The curse of "Final Artwork"

BE MORE WONKY 

In this episode:

• Why quick sketches usually have more life in 'em than polished pieces
• How perfectionism kills creativity
• Beware of the pause button (when you're doing graphic recording / live illustration)
• What to do when you're scared your work isn’t “worth the money”
• Tips for keeping final artwork fresh and loose
• Human vs AI: what if the secret is just… being wonky?

Timestamps, if you're into that kind of thing

• 00:00 – Can sketches be “the” illustration?
• 01:00 – The gap between sketch and final art
• 02:00 – Helen’s owls
• 05:00 – What kills good work
• 06:00 – The hourly rate mindset
• 07:00 – Simple marks 4eva
• 08:00 – Sketchy = human (and that’s a good thing)
• 09:00 – Tips for keeping your work feeling fresh
• 10:00 – Live illustration = brave, imperfect, magic
• 11:00 – Be more human, more wonky

Byeeee for now!
 x The Good Ship Illustration (Helen, Katie & Tania) 🚢

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✏️ @thegoodshipillustration
🌏 www.thegoodshipillustration.com

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Transcript

May - Be Human & More Wonky
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​[00:00:00] 

Hello? Hello. Can sketches be the illustration? This is the Yes. No are done. No. Okay. Thank you. We'll see you next week. Decisive outcomes. I was thinking this thing a lot though, because, so, looking at all the kind of different work that goes on in the good ship.

Sometimes you see people who've got quick sketch work and they, they kind of throw it away. They don't think it's a biggie. They've done some quick drawing, which is. For the amusement of everyone else. And it's so beautiful. It's really lovely work because it's not too focused and, [00:01:00] you know, they're not thinking this is final artwork.

And then the final artwork might be a lot more overwrought, a lot more finished, but it hasn't got the joy or the presence on the page that the quick scribbly sketches have. And I think that Bridging the gap thing that we talk a lot about is, part of it is saying to people, do you know when a quick sketch is enough?

Mm-hmm. Have you got the bravery to say it's that? That's it. It's that word, final artwork. It's such a killer, isn't it? It reminds me. Last week I was doing the children's book show, asked me to go and do this event thing. So I did a like a stage thing, you know, reading and drawing on stage, with.

Hundreds of school children. And after the event on stage, we then visited lots of schools to work with the children. It was really interesting visiting schools and seeing the way that teachers speak to the kids and all that.

And there was one class I went in who I said, okay, so we're all gonna draw owls. We're gonna use a stick. We're gonna dip it in in and draw owls. And so I showed them how to do it and set them all off and they [00:02:00] were just making this lovely mess drawing and these incredible owls. And then the teacher stopped them.

I had a little chat with the teacher and I said to her, oh, these are all gonna be on display at the library afterwards. 'cause this is to try and get children reading and into the local library and, and she stopped them and she said, everybody, everybody stop. Sticks down. Sticks down. These drawings have to be perfect because they're gonna be on display in the library.

The fear on everybody's faces, including mine, of like, I just wanted a, I wanted a rugby tackler to the ground and make a shut up. You should have, it's literally the worst thing you can say. It's awful, awful, awful. Then the kids all looked really frightened and then they were pick their sticks back up and they were hesitating to put their stick back on the paper.

The sound of loads of owl drawings dying. Had they done any drawing before this before She said those dreadful windows, they'd, they'd made a start. They'd all, you know, just done like five minutes. Were they lovely? [00:03:00] Like those owls that you shake? Yeah. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. And then this thing happened and all the joy went out of the room.

We do that to ourselves as well sometimes, don't you Brina go. That'd be good mind. Yeah. People are gonna see it, you know? Yeah. Oh, seize up. Yeah. You know, this illustration you're doing, you're being paid now, so it's got to be the best thing you've ever done. Yeah. Do it. Spend all day off. You could write a little list of those curses out that will kill a piece of work.

Mm. Because if you, if you go on to Helen's Instagram, I think there are pictures of these owls that these kids did in the, they're amazing. Are they honestly the most beautiful thing I've seen Almost. Oh, they are. So amazing and all I said to each class was draw me an owl and the variety. I think I came, I don't know how many owls I've got in the end.

Maybe 200 owls and every single one is completely different. Lovely. They are absolutely brilliant. Some children instinctively draw tiny, like three centimeters high. Some of them completely fill the [00:04:00] papers. Some of them, the whole thing is black with a few dots of white left and the others are the reverse.

Some are really lacy and delicate and fine and other of them, others are like their fist as being thumping that stick on the paper. It's so brilliant. You remember those tea towels used to get at school? I keep doing. Did a different one. Yeah. It'd be so good to get an owl tea towel, all the different owl.

I was thinking that when I looked at them because basically I was so jealous of these kids owl, they're so brilliant. They have this magic thing we're talking about, about a sketch being, it doesn't matter. Just the joy in making that thing for the first time and not worrying about where it's gonna be.

And their idea of what a, a beautifully perfect piece of artwork is. Is sometimes what the kind of devil in our head will tell us.

We're like, okay, you've done the sketches, now it's fine artwork. You've gotta do this properly. We need to get Helen round to start shouting. Forget what the art director wants. Forget what magazine is going in or where. Just enjoy yourself and have fun making it. But I [00:05:00] think something as simple as a sketch that doesn't look like 800 pounds worth of drawing.

It's a mindset thing, isn't it? You've got to get yourself past the fact that this is socalled. I think sometimes when you're being paid money, you think, oh, that I must make this drawing take me a long time. Yes. To be worth the money that they've paid me. Well, your subconscious already starts breaking that down into an hourly rate.

Mm-hmm. And then you think of what a drawing should look like for that. Mm-hmm. Well, this has got to be. As they're paying me more than I've been paid before. It's got to be better than I've ever done before. Yeah. ~But we were talking about context earlier when you were talking about Neil Leighton. Mm. And how he was saying sometimes quick drawings in the context of a page where it's not being seen as a painting, which is sometimes I think a mistake that younger illustrators can make.~

~Like this image has to be amazing 'cause that's all there is. There's just gonna be this image and that will tell the whole story. But you're not, you're part of a whole design team. The art director's working out. Lots of other graphic elements will work around your image. So sometimes you are only need to, needed to give the lightest touch.~

~Yeah. To activate a page, to activate all the other elements around it. If it's too heavy and too overall. Mm-hmm. It just drags everything down. Yeah. When, when we were on this children's book show thing, I had some really great chats with Neil about what it was so nice doing an event like this with another illustrator.~

~Usually it's with an author or by myself. It's the first time I've been invent invited to something like this where two illustrators are performing together. And anyway, it was really, it was such a treat. 'cause I spent loads of time with him and I've been a huge fan of him for a really long time. We had some great chats about this kind of thing and about how sometimes you do a, a really quick drawing for the book.~

~And the drawing isn't great, but all of the feeling is there. And then you might do another drawing to try and correct whatever is the arm isn't long enough or the head's too big in proportion to the other drawings in the book or whatever, and then all the feeling has gone out of it. So it's a balancing act between, well, that one's got all the feeling.~

~So it actually, even if maybe technically it's not, the better drawing it is, the better drawing for this context and learning to decide which is right and how much character consistency is important compared to the emotion of the drawing. It's like a balancing act trying to. You probably have to do lots of them, don't you though as well?~

~To get it right, to keep without over exhausting yourself or deadening the image.~

I think as soon as somebody's paying you, as soon as there's pressure on yourself, sketching feels easy. And there's something in our brains that can kick in and be like, okay, can't be easy anymore. You've got to like either do it loads and loads of times or spend all day on it or you know, just really clench while you're doing it and forget why they came to you.

Like they might have seen your Instagram feed full of really lovely, lively work and they want that. But they've come to you and they're now paying you money and you think, [00:06:00] you forget actually what, how they found you, what work they liked. Yeah. It's good to ask them that question, isn't it? Which of the work on my formula did you like?

It's come to me for, but it, I think that the money thing that changes, it does change everything in the sense that, the first time I realized this, I was, when I was working with some art directors and I used to paint by hand and these images were so com complex and convoluted and yeah, there were a lot of work and if something went wrong in that painting, it was quite hard to repair it.

And then a friend of mine at the Hong Kong Poly U, she said, oh, my husband's an illustrator. And I said, oh, what's his work like? And she showed me these simple line drawings. They weren't cartoons as such. They remind me of that. The Australian poet and illustrator who recently died, Brian something other, God I can't remember his name now, but I was like, wow.

So he's doing these simple, maybe two characters, simple line drawing. Perhaps he does 20 of them and he picks the best one. But each drawing probably doesn't take more than 15 minutes. And this [00:07:00] completely blew my mind. 'cause my paintings were taking me three weeks to complete. Wow. And she said he was working for an ad agency with these drawings, and I knew what their budgets were.

And I was like, is he getting the same fee as I am for three weeks work? And he's got a 10 minute drawing. And I, I just couldn't reconcile this in my head. And now I think more and more the presence of something light and simple. And an easy sketch like Marin de Shaw's work, for example, her work for the Bob Books or the Yo there's now some nonfiction books about yoga and getting fit.

And they're just really simple paintings. And she pieces them together on Photoshop, the bits and bobs and legs and the arms and the heads. So you get consistency, but it's the freshness of just those simple marks and the joyous kind of unselfconscious making. But in the face of ai, you know, just to see someone put an unabashed confident mark on a page is like, is [00:08:00] so beautiful now compared to all these horrible 3D rendered images. Do you think it's like now if you do writing, if there's a typo in it, people are like, oh good, there's a typo.

It's not ai, it's a real person. Yeah. Like sketching has got that human wobbly ness in it, whereas AI would be all slick and weirdly airbrush feel. Yeah. Yeah. It's like hearing someone sing just alone in a studio. You can hear all the catches in the voice. Or like Graham was saying the other day, oh I hate it when they put the sounds of the fingers on the fret and the guitar.

It's like saying, this is real. I was like, no, but I do like that and I'd like to know there's a human behind it. It's not over produced, it's just, you can see the humanity and I think that's what people want now, but we just need to be brave enough to recognize in our own work that's enough. Look, it's kind of singing.

It looks really beautiful, that Mark is really nice, but it takes confidence to back it, doesn't it? That's that, yeah. And there's all those tricks aren't there, so like um, in a picture book, you've got to do rough drawings and you [00:09:00] might do the rough drawings. Ugh, endless times before You definitely get it right.

The layout's right, the page order is right. You've chosen between vignettes and spread, and you've drawn it so many different ways. And so one of the tricks I use is if I'm gonna redraw something, but there's only one area of it needs redrawing, I'll just stick a glue, a piece of paper over the top and just draw that bit so I'm not redrawing the same image again and again.

And then when it comes to final artwork I put the rough drawing on the light box. But then dim the light box so I can only just see through so that the new drawing is fresh rather than copy every single line from the rough drawing.

So it feels like it's new. I know where everything in the is on the page so that I, I'm leaving room for the text or the gutter down the middle. But it's a new drawing. It's like a performance though, isn't it? Yeah. You kind of gee up to it. You've got all the stuff prepared, you've memorized your lines, you've put your gutter in, you know, all that stuff.

You're okay now. [00:10:00] Give it to me. Yeah. And get the feeling as well. Like don't just do this as process. Remember that this is a sad page. So feel sad while I draw it. 'cause if I feel sad, it'll come out of my brain and down my arm through the pen science. Yeah, but, and it relates to live illustration as well, doesn't it?

Because you can't do this over and over again. You do the drawing, you commit to it and say that quick drawing with a person. That's it. There you go. Yeah. And it's, even if I'm working from a recording of an event, not letting myself hit pause. So it's like you've just gotta keep going with the energy and doing the quick imperfect drawings and be like, oh my boy, that's bad, but carry on anyway.

And it's sort of, it gives it a bit of charm, I think. If somebody's got a weirdly long arm or a wonky eye or, yeah, if it's too perfect, I don't want that. It's humans. I like my humans wonky. I really love, I really love seeing somebody not too perfect. You know what I mean? It's, it's intimidating when you see somebody who's got their act together completely.

You think [00:11:00] underneath, you're falling apart. I was, I always think the pretending. Yeah. Posturing. Like everything's fine. Is it though, that's such a good ex, you know the metaphor, wonky humans and wonky art. You just love them more. They've got more char. Yeah. Yeah. And you relate to. Yeah, that's, if people keep asking us about the AI thing, that's just the answer.

It's gonna do what it's gonna do. Just be more human and more wonky. Yeah. And ignore it because we can't do a lot more about it other than mm-hmm. Sign, sign petitions and hope it goes away, but just get more human. Mm. Okay. Bye bye. [00:12:00]