Finding Creative Confidence 🚢 | Summer camp sketchbook week 3

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 five 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 

Feeling a bit wobbly about your work? You’re not alone. In fact, you’re very much in the club.

In today’s episode, we’re talking about confidence – or the lack of it – and how community, creative voice, and good pals can make all the difference.

In this episode:

• The niggly voice that says you’re not good enough (blergh)
• Why working alone is tough and how community helps
• Creative confidence vs comparison doom scrolls
• Why finding your voice removes the pressure to compete
• Helen’s career pivot from baby books to bold new work 
• The bravery of letting your work be fast, weird and you
• How to connect with fellow illustrators online (without being creepy)

Want to join in with us?
Download the free workbook here

Timestamps:
0:00 – Hello and welcome to *week* 3!
1:19 – “My work isn’t good enough” – how to quiet the voice
2:19 – Community builds confidence (and sanity)
4:32 – Competition, scarcity mindset, and the Bologna Book Fair
5:30 – Other illustrators are as important as art directors
6:17 – Instagram friendships + the power of being visible
8:37 – What if your style no longer fits who you are?
10:40 – Making a big change in your work (Helen’s story)
13:47 – Why clients want you, not just polish
15:38 – Pricing confidence + permission to go fast
17:23 – You don’t need to draw everything, just the right thing
18:11 – How to connect with other illustrators online
19:19 – A Pia Bramley fangirl moment ❤️
20:00 – Our community (Facebook group, art club, and course space)
20:56 – Your action step: Make illustrator friends, not competitors

Links mentioned:
📖 Download the free Summer Camp workbook
🖥️ Sketchbooker’s Friend Facebook Group - the free group is no longer active (you get ushered into a secret students-only group when you join any of our courses), but we do still have a Facebook page! And we love hanging out on Instagram.
📚 Our course: Find Your Creative Voice – Fly Your Freak Flag
🖋 Pia Bramley on Instagram
🎨 Molly Fairhurst on Instagram

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. You it. Welcome back to number three in this mini series. Number three is finding creative confidence. And this is absolutely something we thought about it obviously. But then, when we created, find your creative voice, fly your freak flag, it immediately became super apparent that confidence was one of the main things holding people back. And since then, because everyone has lifetime access, we've improved the course, and it now has a whole section just on confidence. But yet, in this section, we're going to talk about all about confidence and finding creative confidence. And we've had two really good questions on this.

Helen  1:19  
Shall I read out the first question? Yeah, how do you stop the niggly voice? My work isn't good enough. I'm reading it wrong.

Tania  1:29  
Get in your special voice.

Helen  1:33  
How do you stop the niggly voice? My work isn't good enough. Voice from interfering with your creative voice. I've said voice three times, but we know where we are, don't we?

Katie  1:41  
All these competing voices.

Tania  1:45  
So I think we were saying earlier that isolation is one of the main problems of being an illustrator. So you have those voices. You sit in drawing alone, thinking, really, Am I any good? What was I thinking taking this up? Will I get anywhere? I mean, it's not like being in an office or with a group of people, that team mindset is really helpful. You can do anything in a team. We even did the good ship in a team, and it was one of the best things that happened, I think, for all of us to come together as part of a community, and it gave us confidence. So it's no wonder you have that niggly mindset when you're

Helen  2:19  
alone. Us three, working together for the good ship has given me more confidence in my own work. Me

Speaker 1  2:24  
too. Me too as well. I feel like you can do anything. Yeah, it's like a foundation, isn't it? Yeah,

Tania  2:29  
just because we started going for coffee every two months in a little cafe to get rid of the niggly voices in our own head and ask each other, is that normal? Or how can, how can I sort out problems within my illustration work or within my business side of things, and all this kind of helping each other eventually grew into this idea of having the good ship illustration, and now is a big old ship with loads of people on it, all supporting each other in the same way. And it's like it's after 30 years of working on my own, most of it in Hong Kong, with no illustrators around and not even illustrator friends. It's a revelation to be part of a community, and it really deals with the confidence issues.

Helen  3:11  
Think it really helps just to know that everybody else goes through the same confidence issues, because if you're just looking on Instagram, other illustrators, you just see the best bits of their career, and you assume they have absolutely no self doubt. They've never had it. They've never suffered with it. It's just you sat alone in your studio worried about everything,

Speaker 2  3:27  
Doom scrolling. You suck. Everyone else is doing so well,

Helen  3:34  
yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. We all have that. We all have that.

Tania  3:39  
And I think community gave us the confidence to find a way out of that.

Katie  3:44  
Yeah, and that's the thing. You don't have to do it alone. I think when I first started out as an illustrator, I was like, I'm self employed, and I'm doing it myself, and I don't need anybody else. And yes, it's so much harder that way, isn't it, when you haven't got people cheering

Tania  3:58  
you on and or guiding you or giving you advice. Yeah, exactly. I remember when you said to me, right, I've left college. How so? How do I get work? Oh, my brains just melted so big I don't even know where to begin. And so varied. But that other thing that you feel you we talked about competition, didn't we? You come out as an illustrator, and you think everyone is your competition. And I thought that for ages, from we're alone, we do this, and we've got to beat everyone to those jobs. But the opposite is true. We need to team up, and we need to help each other out

Helen  4:32  
scarcity mentality, isn't it, thinking that there are only limited jobs and you need to get them and don't tell anybody about what you're working on. And it's just not true. When you go to the Bologna Book Fair, where all the publishers arrive to sell their books to other countries, to sell in different languages and other countries all over the world, you see how many millions of books have been made all over the world, and there is space for you and your weirdness. You're fit somewhere. There's just such a huge amount of work. Uh, yeah, get you need to get over that scarcity mentality, I think,

Katie  5:04  
yeah. And anytime I've made friends with illustrators only, good things have happened, like the good ship, for instance, or like, one of my friends from when I lived in Newcastle, then went on to be a lecturer, and was like, Do you want to try lecturing like this little things? And it's people that you meet, and then years later, the because you've kept in touch online, you know, opportunities come around again, and I've only found illustrators to be generous and supportive.

Tania  5:30  
Yeah, I think other illustrators are as important to your career as art directors. And if you take part, kind of jump into the pool of illustrators and make friends, whether it's online or off, it massively improves things. I would say the only place where you can feel that sense of competition is where you're in a genre illustration area, where you haven't got a defined creative voice, and you look like a lot of other people that can feel really uncomfortable because you kind of are competing against lots of people with a very similar approach to illustration, which is why creative voice is so important and becoming quite singular. And the moment you do that, that sense of desperate competition against other people just disappears, because you're just being you, and no one else is like that exactly.

Helen  6:17  
Instagram is really great for making friendships online, isn't it, you know, and then you can, then you meet them in real life, and they become proper friendships. It's, it's really great for that, not just other illustrators, but if you want to get in, publishing editors are on there as well, and art directors are on there, and they're all lovely humans. And you know, those connections are really important. You could be friends with somebody for years and years, and then all of a sudden they find the right project for your work. So it's worth building those

Katie  6:43  
friendships. Yeah, you never know who's watching. Yeah,

Tania  6:45  
of course, I didn't believe any of this being the oldest one. And then Helen was saying, No, it's a really great community. This is, say, about four, four years ago, before we started good ship. And she told me how much fun she had on Instagram, and I just saw it as a doom scrolling, anxiety inducing, competitive place. But now I've found it to be true. It is, you know, you meet people and they they become your friends on Instagram. I'm sure loads of people already know that. It's just because I'm a bit older that was resistant to it, but it is a great place to take part in the illustration community.

Helen  7:19  
This is a really good time to mention. Maybe, is it about how we have so many different people from different backgrounds and age groups joining the good ship?

Katie  7:27  
Yes, sometimes people send us a message and then, like I see, it's obviously only for experienced graduates who've been to art school, and there's so much of a huge spectrum of people on the courses, from people who've just picked up paper and started drawing a couple of weeks ago right up to like published illustrators at the peak of their career. Because I think when you're an illustrator, any creative really, to keep learning all the time is so valuable, and also just to meet other illustrators and have that community thing

Tania  8:00  
going on, yeah? Because the community is in well, in the Facebook group is so strong. I mean, even on the sketchbook as friend, which is not the course as such, there's so many people joining and showing their work, talking to each other, giving advice. It's an incredibly generous and supportive environment, especially that's the free one, isn't it? That's a free one? Yeah, so you can, you can go along there to Facebook and just join sketchbook as friend. If you Google that on Facebook. If that's the right thing, Google something. Well, that's because there's another question there from someone who's established as an

Helen  8:37  
illustrator. Oh, yeah, that's right. What if I discover I'd rather work in a completely different way. How would I step off the train and change the way I work professionally when I am hired for a certain look and expectation and mind, what if working in a new way feels better but is actually less professionally viable than what I do now? It's a great question.

Tania  8:57  
So good. There's so many aspects to unpack there. Yeah. I mean, first up, this relates to the thing, yeah, talked about in the very beginning about your career,

Helen  9:05  
yeah, yeah. Well, I really like changing up materials all the time. I get quite easily bored working in one way all the time, you know. So I've often kind of changed direction in my career quite a lot. But there was one point where I'd been doing baby books for a long time, and I just felt a bit trapped by them. I felt like I painted myself into a really bright, pastel coloured corner, and I couldn't get out of it. It was driving me insane. I wanted to do something darker or sadder or more complicated. Obviously, that doesn't happen in baby books, because five spreads of happiness. Of course, nothing wrong with baby books. It's just I felt trapped by it, so I took a year out. I went back to my sketchbooks, remembering what I loved best when I was at art school, went back to that for a while, and then came back with a new, looser way of working that was more like the work I'd done at art school, more like my sketchbook work, and I had all of these. Worries that this person has written here. I had all of those. Will I ever be published again? Will anybody like what I'm doing? It was quite stressful, but I just got my head down and got on with it. And actually, as soon as I showed it to my new agent, to my not my new agent, my agent, and she, without telling me, showed it to a publisher that day, the publisher got in touch immediately. Yes, yes. We really love it. I made a book in that way of working, I did better than all the books I'd ever done before. I think people can detect when you're being your authentic self and when you're happy, it shows in the work. So my advice would be, go for it. Those are very normal worries, but go for it. What was it? So

Katie  10:40  
it's quite brave, because I know you sort of paused everything. Took a year to dig into this new way of working. What made you brave enough to do that? Where did you get the confidence from? Well,

Helen  10:50  
you know, sometimes when you just can't physically carry on doing something that way anymore, like I had to use my left hand to force my right hand to do the drawing. Now I was so I was so frustrated by here. You know, when something's just not a choice, it was like that. I would never now take a year out to do this. I made a massive drama over it. Now, having had that experience, I'd just think, Well, do you know what? I'm not going to use those acrylic paints anymore. I'm going to use this stick and dip it in ink, and I would just do it. But at the time, it felt like such a massive challenge and a mental hurdle that I took a year out to do it. I was lucky, because the baby books were paying me enough royalties that I could live without some publishing work for

Katie  11:32  
a little bit, because that's part of it as well. Isn't the financial thing. Knowing that your bills are sorted and stuff makes it easier to make creative leaps in new directions

Tania  11:41  
you could almost do but you could use a part time job superpower for that as well, if you really wanted to make that change. And I think it's harder for early career illustrators to be brave enough to change their work because you're so worried about building your career. So it's amazing that you did that in you wouldn't say it's mid career. It was quite early.

Helen  12:02  
Yeah, I think I'd probably been in publishing five, six years, five years. Yeah, probably, so it was early. Ish. I think that's why it was so stressful, because it had been so difficult to get in, and now I was in, was I about to just throw it all out? Yeah, but it was completely the opposite.

Tania  12:21  
And I think people in mid career begin to, you know, there's a lot of people talk about this, and they're feeling absolutely burnt out. They resent their own style. They don't even want to do it anymore. But I would say, how do you know that it may be less professionally viable to change until you can give it a go? Being unique may make you stand out a lot more than if you are stuck in a style that has been commercially art directed, because it's highly marketable, it will inevitably push you into an area that's highly populated and highly competitive. I mean, it takes huge bravery, but yeah, making a leap of faith could be exactly what you need creatively and for your life, so you can enjoy your work a lot more. I think you'd

Helen  13:03  
make a mistake to try to decide yourself whether your work was professionally viable.

Katie  13:08  
I was gonna say you never know till you've done it. Yeah. So yeah,

Helen  13:12  
and publishers are looking for new things, and it's so exciting to see how sophisticated I've noticed over the last sort of 15 years how much more sophisticated artwork is in picture books, and at the beginning of my career, I know that art directors would have steered me away from that, saying it's too sophisticated. We can't go there. But then other people have dared to do it, and publishers have dared to publish it, and everything moves forward. So I think it's a mistake for the to decide not to do something you're passionate about, just in case it's not viable. You don't know. You don't know till you've done it.

Tania  13:47  
I think, yeah, the whole design sensibility, particularly in the UK, has moved forward so much. I mean, the advertising industry has always been something that, you know, searches for new things, which is why someone like Molly Fairhurst, whose work is just wild, if you haven't seen her, Look her up on Instagram, and we're big fans of her work. And in fact, we got her on the we did an interview with her fourth fly your freak flag, which is specifically about confidence, because we all kept saying, How does she have the confidence to produce this work that's so out there, but that work was picked up by H and M. It was picked up by MailChimp for their rebrand. So these were seriously big jobs, and it was because she's so unusual and so outstanding, and that kind of greedy design machine, particularly in advertising, was craving something that looked immensely different, and she did. So if there's any evidence for saying, you know, make that change. Be yourself, fly your freak flag. There's a lot of people like Molly Fairhurst out there who are very successful for being really brave.

Helen  14:53  
What we were really interested to know about when we were interviewing her was how, you know, her drawings look as if they. Take a like a minute or two, and they and I think in the interview we did with her, she said that sometimes she does a pile and chooses the best one, or sometimes the first one is it. And it's the bravery of being paid by H M for an advertising campaign, however much money that is, however many 1000s, and thinking, here it I've just done it. I did it in the first three minutes. Here it is. That's so brave. It's so brilliant, because you could labour. You think, okay, 10,000 pounds. That must be. That must be 24 hours a day for three months, until you completely kill all the life in the drawing you've over thought it so much you don't put pen to paper anymore. And that's just so brave.

Katie  15:38  
That's such a huge hurdle to overcome as well, even just as an early illustrator, if you've been in retail, working eight hour shifts at minimum wage or like, you know, if you've got a working class background, I think it's so tricky, and it's such a mind bending thing to jump into pricing. You know, I'm going to do two jobs this year, so they've got to pay a good chunk, and it can be really quick, and I can I can just dash it off and it's done that's allowed. Nobody's gonna come be like you already spent five minutes on that

Tania  16:07  
in the early days. I used to share a studio with my old college mate, Marion de Charles, and she had that kind of confidence as well, where she was being employed by designers. And this was interesting, because I got to see this first hand in action. So I knew it was true. It was proof that this is how it worked. You know, if you've got a designer with a very minimalist approach, but they need maybe some spots of colour, some marks, or some textures that bring humanity to the printed page, but you don't want them going over the top. You don't want to see the equivalent of an opera in illustration. You just want a few marks, you need an illustrator who's got that design awareness to make some very restrained imagery. And maybe it's hand lettering as well. This is another area, obviously, that is really good for illustrators. So hand lettering, just writing four words for a large corporate and being paid a huge amount for it. It's proof. It happens. It works. If your signature mark is aesthetically pleasing enough, and a graphic designer craves that to include in a corporate brochure, you will be paid well for it. So having some restraint is a huge benefit. Not going over the top, not giving an illustration that's got everything in it, 20 people in a full background. They're not looking for people like that.

Helen  17:23  
Okay, so because, if they came to you because they love that quick drawing that you stuck on their website, you they don't want you to present them with a painting that took you weeks and

Katie  17:31  
weeks oil painting. Yeah, it's a confidence to be like, here's my work, yeah, if you like it, good. If you don't, fine, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So our action step for you can see, we could talk about creative confidence for years, hours and hours, but the action step for this one is connecting with fellow illustrators and kind of having creating a community for yourself. That's right, isn't

Helen  17:57  
it? Yeah, it's really valuable. We've all found that, haven't we?

Tania  18:01  
Yeah, even if it sounds a bit kind of open and broad, but it's the thing that will make you feel more confident and more connected to people. So how would you go about it? Yeah, it's gonna say

Katie  18:11  
there's a lot of the ways to connect with other illustrators. Instagram comes to mind easily. Of course, social media in general, if you find other illustrators on there, it's gonna be good. Such That's brilliant.

Helen  18:21  
Sometimes I get really excited when I find somebody new on Instagram, and I'm just so greedy to find out who they are. I send them really, really crazy messages, like, how did you get to be you've never met me them.

Katie  18:34  
That's a warning.

Helen  18:39  
Yes. Message, I love her work so much. Pia. P i A Bramley, her surname. I love her work so much. We'll we'll put it in, we'll put her name in the description on the podcast. And I bought some pieces of work from her, and I just immediately fell in love with her work, very, very characterful line drawings of often her in the bath or her looking in a mirror. Kind of weird, awkward, just beautiful, beautiful drawings. Yeah, I sent her a message like that, and she was nice enough to reply in a similar tone,

Tania  19:19  
amazing. Just pretend you're Helen and overcome your fears of approaching strangers on Instagram and just write

Unknown Speaker  19:26  
them. How did you get to be you? Tell me now,

Katie  19:30  
yes, can I have a picture and then, of course, a shortcut we've got. We're really proud of our community inside the good ship we've got on Instagram, we've got an amazing community, because we do art club every well, not every Friday. It's a special pop up thing now, but when we do art clubs, everybody on there is really lovely. And then we have the sketchbook as friend on Facebook, which is our free Facebook group. And then we also have the creme de la creme, which is the page online community bit for the course. And that's where everyone is like, cheering each other on, sharing their work in a safe space. That's where.

Helen  20:00  
It's really great that we've got such a broad section of people doing the course, because we've got really, really experienced illustrators at the top of their career in the Facebook group answering questions from people who are just at the beginning of their career and they might have pricing problems or contract problems or creative problems. And so we've got a big range of people in, yeah, it's brilliant.

Tania  20:19  
We've even got an ex military, US spy, have we? Yeah, it's not her real name. We're making up. She answers all the difficult questions, like my Instagram accounts been hacked, what can I do? And she's really clever. She knows all that stuff. So we have data scientists, illustrators,

Helen  20:39  
what are the we've got doctors, nurses, data analysts, painters, teachers, lots of teachers, new parents. Illustrators,

Tania  20:47  
illustrators, graphic designers, lots of people moving into illustration from other creative careers, and that brings a lot of interesting things with it as well. So

Katie  20:56  
that's your homework for this session. School, connect, make friends with other illustrators, and know that there's plenty of work out there. There's more than enough for everyone. So you're not in competition. It's community over competition. That's

Tania  21:08  
where you'll get your confidence.

Katie  21:09  
Yeah, okay,

Unknown Speaker  21:12  
bye, bye, bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai