Bask in your weirdness ☀️ | Summer camp sketchbook week 1

Pssst, this episode was originally published in 2023 and we’re sharing it again as part of our Good Ship Summer Camp series. It’s one of 5 episodes to help you fly your freak flag this summer. If you’d like to join in properly, there’s a free workbook an' everything!

You can download the workbook here: https://www.thegoodshipillustration.com/workbook 

🚢🚢🚢

What if your creative voice isn't one you actually like? 😬

In today’s episode, we’re chatting about that awkward bit of figuring out your voice as an illustrator, and why the weird stuff you’re secretly obsessed with might actually be the key to your best work.

In this episode:

• What to do if your voice feels ick
• Why “basking in your weirdness” matters
• That Ira Glass quote we always bang on about
• Over-art-directing yourself (oops)
• Katie’s Eminem phase 
• Why being a people-pleaser is the worst career strategy
• Your homework for this week

Want to join in?
Download the free workbook here

Timestamps:
0:00 – Hello from us!
0:47 – What if you don’t like your creative voice?
2:10 – Art direction, publishers, and breaking out of boxes
3:33 – David Bowie, freak flags and bravery
4:37 – Eminem, rebellion, and tired teenagers
6:01 – People-pleasing vs doing your own thing
8:31 – Future-proofing your illustration career
9:33 – Action step: pay attention to what you really love
10:35 – Come back next week for Day 2!

Links mentioned:
🖍 Our course: Find Your Creative Voice: Fly Your Freak Flag
📖  Download the free workbook
🎬 Moonage Daydream documentary (about Bowie)

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

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

Tania  0:00  
Hi. We are the good ship illustration, and we run online courses to help illustrators and image makers navigate a creative career. We are Tanya

Helen  0:09  
Katie and Helen. We have about 70 years experience between us, each of us working in a different area of illustration.

Katie  0:16  
Welcome to this mini series. Find your creative voice. This week, we're digging into practical, powerful steps to help you find your way of working, finding your creative voice and your confidence and fly in your freak flag, if you like what you hear. The doors are now open for our eight week online course, find your creative voice, fly your freak flag, and would love to see you in there. Just visit www dot thegoship illustration.com/freak, flag, or you can just Google freak flag course and ta da. There we are, and you can read all about it. Okay, welcome to step one, which is bask in your weirdness.

Helen  0:47  
We got a good question about this when we were at art club the other night, and somebody asked, What if the voice that's emerging isn't the one you like?

Tania  0:57  
Oh, that's a good question, isn't it? So yeah,

Helen  1:00  
if you're going to bask in your weirdness, surely you're going to love your voice. If you're going to embrace who you are completely, maybe you don't like your voice because you're not really digging into the stuff that excites you most. Do you think?

Katie  1:12  
Yeah, I think it's also that we always talk about Ira Glass, don't we? We're like, obsessed with that quote about the taste guy. So here's where your work is now, and there's where you want it to be, and bridging the gap is really hard, and in that process, you can sometimes hate your work and think the voice of developing is horrible. But we'll get into into another step that we're going to talk about like there's not really any shortcuts. Unfortunately,

Tania  1:35  
I think, and some people might not like the voice that they're working on, if they're moving out of commercial illustration or work they've done for a long while and they want a new voice. So there's kind of two areas. I think change is always quite ugly, and you've just got to bear with it and see it out and things, things will start to move, especially if you look at the things you really like as well, and start feeding yourself with good stuff. So good stuff in, good stuff out. But you know, just bear with it. Your first change will be a bit a bit weird, maybe not to your own taste, but be kind to yourself. I

Helen  2:10  
think sometimes, if you've been working as an illustrator for a while, you can end up in this situation of not liking your work anymore, because you can tend to be over art directed, or there's that thing of anticipating what the art director is going to say and editing your own work before it even gets there. I think when you've been around for a while, that's a point where you might become dissatisfied and need a change. Yeah, and

Katie  2:31  
there's that thing, I know you talked about this Helen, like publishers, the art director, like all the art directing you, and then you kind of get stuck in a box of thinking, Oh, I've got to work that way, because that's what the publishers will publishers want. It can be really scary to break out of that thing, yeah,

Helen  2:46  
and it's not always true either. Often that can just be a voice in your head somebody once said, and so then you think it's the rule forever, and it's just not true

Tania  2:55  
that, yeah, your true self might look a little bit weird because you've been maybe faking it for art direction for so long, and it'll take a while to unearth who you really are. But we were, we were talking earlier about watching the documentary on moon age Daydream on David Bowie, and that's a perfect case study in being brave and really waving that freak flag. I mean, he's the king of freak flag. But watching the documentary made me think, this is how you build your true voice. So if you haven't seen it yet, go and watch it. It's just mind blowing, and it'll make you feel braver about your own work.

Helen  3:33  
You're sort of learning to appreciate all the weird tastes that you have. The thing that makes you you like. What have you always really been into Do you appreciate that? Do you use that in your work? It's important to kind of think about who you are as a person, as well as the way

Katie  3:49  
that you draw. Yeah, and especially if the things that you're like, a bit embarrassed about, they're the best fits the juicy stuff is like, nobody can know this that I'm like, for instance, I was obsessed with Eminem as a teenager. And now, when I tell people that they're like, really, the other day, I was driving home from a job and I was listening to Eminem's, one of my favourite Eminem albums, I was like, Why was I allowed to listen to this when I was 12? It's terrible. He's talking about awful things and swearing constantly, but I just absolutely loved it, and I think it's because he was just so naughty, like it was the naughtiest thing I could possibly be listening to, because he was talking about these terrible things and swearing constantly, and I loved it. And I know there's something I don't know where that comes into my work now, but maybe that tiny sprinkling of rebellion and being like, yeah, getting away. Like, I don't know, I feel like I'm getting away with it.

Helen  4:37  
Totally get that. I always made friends with people who were much noisier, much louder than I was, and much more daring or naughty than I was, because I could just reflect like

Katie  4:47  
live in their shadow would be so brilliant vicariously. Yeah,

Tania  4:52  
hold on. But what about Katie's other persona, the folk singer, the folk Didn't you go and sing? Oh no, you sang

Katie  4:57  
blues. I was a blues finger style. Guitarist for a while.

Tania  5:04  
This is when you were literally a child. I played

Katie  5:07  
guitar until I was 14, and then so I used to go open mic nights with old men, and I would play guitar and stuff. But I stopped, because every time I sang, I would cry, and it was really embarrassing, especially when you're 14, there's a pod full of old men, they're just like, I think I felt it too much and would cry, and it was

Unknown Speaker  5:24  
incredible. I

Tania  5:25  
mean, all of you, you were really living your freak flag that age when everyone's telling you to conform, and other teenagers really put pressure on you to be normal, but you were at it even

Katie  5:36  
things like at house parties, if I got tired, I'd just go to bed. And that was always one of my like, rebellious things. I wasn't like a proper rep. I was just like, I'm tired. Like, I'm tired. This body is over for me. Whoa, you go to bed. You're crazy.

Tania  5:48  
These are all the things that make you you now,

Katie  5:51  
yeah, and it's so fun to dig into those. I think that's something inside, the inside the course, seeing people dig into their freak flag and all the things of their past is really interesting. I think

Tania  6:01  
there's nothing more boring than being a pleaser, if everyone's kind of held to task in terms especially in terms of their work. But what does the audience want? What does the client want? Let's all work to please. That's why we've got this huge morass of similar looking work, because everyone's asking, how will I get work? How do I fit into this genre? Don't fit in. Make yourself unique by doing what you really feel, not what you think should happen. But it takes a while to start listening to that voice and also valuing what you like, because you can think, surely no one's interested in the weird stuff that I like, but actually they are, and if you start drawing about that. I mean, I regret that I didn't draw about the things that I really like, like pearly kings and queens and steam organs. And why didn't I do that when I was at art school or as an illustrator? Instead, you think, what's illustration? I must learn and I must toe the line. That's the worst thing you can do.

Helen  7:00  
I think it's because we were out of school in the 90s. We've spoken about this before, about what a cynical time it was, and you couldn't show huge passion for something that was a bit weird. Could you just such a kind of everybody was not cynical? What's the word like? Yeah, you could only like something if you liked it in an ironic way. Don't you think? Yeah, I guess 90s was really laddish, and you could only like something with irony.

Tania  7:24  
That's why, when they talk about, well, when people talk they when people talk about vulnerability. Now, as a kind of someone with one foot in the boomer generation, I think I couldn't do that. I don't want to be vulnerable, because we were brought up in that cynical, self conscious era, whereas Katie, you're all about it. I watch you go going about being vulnerable and wow, I wish I could do that, but it doesn't come naturally to, I think, our generation, but that's where it's at. And all the things that I admire come from a place of vulnerability. So I have to push to make myself do that, or become

Helen  7:58  
that. I was gonna say something about you just made me think, Tanya, about art directors. Now, look for people on Instagram, and if you're too safe and you just want to be a bit like all of the other illustrators on Instagram, because you think that's how you're going to get work, you're just never going to stand out. So the people who stand out on Instagram are the ones that really know their voice and really draw about things that means something to them. So yeah, there's just no kind of long term career for somebody who's a bit like a load of other people. You really do need to be yourself, yeah? And that's

Katie  8:31  
the whole benefit of flying a feet flag, isn't it? It's the future proof thing, because you can be yourself till the cows come home, forever. It's so easy. Yeah,

Tania  8:38  
you don't have to think about it. As long as you've accessed yourself. It just keeps on giving

Katie  8:43  
makes the work easier. Yeah, definitely, especially when you compare it to, you've seen a file that you like, and you sort of try it on, it's like wearing someone else's clothes. You know, you can do it for a bit. You can

Helen  8:53  
do it for a bit if you're illustrating something that they've kind of illustrated, but the minute you need to illustrate something they've never done, then you're lost.

Tania  8:59  
That's true. Yeah, you're following a kind of formula or a manual, but it doesn't give you all the ingredients, and it kind of doesn't feel right, and you know when you when you're faking it, and it doesn't, and it seems inauthentic, and it's not ethical either. And I find that that ethical side of things has been, seems to have gone by the wayside in the past, sort of, couple of decades. It's okay to copy people. Well, it's kind of not, and it feels awful. So we had some good ideas, didn't we, how to overcome some of this and how to find your creative voice?

Katie  9:33  
Yeah. So we've got an action step for you. So if you're feeling productive, or was it teacher's pet ish, you can do that action step, and that is to just notice the stuff that you love. And if you don't even have to write it down, but if you want to write it down, you can, that's going to be really helpful. You might want to draw the things that you love. And just, I think it's about paying attention.

Helen  9:53  
Yeah, paying attention and appreciate your weirdness. Appreciate all the weird things about

Tania  9:57  
yourself, especially the things that you don't think would. Count? I mean, yeah, you can. You can talk about colour and pattern and all the things that are visual and easy, but think about the stuff you wouldn't think counts, and notice that that's

Helen  10:09  
so true. Yeah, all the stuff that's not related to visual stuff, music, clothes, you know,

Tania  10:16  
yeah, make all the things that you think aren't part of pictures. God, I wish I'd made pictures about the things I really liked. I will make pictures about sound systems, base box sound systems, especially it was, it was Notting Hill this week. What a great place that would be to draw. It would be, go to your source

Unknown Speaker  10:35  
talking about drawing. That's the next podcast. Yes,

Katie  10:38  
the next one. So come back. We're going to be releasing one of these a day. So if you're listening to this in real time, it'll come up tomorrow, but if you're revisiting, it's probably already there for you, so that's nice.

Speaker 1  10:49  
Okay, see you there. Lovely bye bye bye bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai