PANIIIIC! (or don’t...) 😅 | Summer camp sketchbook week 5

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 

Riiiight, pack up your art supplies. It’s the final week of our pretend Good Ship Summer Camp. 

This week's topic is panic. Mmmmm. Our favourite. (How to stop doing it.) 

In this episode:

• Why “no panicking” is our golden rule here at the Good Ship Illustration
• Part-time jobs, anti-desperation energy, and creative freedom
• Cat metaphors, war artist fantasies, and business meetings 🐈‍⬛
• Why shouting at yourself doesn’t work 
• Cheesy notes vs reverse psychology for calming down
• Creativity and nervous systems (and when to just lie on the floor)
• Finding your pace, your people, and your process

Want to join in?
Download the free Summer Camp workbook here

Timestamps:
0:00 – Welcome to week 5: no panicking allowed
1:18 – You can’t force creative growth (sorry)
3:01 – Part-time jobs = creative freedom
4:08 – Don’t fill your portfolio with jobs you don’t want more of
5:05 – Recap of all 5 creative steps
5:44 – Why being kind to yourself actually works
6:06 – Walks, breaks, and giving your brain a breather
7:13 – Live deadlines vs long deadlines
8:03 – Katie's war artist career plan (sort of)
8:31 – Action step: write a cheesy note or one to rebel against
9:18 – Course doors closing soon – but no pressure
9:41 – Byeeeee from Summer Camp!

Links mentioned:
📖 Download the free Summer Camp workbook
📚 Find Your Creative Voice – Fly Your Freak Flag course
🎧 Watch an Art Club on Instagram
📺 Watch Art Clubs on YouTube

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. Welcome back to the final installation of our mini series. Find your creative voice today is number five, and the key ingredient, which is no panicking allowed. And that sums up so much of what we're all about with the good ship illustration, no panicking ever, no

Helen  1:03  
fancy materials, no panicking. Be kind to yourself whilst doing have a word for yourself. That's

Katie  1:10  
the thing you know. When you're working on something and you're just overdoing it, you're spending ages on it, sometimes you just need to have a word for yourself

Tania  1:18  
and get out of your own way. Yeah, exactly. We say no panicking, because you see a lot of people now saying, right, I'm going to give up my day job, take a course and be an illustrator. And you kind of think, wow, that's not really how it works. Compression, yeah, pressure's too much, yeah. And I think most of us, when we left college, did other jobs. You know this, there's no shortcuts on this. It's not going to be immediate. You don't suddenly get qualified to be an illustrator. Developing your work and finding your creative voice is quite a gentle process, and if you put the squeeze on it, like holding the bar of soap too tight, sorry, Katie, I pinched it, you're not going to get anywhere. So you've got to start feeding yourself with creativity and inspiration and all those things take time, and it's not really a panicking situation, is it? And if you can get a part time job to help support you while you do that, you're giving yourself a realistic amount of time to mature and to develop your own voice. I mean, when, when I left college, most people taught at college, I left with an MA, so that qualified you to teach on a BA, and it was regarded as perfectly normal to spend maybe the next decade doing part time teaching at college, while that supported your illustration practice, until you could bring in a full time salary. And I think you know now more than ever, you perhaps need that kind of thing. You could get lucky and be pulling in a full time salary from the get go, but that's not really very usual, is it? And it's no source of shame to be working on in a part time job while you're working on your work, and it takes the pressure off you so you don't panic.

Katie  3:01  
Yeah, and I kept my part time job for as long as I possibly physically could. I was terrified to give it up, because I knew it was like the ultimate anti panic thing, because I knew if I had my part time job, my bills are paid, I didn't have to worry about anything else. And any money I made from illustration was a bonus. And also meant, when people got in touch and the budget was crazy low, or they were trying to haggle. I was just like, You know what? No, I'm fine. I don't need that. And I think that that secret thread of power really helped in those early days, because I was sort of, I could stand my ground and be like, I don't need that work. I'm not desperate. It's, it's like the opposite of panic is not being, no way. Yeah, don't be the panic and the desperation thing. If you can move away from that. And let me say, when you're trying to talk to a cat knowing you're desperate for the cat to love you,

Helen  3:49  
I am massively allergic to cats, and so allergic to them that I don't even like looking at a cat now. So cats love me, see, because I don't want anything from them, they love me. They jump on my knee. I sit down. It's a nightmare. See

Katie  4:02  
cats in this in this metaphor, are illustration jobs, and you are an illustrator who is not panicking

Tania  4:08  
exactly because also, if you spend all that time doing jobs that you don't want for money, that aren't appropriate to you, and are going to result in really ghastly work that you don't want to put in your portfolio, you're wasting time getting 50% of your portfolio just for cash, but you're going to bin it, you're not going to show it, you don't want to put it on your social media. It's wasting your time and creating bad work, and you might get into that kind of habit and that mindset. So you'd be better off working for something that's nothing to do with illustration in the initial phase, just to bring in money that's unrelated to and doesn't contaminate your creative voice.

Katie  4:46  
Yeah? And I think everything we've spoken about so far in this mini series kind of feeds into not panicking, doesn't it? I can't remember all that.

Helen  4:53  
Let me. Let me just revisit the

Katie  4:55  
notes. Yeah, basking in your weirdness, yeah. Drawing. Going and drawing some more, finding creative confidence, and then playing and

Tania  5:05  
having community, all of those things should hopefully make you feel a bit more relaxed about your own progress and supported by community.

Helen  5:16  
Be kind to yourself. It's so important not to beat yourself up when you're not working as quickly, or things are not developing as quickly as you want to, because I remember at school if you had a really bossy teacher who was mean, I never learned anything. If I had one of those gorgeous teachers who just do their job so well, you suddenly become brilliant at that subject because you feel relaxed and you can soak it all up. So yeah, don't be mean to yourself.

Katie  5:44  
Yeah, I think the more you can calm your nervous system down, the more your creativity can come out. And you can create work that you feel really good about, and in turn, get work that you love doing, and you can be confident enough to charge what you're worth and things, and that just kind of blossoms into this lovely illustration career. But yeah, shouting at yourself is not a fun way to get there.

Helen  6:06  
Whenever I get stuck on something, if I'm really stuck on an illustration knot, you know, I want to draw a particular scene, but no matter how I draw it, it's just not working. I just grab Peggy's lead and go for a big, long walk on the beach and stop thinking about it for a while, but by the time I get back often, I've got a new like, you know, things have changed in my brain, relaxed. Things solve

Katie  6:27  
themselves, magic. Yeah, often have to remind myself, like, I'm an illustrator and nobody's gonna die. Especially when I'm working with big corporate clients, they can be really like, we need this by end of day, like, can you get these like, revisions to us? And it gets really like, Oh my goodness. But then, you know, I have a word of myself. It's not It's important because it's my career, but it's not that important, and I can go for a walk or have a break or just lie down and stare at the ceiling for a while.

Tania  6:53  
Actually, there's a lot of kind of panic built into your not panic, but you need a defence against it. But the way you work is way more intense than say Helen, where you've got booked deadlines of six months, yeah, sometimes, and you're working live, and you've got deadlines of, well, it's a three hour live. Is that average

Katie  7:13  
an hour sometimes 20 minutes? Yeah, I think that's so I struggled so much with deadlines, and I still do. That's kind of why I work the way I do now. But it feels fun to me. So it's like, it's the play thing. If I'm like, I've got one hour and these people are gonna say really important things, and I'm gonna make it look nice, it's fun.

Tania  7:32  
It's a no choice situation, in a way. It's great because the previous podcast, we talked about people, not someone sent in a question, saying that they find it really hard to get started on a piece of work. We were saying the only way you know, if you're an actor, you'd just be shut on stage and get on with it, or someone starts shooting, and that's it. It's the same as yours, really, isn't it? There's no nerves. You just start drawing because, yeah, they start shooting.

Katie  7:57  
And I wanted to be a war artist,

Helen  8:01  
events, war artist, without the danger of

Katie  8:03  
war exactly. I didn't want to actually go into trenches and stuff. I was like, what's a more lower risk of death? Business Meeting, yeah, much less cool, though. We can see the action step for this one is, so there's two options depending on your personality. One step, one option, one sorry, is to write yourself a reassuring note that's going to help you not panic. But

Helen  8:31  
you know, Katie, I would rebel against I can't write like messages to myself about being kind and things, because I just want to rip

Katie  8:38  
them down. Yeah, exactly. If writing something like this, plenty of times, loads of work yourself. No, I will not be kind. If you're like Helen and you've been sick in your mouth, you can write a big note that just says panic, and then you'll rebel against that would definitely work. So pick your own adventure. Write a cheesy note. Write a one to rebel against. It's totally up to you. But yeah, if you've enjoyed this mini series, we would love to see you inside the Find your creative voice, fly your feet, flood course, which has lifetime access, so there's no panicking, no panicking allowed at all. The doors close tonight, so there

Helen  9:18  
is some amount of panicking. That's

Katie  9:22  
the only part. Only panicking. But you know, the doors will open again. So even then, if you don't join, it's totally fine. We'll still be friends. We still do these. We do the podcast. We've got art club, so you're welcome wherever you are, at your stage in your illustration career journey. Yeah, yeah. Crown the board. This has been fun,

Helen  9:41  
bye, bye, bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai