The Good Ship Illustration

Illustration trends vs your creative voice PLUS what materials to use

• The Good Ship Illustration • Season 10 • Episode 17

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Two more chunky questions for this week's episode:

  1. “How do I choose the right materials and techniques when I love them all?”
  2. “How do I keep up with new tech and trends without hopping on every train and going bananas?”

It's a longer one this week! A podcast title that went in the bin was: Mouldy bingo dabbers: A love story. A moment of silence for that title. It woulda been great, but not very useful or searchable 😆

Alas.


Timestamps

  • 00:00 – “How do I choose the right materials?”
  • 01:00 – You don’t have to pick just one
  • 02:00 – Mixing media
  • 04:15 – Why learning 'the proper way' can sometimes kill your weirdness
  • 06:30 – The gouache phase 
  • 07:30 – Storytime: The incredible grasshopper drawings
  • 09:00 – Wrong materials = the right results
  • 10:00 – Drawing with stuff you don’t like
  • 13:15 – Listener question: “How do I keep up with tech & trends without going mad?”
  • 14:00 – Learning Procreate while making a book??
  • 17:00 – Trends are sneaky
  • 19:30 – Don't force yourself into a trend box
  • 22:00 – Are you a fan or trying to be someone else?
  • 24:00 – Going off-grid


Stuff we mention:


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Right, we’re off to draw with things that smell like school. Mmmm. 

Bye!

x Tania, Helen & Katie
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 🎙

materials + trying out new tech & trends without going insane
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[00:00:00] Okay, we've got a good question from Nisha. Uh, Which says, how to choose materials and techniques that work best for me. I've worked with ink and brushes, with ink and nib pens, acrylics, watercolor, gouache, colored pencils. I've done collage and also mixed some medias.

Pewie. I like them all. Each in a different way. How can I be a bit more focused to become more professional at least in on technique? Thank you in advance. That's an interesting one. I remember when I was teaching in Hong Kong, they asked me to teach classes on different mediums. I was like, We don't do [00:01:00] that in England, or in the UK.

We just use any old thing. And you're not really aware of what they are. Obviously, ink and a nib pen is very different from watercolour. But sometimes it's nice not to think about what they are, and just think about what you want from it, like some contrast. A single, nice, sharp, scratchy line, and maybe a lovely, smooth, flat colour.

So just think in terms of contrast rather than what the mediums are. Because people looking at your work never think Oh, there's a watercolour or that's done in acrylic and sometimes people put work on their website and they say what mediums it's done in and I find that really jazz now. I'm like, who cares?

Could be digital, fake watercolour digital. So really just think what mixes together, mix them all up and don't worry too much about trying to be, um, good at specific mediums, I would think. Yeah. I really agree. And I like changing mediums all the time, so I don't think you need to. decide now I have chosen my [00:02:00] mediums.

This is me forever. Yeah. That would drive me insane. I would get so bored with it. I really like swapping things up, especially say you want to draw something tiny. Maybe you're doing some vignettes or something. Then, um, sometimes my line will be, uh, a color pencil, but say I want the work to look similar, but big, then the line might be a chunky crayon, but the same color.

So like you said, Tanya, it's really thinking. What you need this line or this color to be, and then finding something that does that and, um, not necessarily thinking I'm, I'm going to use watercolor from now on, and I'm going to use it in a watercolory way. You can mix it with loads of water in a traditional way, or you might mix it really thick like you would with gouache.

Just experiment and play with it and use it in your own way. Yeah, you kind of get what you want out of it, don't you? Effectively, you're doing mixed medium, and that's what we were always taught at college was to mix them all up, even if they weren't supposed to work. And at [00:03:00] the end of a kind of, when I was doing painting, some of that was sort of dismantled, like you can't mix this and that.

Do you know that you, you know, you can't put an acrylic primer down and then go on top of it with oil paints or something like that, but that was fine art related. So then it all got a bit more. It made more sense put it that way but then later on with the with digital as well None of these divisions seem to matter anymore and when asked to try and demonstrate how to use for example oil pastels I thought well, I remember they taught us at primary school go over all the colors in black and then scratch them off Do they want me to teach that?

Surely not. I realized I didn't know how any of these things worked properly I knew that watercolor You know, you let the paper shine through. It's transparent on those kind of, but you don't need to become a virtuoso. I think it's Virtuoso in those things. I think you're actually kind of shooting yourself in the foot if you go and try and learn those methods.

If you go on YouTube and you watch all the videos about how to use watercolour, your watercolour is just going to look like everybody else's. [00:04:00] Like, you're not going to be You're not going to find your own way to do it and have your own unique way of working. It's much, much better just to go in the art shop, shove a load of, scrape off the shelves into your basket at random.

Supermarket sweep. Supermarket sweep the art shop, or not even the art shop. Felt pens in the supermarket or whatever, and then just use them in whatever way. When you put them on paper, how is it you have to hold them and move them on the paper that feels and looks nice? You're clicking your fingers.

Sorry, that was really annoying Are we making you angry? I was just like, Ooh. She just wants to draw. She just wants to get into the art shop. I was thinking about art shops. But that's ultimately a much more unique creative voice, isn't it? Mixing these things up, doing what you want, making mistakes, finding out things on the way that you can actually master that mistake and make it your own.

And you don't have to use these things in that particular way. It sounds like you've kind of done your own [00:05:00] foundation year. If you've tried everything, cause that's what they do at like traditional art school thing, the foundation year is you try everything out. And then at the end of that, you pick what you want to do or like what you liked most or what you found easiest.

So maybe that's the next step is like, what did you like most? What did you find easiest? Cause in terms of longevity, you want to do loads of it. And you don't have to pick one, you can mix them all up. Yeah, I would question whether you really need to pick one. You don't. No. I feel like it's that those different mediums dictate, or have dictated for many years, to people what kind of artist they should be if they are using the materials correctly.

And then you get those kind of visual genres of work that all look like each other because the medium has told you how it's supposed to be used. Just break the rules and do what you want. I feel like gouache did that a bit. There's like a niche of illustration everybody was doing gouache and everyone like gouache and colored pencils and everyone's work looked the same.

So it's yeah worth avoiding that. And then gouache broke the rules by making acrylic gouache which meant you could [00:06:00] put one color on top of the other because it would dry and seal. gouache was the hardest because that's like 1950s ad man in the US in the creative department who can put one color next to another color that's not too wet so they don't blur and they dry in between all that kind of stuff that's is literally a craft.

No one wants to work like that anymore because we're more, we have more options and I think there's a lot more freedom and you don't have those disciplines of the medium but you think of digital and procreate and people can mix up different mediums with names. that don't react with each other that way.

So you see lots of weird combinations of textures that wouldn't work in the real life, but they will work digitally. I think it's really interesting to use a material. In a way that's, um, counterintuitive, a way that shouldn't really work. Like I can remember going to Bologna book fair years and years and years ago.

Oh, no, it wasn't Bologna book fair. We went to an exhibition in the, um, the [00:07:00] Royal festival hall. And it was an exhibition of Japanese illustrators, picture book makers. And we saw this incredible work where this Japanese illustrator had got some, um, big sheets of board that were like a kind of Kappa board, you know, where it's sort of water resistant on the surface. Yeah. Let's go. Yeah. And then he'd use some sort of pigment, maybe some sort of ink that was quite watery.

So then he's put in this high pigment, watery ink. Um, liquid on this sort of non absorbent surface. And so it kind of took the pigment, but not the water and made this weird kind of, um, resistance to the materials on the, on the surface of the board. And he drew these amazing, incredible grasshoppers really big with, must've been quite a thick brush or like, or.

It could have been loo roll dipped in a bit of ink or something and pulled across the [00:08:00] board. And everything about it was, these are the wrong material for the wrong board and everything. But they were so incredible and we've never forgotten it. And we saw this exhibition. When I say we, I'm talking about me and my partner, Jerry.

We saw this exhibition maybe 20 years ago and we still talk about it now. And just recently in the last couple of weeks, Jerry actually managed to find what this book is and who the illustrator is and managed to buy a copy. And we were a bit worried that when it arrived, it might let us down. It might not be everything that we'd built it up, but it arrived and it is.

Absolutely incredible. It's so beautiful, but everything about it, you'd think, Hmm, you couldn't use that material on that board. It looks like it would resist it, but it made these really interesting marks. Breaking the rules. And making it work for yourself, using it in a way that creates almost a sort of signature and it doesn't really matter where it came from.

I think just the thing is trying to make visual impact, isn't it? People are hungry to look at new things. And if you play with materials in such a way that something really exciting [00:09:00] happens, and you know when it's happened because you get the whole, Oh, I have done something amazing. Well, it might not be amazing.

Sometimes you just scare yourself when you make a new mark that is not what you'd normally do. But you keep going back to it and you keep having another look and you think there's something there. That's the aim, isn't it? It doesn't kind of matter. It could be emulsion paint. Mm hmm. Really doesn't, or like you say, caperboard and ink making weird textures.

I really like to pick up a material that at first I hate. Like, for a long time I really hated a very, very fine, fine liner. They're too spiky, they're too thin. Everything about them put me off. But I love picking up something like that and learning. To find how I would use it and how I could make it work with my drawing.

Like I love a biro, like a really blobby, cheap, cheap, cheap biro. You know, one to have that smell. Yeah, it smells really good, it's like school, isn't it? And they're kind of anti drawing, aren't they? They're like You really wouldn't think you'd make a good drawing out of it, but if you find something like that and you stick with it, you can [00:10:00] find your way to draw with it, and I get really excited when that happens, like the bingo dabbers dabbers.

They've got a smell as well. Didn't you say yours was mouldy? Yeah, they smell mouldy. I don't know if they've gone mouldy maybe. Probably are five years in. And you're always changing up anyway, aren't you? I change materials all the time because I think by nature I'm just a, a jump from one idea to another. I just really like experimenting all the time.

There's no way I could be an illustrator who chose my materials and stuck with it for life. I think it's kind of, it's a good idea to choose your materials for your first ever folio and the first artwork you put on your website. Maybe just while you're getting a foot in the door so people know what they're gonna get and then after that I think you can just You can do what you like.

I don't think people notice when I swap materials. I was going to say, it's that age old thing, like in the freak flag course, people will be like, Oh, I'm trying this new medium. Or new style even. Yeah, new style. And then we look like, looks the same. They all look like they're by the same person. You can [00:11:00] see their decision making, their subject matter.

draw about. You can just see how they hold a pencil, like their visual language is in there, no matter what they pick up. Yeah. And it could be, it could be your colour sensibility and a palette you keep returning to, or the way you depict a face or a dog. Whatever, those things will define you as you, regardless of, of the mediums you use.

And that, that's what you should could have sort of aimed for in your voice, not really what, what mediums you use. Those can swap continually and no one would know the difference. You know, when you're sometimes asked to put some work in an exhibition or it goes into a, like a compilation book of some sort and they say, what materials did you draw it with?

I always think, what are you asking me that for? Yeah, what does it matter? What were the dimensions? Ask her a number question and it will flip out. Don't matter, don't matter. Get lost. Well, I hope that solves it for you. You can go and do what you want. Do what you want. That would have been a shorter version of the podcast.

Do what you want next. It's a nice question though. Cause it [00:12:00] is very freak flag, isn't it? It's just throw off the shackles of medium and find out who you really are in other ways. Do we got another question? Yes. Many, many, many. for sending in good questions. That was really nice to talk about. It's nice to talk about proper creativity and tools because so often.

I mean, courses, a lot of, um, questions are money questions or business questions and they're valid because no one talks that much about them, but it's lovely to get back to the roots, isn't it? Yeah. What materials you pick up, how you put them on paper. It seems so obvious to me that you just get some random materials and you try and make them work.

Hang on, where was I going with this? Hang on. There was an end to this sentence. Um, 

also I think, oh that was it, we all feel as if we're just cobbling, cobbling, what's that word? Cobbling our way along, we're just kind of making it up as we go, and do you know what? We all are, and then we're all getting it right, that's, that's how you should be doing it. Yes, yeah. It's reassuring. [00:13:00] Yeah. Yeah.

What about this question from Anna? Um, what are your thoughts on keeping up with technology and trends without hopping on every train and going insane? Oh, that's interesting. That's the complete digital version of technology and trends. Cause I kind of, I suppose in terms of techie trends, that's a whole thing, isn't it?

I wonder if this means like social media or exposure or whether this is tools, technical tools for work. I really like picking up the techie tools for work. I think because I've, by nature, just really like to swap things and change, try new things all the time. I really, really love getting into a new bit of software.

Try it. So I'll think, okay, I'm illustrating the next book, but I want to learn Procreate or Affinity. I'll just use that to illustrate it and learn on the job. And then at the end of it, I think, was that fun? No, I might do some work on paper next time. So I really love it. It's just another tool, isn't it?

But it makes me love it. You're so brave. [00:14:00] You'll learn a tool on a book, on a new job. I mean, that's madness. That's either brave or mad. And you pull it off. You're like, at the end of your new project, I've learned procreate in public. But I mean, you do a run, it's not, it's not safe. It's just learning on the job.

That's the best way. That's life. Yeah. It's life, but it's brave, definitely. I think I'd love to be that, um, or just to be that brave and try new things. I don't know whether my brain and my neuroplasticity has got me so stuck in Photoshop. Even if I use Illustrator, I'm like, just cry all the way through it because I hate it.

Because the moment I try I'm like, I can't be bothered, let's just go back to the way I work.

I feel a bit like that about my work, like I've discovered what works, like procreate, doing it digitally, that's just what I do. But then I feel like, Because the content is different every time my brain is stretched that way it's almost like you want to keep those things the same and then change other things.

But in terms of like technology things outside work, like I love [00:15:00] learning new stuff and jumping on new things and like. You're good at it. I just get so excited about it but I can see where she's coming from and saying how do you do that and not go insane. I think that sometimes like. In terms of new social media platforms, if I hear about them, just say, I think we talked about this in podcast.

Yeah. I'm not into that. I feel through with that. I'm bored. Yeah. I've got to be, I've got to be really excited about something to jump into it. And then sometimes Adobe sending you these, uh, kind of demo email videos. Look, there's an easy way to do this now in illustration. I. Well, I've worked out a really long winded way myself and it seems to work.

It's a little bit wonky. But actually maybe I need to keep the wonky in it because then it has some handmade quality. So say you're extruding a shape or making it 3D. I know how to draw that perspective in my head even. using a digital medium. But if illustrators say, I, some kind of shape tool will suddenly miraculously make it 3D with some gradients on the side.

I'm like, yeah, knock yourself out. That's not for me, [00:16:00] but I'm sure someone likes it. But there's something to be said about, for that, about learning it your way. And even if, cause I, I really like to learn a new. You know, piece of software for making a piece of artwork or whatever, but I learned the very basics, probably the idiots, very simple way of making this happen.

I don't get really in depth on Affinity or something and know it inside out. I couldn't really run a workshop on Affinity or Procreate. All I know is I just grabbed the easiest things that would make this work the way I wanted to work and stick with that. Like you're saying, you, you kind of cobbled together your own way of doing it.

And that becomes your visual voice. You don't need to know the whole program inside out. I would be so boring. Maybe that's the key. Like get in there, figure out how to do the thing you want to do and then leave. Yeah. Yeah. I think we did, and Photoshop for me in the beginning was like, Oh, this, you can draw with this stuff that, and it has some brush type things in it.

And then the layers made it into a kind of screen printing machine. [00:17:00] And I thought that's what Photoshop is for me is a digital screen printing machine, and I only want to know things. That work within the recreation of something that looks analog if it's got some snazzy add ons that become quite Digital or, you know, the, the, your workflow is suddenly shortened and you can do things much, much more quickly.

I'm like, well, it would take me three days to learn those things. So ultimately, will my workflow be economized? It probably won't because I'll get mired in some manual or video that is supposed to be teaching me a quick way to do it. I was already okay. It was a bit wonky, but I could do it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Exactly. Yeah. And same like for trends and things. I think if there's a big trend. It almost puts me off jumping on it. If everyone's doing it, I'm like, no, I don't want to do it. And we're always talking about kind of avoiding trends, really. I think for everything, it's I get reject full of trends. I don't like, it's not a good word.

Yeah. Avoid and like, avoid. Yeah. Well, that's what Freak Flag was really about, wasn't it? [00:18:00] Avoiding that huge pitfall that so many people seem to be in, in the industry. When I say the industry, I mean really generally. People were buying images of quite stuff that eventually became cliches, trends that became cliches.

Owls. Owls and llamas and avocados and rainbows and unicorns. So the industry of manufacturing and creating , products that were differentiated by having images stamped on them, and that's something that didn't exist 20 years ago, but now all these things, whether they're phone cases or tea towels or tote bags, need illustrators and visual people to provide stuff for it, and those trends are just, they're such a danger for an illustrator, your entire portfolio is redundant.

Once the, that ship has moved on. I also feel like I've worked out my own way of doing a thing. And I'm actually not capable of going and joining that trend. Because, you know, but also by the time you get there, it's [00:19:00] moved on. Yeah. I, I, it's almost like the way you work. Oh, I don't know how to word it exactly, but I heard, um, you know, the band Travis.

Oh yeah. I've forgotten the name Franny, the lead singer of Travis. I know that because he was at Glasgow School of Art when I was there. Oh, really? I was going to say, this is taking a long route. I know it is. The reason I remember it is that I vaguely remember him from art school. And he was talking about how, um, your, so he's talking about music.

And he's saying, he says in this podcast that you have almost no choice what your, what your work is when it comes out, it comes out and you're like, Oh, I didn't expect it to be so quiet, but that's how, that's how it turns out. And I don't have any choice in this. I feel like that about my work to some extent, if there's a trend, can't really get on that trend.

Cause I've worked out my own way of making a story and doing the pictures and that, and it's a very. laborious weird way I get there. I can't really [00:20:00] just jump out of that and follow a trend for a while. It makes no sense. I can't do it. It wouldn't be comfy. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Wouldn't be comfy. It's true.

Pre internet world, you didn't have so much stuff to look at. You had libraries. and stuff that was in the real world for you to go, am I like that or should I be more like that or should I just be myself? So the ability to be truly yourself with integrity was much, much easier because you weren't overexposed.

Now we're bombarded visually by all these things, you know, that include, you'd be better off if you tried a bit of this, cause these people over there are making money, have a go. Then you end up like some kind of minestrone soup of influences. Which ends up quite mediocre in the end. We all just need to go down into bunkers and ignore the world and try to go back to It's going to come out how it's going to come out that I love the idea that it's going to come out quiet If that's you so if you think of that in terms of color, that's how certain people have [00:21:00] those beautiful Quiet neutral palettes because they only ever had those paints and they just stayed like that But it's really hard in this overexposed world to find out Who you truly are, because you think you're like everything like a magpie and you can't stop looking at all these things and trying to pull them into your work.

And so trends, yeah, avoid them. Try and put your blinkers on and figure out who you are. It's so noisy out there, it's hard. Yeah, just be a fan. Just be a fan of all that amazing illustration that's not you. That's fine. Yeah, don't try and copy. All the things that I really like are absolutely the opposite to what I do.

And I find that quite a confusing thought. If you look at things and you're just like, oh, it's so beautiful, but you know, it has no relationship to the work that you produce. And then you start wondering about the work you produce. Is it you? But you, before you had seen this amazing work, you hadn't thought of it.

Therefore it can't be part of you. You're just being a fan and there's a huge division, isn't there? [00:22:00] I saw a thing recently and somebody, I can't remember if it was on the Facebook group or some somewhere, I wish I knew where, they'd said they were browsing Pinterest and they'd got into a habit of every evening just like looking at Pinterest, looking at illustrations and thinking, Oh, I want to draw that.

Oh, I want to draw that. But they were stuck in that mode rather than drawing. And I was like, there's something to be said about the create versus consume thing, isn't there? Like make sure you're not absorbing too much of other stuff. Yeah. Or reading too many things or listening to too many other people and flick the switch so you just make stuff and almost like covering your ears and go la la la and just make things.

Mm. Maybe that's it. I think that's really true, actually, because you can kid yourself, you're doing work, you're looking, exploring inspirational ideas, and it's, oh, it's just like creative shopping. It's like being in a massive shopping mall and wanting to grab all these things, even though they don't fit you and you've got nowhere to go in them.

You, you know, you're just adding them on to yourself and you don't need to. It's trying to find that quiet space after you've had a look, then you say, I'll go away and be a hermit for a year and just try and be me. [00:23:00] We'd love that. Oh, I'd love that. And they're just saying it makes me think. Just unplug the Wi Fi for a year.

I think that will happen soon. I think we're getting, we're so stuffed with things and so overexposed, we're raw. It's time to just log out. On my way here, I walked past somebody's house. You probably know who they are, Tanya, because I walked We're at your house and I walked past this person, one of your neighbours.

And in the window she has a sign saying, I am not on Instagram or any social media. That's all it says. . She's an artist. She's older than us and she reads The Idler. That's all you need to know. She's like, here's the work in the window. Knock on the door if I'm in, you can come in and buy it or look at it, but don't ask me if I'm on Instagram.

I see people talk about going on an information diet. Maybe it's that as well. Oh, maybe it is. Well, keep an eye out for the next good ship, um, incarnation, which is we, we get a series [00:24:00] of caves in a hillside. Maybe somewhere in Turkey. Maybe we actually get a ship and just sail off with our And no, there's no Wi Fi anywhere.

A cruise, a giant cruise. I hope that was helpful. Yeah, that's a nice big conversation. Two big conversations. Thanks for the questions. Yeah, thanks a lot. It set us off on a good, good, good voyage. Bye. Bye.