Illustrator vs artist: what’s the difference? + Creating your portfolio 🥳

Thanks for sending in yer juicy questions. Here are the ones we tackle in this week's podcast episode:

1. “How do I build an illustration portfolio if I only have fine art work?”
2. “What’s the difference between an illustrator and an artist?”

Ahh yes that ol' chestnut. How to pivot from fine art to illustration without losing your mind. We dig into the figuring out what kind of work suits your actual personality. No more trying on other people's uncomfy too-small style jumpers. The illustrator vs artist line is a bit blurry - we get into why that’s actually a good thing. Promise.

Honourable mentions:

• Fenugreek soup
• Dream clients and imaginary briefs
• Katie’s two-week job limit
• "Just make the kind of work you want to get hired for” 

Timestamps

• 00:25 – Q1: How to turn a fine art practice into an illustration portfolio
• 01:00 – Making the kind of work you want to be hired for
• 02:00 – Picking your corner of illustration industry
• 03:30 – Fine art vs illustration: different goals, same skills
• 05:00 – Picture book makers: an exception
• 06:30 – Your personality probs already picked your niche
• 08:20 – Know what suits your work style (and what definitely doesn’t)
• 10:00 – Unexpected places you might find your dream illustration job
• 11:30 – Be a detective: trace the work you love back to the source
• 12:00 – Q2: What’s the difference between an artist and an illustrator?
• 13:30 – Do labels even matter anymore? 
• 14:30 – “Artist” vs “Illustrator” – what clients think they’re hiring
• 15:30 – Choose the title that helps the right people find you

Stuff we mention:

• Our Business Course for Illustrators walks you through exactly how to figure out where you fit and how to build a portfolio that attracts the right clients.
  → Read aaaall aboot it here
• Want to uncover your weirdness and figure out your unique style?
  → Fly your freak flag with us

Got a question for the podcast?
Pop it in the question jar here:
Podcast question form

Thank you!

x Helen, Katie & Tania
The Good Ship Illustration

Come and say hello!

✏️ @thegoodshipillustration
🌏 www.thegoodshipillustration.com

p.s. We love answering your illustration questions. Click here to submit your question for The Good Ship Illustration Podcast 🎙

Transcript

0:25  
Jackie D asks, How do you develop an illustrative portfolio to break into the market if you have mostly fine art examples? He's

0:34  
good one. The first thought would be, set yourself some projects that you like, that you would want to do. Maybe ask yourself, Who if you were going to be an illustrator, because she obviously wants to why? What would be your dream job? Dream client, Dream brief, and set yourself that you don't even have to find a pre existing one to copy. You could just design a project for yourself and work to the demands of that brief,

1:03  
just brainstorm a load of stuff you're really, really into, you know, maybe you support a green piece or, you

1:10  
know, yeah, causes, causes and charities, causes

1:14  
or charities that you're really into, or memories from your childhood, or albums You love, or stories you love. Like, just pick something you're massively into, maybe make a list of all the stuff that you're into and you've always been into, and, like, really value those things, and make projects around those. Yeah.

1:32  
And if you see work in the wild and it makes you think, oh, wish I'd done that, that looks like a cool job. That's a really big clue. Yeah, go back

1:42  
and redo it in your own voice. Also, what area do you think you might want to be an illustrator for? Mean, we, the three of us, kind of represent the different corners of illustration, picture book, generalist and editorial for me and Katie, we call it, what new media? Yeah, live scribing. Well, there's different kind of areas which one appeals to you, and just finding a way to answer it, because they all have different requirements. Each area of illustration, if you're doing editorial, and even if you break that down into different magazines. So a magazine about health and well being will have probably some lovely pictorial representation of someone out in nature, whereas a business magazine would want you to come up with a cunning editorial concept that doesn't just feature men in business suits looking like clip art from or or a Getty. You know, magazine image for business, you've got to come up with ideas that have interesting visual solutions. And for yours, for Katie, you need a big vocabulary of images, don't you? And it's like concept on steroids, practising from

2:51  
like, I think, going to real events, even if not being paid, and drawing them live. And, you know, working on your live illustration skills that way, or if you're doing live portraits, you'd have a load of portraits in your portfolio. I think, just figure out what you want to do and do some before somebody asks you to like you don't have to wait to be asked. You can create a portfolio to show what you're capable of. That's the secret.

3:12  
But to cut, you know, to save time and cut out a couple of years of trying everything is probably a good idea not to be a generalist. Don't be everything to everyone. Going back to what Helen said, it's much easier to work from your point of personal obsessions, because you've got a ready made language, than reinventing yourself to talk in everyone else's language. So if you figure out who you are, which you probably have done, because Fine Art is a path to that, isn't it, you're probably working about things that you love. Now they just have to have a communication aspect that allow people to understand what your images are there to say, because with fine art, you're the author of the work. You're the author of the content. You generate everything. It's a slightly more service based industry as an illustrator, where you don't always get to create the content. Sometimes you do for self initiated projects, things like that, but you're in the service of someone else's ideas, and they might not be your kind of thing, but you use your cunning obsession or language to make them interesting. Well, just nodding, can you hear the silent nods? I love the way they look like they think I'm talking sense. Yeah. We've just had lunch that were a bit woozy.

4:24  
It was really good soup. It was the spices and it was, it fenugreek

4:29  
curried parsnips, yeah, but yeah, you just, you're serving other people with illustration. And that's probably the big change, is you don't have so much autonomy that you do as a fine as you would as a fine artist, but you might have more money, yeah,

4:46  
if you're responding to what people give you rather than just creating.

4:52  
I also think if you're a picture book maker, you're not so much just responding, because, especially if you're right, if you're an author, illustrator, yes. Of course, you're actually coming from something in you or your life, or it's you're not following a brief exactly. I suppose the bit of the brief that you're following is that the book has a certain number of pages at a certain size, but you want children to relate to it. Those are the boundaries around it. But other than that, you're, you're, you are the creator of everything in it. That's

5:21  
a bit why we're why we're really envious about author illustrators. And I blanked it from my mind. And even as I was saying, you're in the service of someone else, I'm like, there's an exception. There's an exception. Exception. Oh, those damn pitchable

5:34  
You're in the service of children's children who could just throw your book aside because it's rubbish. Yeah, I don't want that

5:44  
story. The picture book illustrators and authors, you know, get to live in their own world the whole time. You don't have articles by boring businessmen and art directors to change all your illustrations. There's a lot more autonomy in your area. Yeah,

5:59  
I think there is. I think maybe that's how I ended up doing it, because I really, really don't like to be told what to do. Really don't like to be told what to do. So if it's a job where you come up with your own idea and you pursue it to the end, perfect winner. Do you remember

6:15  
that TV show Wife Swap? Was it family swap, where people go

6:20  
and live each other's lives. Are you going to do illustrate as well? Yeah, why don't we

6:23  
just rotate and that means we have two versions, or it would make for

6:28  
great a lot. I don't I could think I could. Maybe I could definitely draw live in front of people, but I would be really stuck with all of your tech knowledge and to draw a map or something. Oh, I think that would be so hard. I'm just

6:42  
gonna be funny to see you in such a fury and phone them up saying I'm not doing this better idea.

6:48  
I'd be following them up client the day before, like, right? I started just a

6:55  
couple of questions about the content. They're like, what we signed you up for this four months ago, and

7:01  
I'd be having a nervous breakdown being watched drawing. So I don't go on art clocks. I don't like being watched drawing. I have to overcome that. But you know, you can see each area has a different personality type that it's suited to, which you never really think about.

7:15  
It's really funny as well, that I think my whole life, the whole time I've been making picture books, I've never really thought about it closely as closely as I do now, since we've started talking about it all the time, and now I've suddenly realised all of us are in exactly the area that suits our personalities. I never even thought about that until we all got together and started talking about it. It's

7:37  
amazing when you're forced to be kind of conscious and articulate what you do that you've just done as a knee jerk reaction. You've never analysed it. I think that whole teaching thing, especially when it bounces off each other, and when we're not just talking alone about our own thing, it's all in comparison to the other. And you can see how they're different. Because when we all started chatting about illustration, when we would meet up at the corner kitchen, we were like, Yeah, illustration that thing, yeah, it's this shape and it's blue and it's soft and fluffy or something like that. But then you realise after a while, we all perceive it entirely differently because of our experience in different fields of illustration. So then it would be like, no, no, no. It's not like that. Nobody is in my field.

8:19  
The thought of doing a whole picture book as well. Like, I think writing, because when we wrote together, it was fun. We just bounced ideas. But like, the pressure of, like, working with one publisher for a long time, and like just knowing that there was months straight, oh, like even thinking about it, I'm like, I feel my heart beating more.

8:38  
I would hate it if I didn't love the people I was working with, and I have had situations where I haven't and I've had to move publisher numerous times, but when I find the team I like to work with, that's it. I'm like, I'm stuck, whether they like it or not. I am sticking with them forever, and I love the feeling of right now, it's time to start the artwork. I'm going to hibernate. I'm going to stop doing all my social stuff for a while. I'm going to be in here in my studio, dog at my feet, rain on the window above my head. Get a hibernate. I love I just love that, although they're making it sound idyllic, and it's not all idyllic. There is some pain involved. But because I have the pain that I am used to, and I enjoy it,

9:16  
what if I like the misery? I Mr. Doyle,

9:23  
yeah, it's like the length of time and how long you can be in that zone, like you can be in the zone for eight months. Katie wants it over and done within three hours. She's had enough by then, the shorter, the better I can do. Two weeks max. And then I want something new, which is all a long winded way of going around, saying it's worth knowing what area you want to work in to create the portfolio that winks at that particular area to get the jobs in. Because if you haven't got time to hang around you and I'll have another career and spend two two years in totally the wrong part of illustration that doesn't suit my personality. So. Yeah, and my work maybe doesn't work for it, because you don't want to be too bent out of shape. So what would your work already suit? Does it look like stuff that you see out there in the world? Do you see commonalities? You really have to put your you really have to look hard, because the great work exists in weird places. Doesn't it like in a museum shop, or sometimes I find things like, you know, at a tourist attraction in a city, they have a gift shop, like, all these lovely things you don't normally see them anywhere else. And then you get really inspired and think I could get a job doing this.

10:35  
You think somebody somewhere is making money drawing pictures for this. Yeah, like, I saw somebody, my friend, Georgia from in Sydney. She did a partnership with, I think it was Malmaison or the company or something, but it was, she illustrated dressing gowns, the gowns for the like, the robes for the hotel room. I was like, That's so random, but so cool. Like, there's jobs you don't even know. I remember at school. Like they didn't say it to me when I was at school, but I think to my little sister, they said, like, don't worry about what job you're going to have, because it doesn't exist yet. I think that applies for illustration too, because you don't know where anything's going really but, and

11:13  
it's often design groups who get those really nice jobs. And we, again, we talk a lot about that on the business course, tracking things down. So if you see things and you don't know who commissioned them, you can use your stalking detective work online, take some photographs, see where they come from. I love that, like, who got this job? Who's the commissioning editor? I want this job, and that's when you know you're on the right track, kind of for your work. But the other question, does we could talk about that one, because it is appropriate to this, isn't it? What's the difference between illustrator and an artist? Yeah, it was roughly. That wasn't in is there an illustrator, artist as a role? And we decided they're it. Well,

11:52  
such a scale of artist and illustrator, you can be anywhere along that line. And I don't know that there's a lot of difference. Really. My partner. He illustrates, or he has illustrated children's books in the past, and now he makes screen prints at home, which are completely self motivated. And he still calls himself an illustrator, because he just feels like one inside somehow, even though, I suppose maybe you would say he was a printmaker or a fine artist, and he's making a choose your own you just choose your own label, don't you? Oh,

12:24  
yeah, an artist is a word that has to do a lot of heavy lifting because it covers so many bases as you're just basically a creative and I don't think these titles make a lot of sense anymore. You know that work that would only exist in a gallery and couldn't be used anywhere else, that's an artist, a fine artist, or whatever. But there's a lot of hybrid people who maybe do the odd bit of commissioned work, but they do loads of self initiated like Jerry and people who are commissioned to create images for walls like there's lots of poster work and sites selling posters that are generated specifically to look like art posters in interiors. And there's also a lot of commissions for hospitality interiors, whether it's hotels or restaurants where it's kind of make something artist but groovy. And there are illustrators who are working to that brief. So to a certain extent that illustrators are being commissioned, but they're creating work that gets framed and put on a wall,

13:21  
but those galleries where they have a painting, but you can choose what colours are on it so it matches your wallpaper, really, because then I was kind of thinking, maybe illustrate is the more commercial side. But then there's artists inverted commas, you know, artists that are really commercial and they're just creating art that is going to match your wallpaper? Yeah, I don't. I think it

13:43  
doesn't matter, does it?

13:44  
I don't think it matters. No, you just choose what you want to call yourself. I think all the

13:47  
categories have just been kind of blown apart now. I mean, there is obviously that whole field of fine art, but the rest of it in between, even like textile artists, who used to be very clearly for textile have become print and pattern. And print and pattern has become an area of illustration so that all all the edges have been blurred. And people would like art for their walls. They like art on their objects. So illustrators extend the life of objects. You know, used to just have a phone case that was that colour, a tote bag that was cream, and some other stuff, but now you can have multiple versions of them, because you put images on them, so suddenly there's 200 versions of the phone case or the tote bag. And that's where illustrators have great potential to do loads of work, and they can just produce what they want and see if it gets licenced or it's commissioned. I

14:37  
was thinking maybe in terms of logistics and people finding you to work with you. It depends who your ideal person to work with is, like, if you want to be working with brands that want to do a collaboration with an artist, maybe calling yourself an artist is more strategic. But then if you want to be hired as an illustrator, people are going to be searching for an illustrator, and if you call yourself an illustrator, they're like, Okay, that's the right person. Could. You

15:00  
said you were commissioned as an artist, weren't you? You knew

15:03  
early, early on, I did a job for an espresso painting on Windows. And they were like, we've got an artist in store. And I was like, Oh, just so fancy, but I'm just playing the street. I can just draw pictures. I'll draw whatever you want. So I don't know if it's a maybe a mindset thing or a class thing, or if it's just words that don't matter anyway. Well,

15:23  
because you can say you're something, but if a marketing agency wants to perceive you as an artist and pitch you as an artist, you know what you say you are is as much as what people see you to be or want you to be. So in

15:37  
that case, they probably saw more value in calling me an artist. Be like, it's a fancy smancy artist that we're collaborating with. Rather than being like, got an illustrator paint on the windows? Did

15:49  
you? You should have stood up at the end and pulled off your T shirt and it says illustrator across your chest? Proud illustrator. I am not an artist. I'll draw anything.

15:59  
Didn't really answer that, but it's

16:01  
not, I don't think there is answer, is there you can't, but we covered some nice vague areas. There's soup. See you next Week. Then goodbye, bye. You.