing nothing. So just get out with your sketch get a sketch book out and draw literally, what is in front of you, even if it looks unappealing, because once you've done a few drawings and you've got your drawing eyes on, you've got your drawing hat on, and you're into it all of a sudden. Whatever is in front of you, it just looks gorgeous when you draw it. You just need to make that start. Even if the first few drawings are rubbish, even if you're drawing a subject you don't want to draw, just start somewhere, yeah,

Tania:

and don't avoid you would probably disagree Helen do all the stuff you really like. Yeah. And then later on, if you're stuck with the same subject, and you're avoiding everything else. Go and do the things you're avoiding as well, because you might just be singing the same song over and over. Oh, that's so true. That's so true yourself. Some challenges,

Katie:

yeah, it can be really helpful when you're starting out, you know, like Inktober prompt things. It's a double edged sword. Sometimes those prompts are so stressful because you've got to do one every day. But if you're starting out, and you've got lots of time, and you've got lots of time, and you're really excited and motivated, and you're just like, What should I draw? It's like somebody tells you

Tania:

what to draw every day, yeah. And it stops that 20 minute faffering around as you wander around the house, put your coat on and think, should I go out now, sit back, open a cupboard, close a

Katie:

cupboard. One of my favorite drawing times was when I was traveling with my sketchbook and just drawing where I was, because I felt it feels like mindfulness, almost, because you're sitting really looking at where you are, really drawing it. And then when you look back on your drawings, you can remember the smells and the temperature it was, and way

Helen:

better than photos for that it is. We just went to Iceland and that, and I took sketch book with me, and was thinking, Oh, I'll go out drawing. I'll draw in wreck if. I'll draw down at the harbor where the ships are and everything. But when I got there, all I felt like doing is drawing in the warmth of the hotel, and so I just did drawings of like around the hotel, and my daughter sat looking at her phone, and when we went for meals at the table and did really domestic, low level stuff, nothing to do with the bigger city we were in, but actually it felt more like a diary in it. I really enjoyed doing that, so I took the pressure off myself, even though I do like sitting in the cold to draw and join in the rain, I just decided I wasn't up for it, and just drew all the nice indoors, warm stuff that's serious cold that would have taken you away. She could barely breathe when you got down to the harbor. It was so cold, it was painful to breathe in. Thank

Katie:

you for your questions. If you've got more questions as well, we've got a thing on our if you go on the good, cheap illustration, forward slash podcast, there's a big button, and you can submit your questions there.

Tania:

I forgot that is so brilliant. Oh, we're gonna harvest so many good questions, yeah, and get them in to hear them. Lovely. Okay, bye.