The Good Ship Illustration

Picture Book, Freak Flag, or Business… which one is calling yoooou?

• The Good Ship Illustration • Season 11 • Episode 6

Share episode

Which course should I do? 🎨📚

We get asked this aaall the time: “Do I start with the Picture Book Course, Fly Your Freak Flag, or the Business Course?”

There is no wrong order.

Right now the Business Course isn’t open, but…
 ✨ The Illustration Business Club (our shiny new name for it) opens for enrolment on the 19th of September!

We almost dropped the word “business” because we thought it might put illustrators off. When we asked our students though, the answer was a big NO. That word was exactly what motivated them to jump in and learn the nuts and bolts of building a creative career they love (and get paid for).

Hooray! 🎉

In this episode, we chat through how to know which course might be the best place for YOU to start, and how to avoid getting stuck in analysis-mode worrying about making the wrong choice.

Here’s what we cover:

  • How to know if you have found your creative voice yet
  • Consistency = a magic ingredient for picture book characters
  • When does it make sense to start with Fly Your Freak Flag?
  • ...or dive straight into the Picture Book Course
  • Our creative car vs business car analogy 🚗 🤓
  • Why the Business Course tends to work best after Find Your Creative Voice, Fly Your Freak Flag
  • Freebies you can try if you're just not sure (Childhood Illustrated, the Colour Workshop, our Character Workshop and more)
  • The veeeery high-tech decision tree that makes the which-course-should-I-do choice for you 😆

Timestamps
00:00 – The big question: Which course first?
01:00 – Do you know your creative voice?
02:15 – Why consistency matters in picture books
03:00 – Picture Book vs Freak Flag (gut instinct wins)
04:30 – The Business Course (and why not to mix it in too soon)
05:30 – Creative car vs business car analogy
07:00 – What to do if you are not ready yet (hello freebies)
08:30 – The one-hour live illustration masterclass
09:00 – Our decision tree

Links and goodies mentioned

Byeeee for now!

x 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 🎙

which course to choose
===

​[00:00:00] 

Hello, welcome. This is a question we get quite a lot of people get really excited about the courses, but don't know which one to do first.

And this morning we tried to make like a diagram of like, do you know what your creative voice is? Have you found your style? If so, you should do this 'cause, but basically the advice for Dish Out is what is the advice of Dish? The advice for Dish out is, if you really wanna make a picture book, but you don't know your visual language yet, you're probably best doing the Find Your Creative Voice [00:01:00] course first.

But if you wanna make a picture book and you do kind of know your own voice so you can, you know what? Your voice is enough that whatever you want to draw, you're kind of comfortable and you find your way to do it. Is that a good way of explaining? Knowing your visual voice already. Yeah. When do you know your visual voice?

When you drawing loads. Your work always looks like you, you feel comfortable with it. You probably know your visual voice already, and then picture books, you're just ready to go. 'cause you need to be consistent, don't you? Yeah. You need to be consistent. In your voice or style, we always try not to say style, but there's no way of avoiding it sometimes.

So if you're gonna look at a character that you can recreate across a a picture book, you need to know how to do that consistently so that they stay the same basically, and you don't lose control of your character. So yeah, find your creative voice is a good one to do first. But. [00:02:00] If you are unsure about doing that, you can try us out on some freebies.

Yeah. Like childhood illustrated. Yeah. And, and, and sometimes we tell people, yeah, freak flag's a good choice for you. Like, do they find your creative voice? Fly your freak flag course. Brilliant. And you can see them going, oh, I wanted you to tell me I could do the picture because, and if that's your reaction.

The best bit is probably just do the Picture Book course, because we have a lot of people. There's no right or wrong order. Is there? A lot of people do the Picture book course get halfway through and they're like, I should have done the Freak flag course. Yeah. But then you're really motivated and excited and I think listening to your gut, listening to what you're really excited about, if you sleep on it and in the morning you're still really excited, it's a good sign that it's the right choice.

And I just had a chat with somebody this week who was very excited about Picture Book course, so signed up for it. Exactly the scenario. She got into the Picture book course and realized I should have done Freak Flag first. So she signed up for that and because she had lifetime access, she's just dipping in and out of both at the same time [00:03:00] now, and she's very happy.

So we're telling you that there's a correct order, but there's not really, it's what? Whatever is exciting you most of the time, isn't it? Yeah. And also. There are some people who might not want to do picture books. They want to be an illustrator of a different kind. So they just do find your creative voice and stay in there and hone it.

And hone it. And lots of people do it more than once. There's lots of people when we start the course or restart the course and launch it and invite all the new members on, lots of people appear saying. I'm doing it for, for the fourth time. It's so nice to jump back in. So I guess they do it and it intensifies your sense of consistency and your creative voice.

So you might just stay there and then go on to editorial illustration or live illustration or illustration for design. But for those who know they want to do picture books. If you haven't done lots of creative voice work, first, you might find yourself all at sea and maintaining consistency. something else we see quite a lot is people do the freak flag course, find your creative voice, [00:04:00] and they get halfway and they're like tell me how to make money from this.

Now I need to make money from this. And that is why we made the business course. And we haven't really talked about the business course. 'cause I feel like people know when they want it and they're ready to kinda monetize things or go in that direction. But we do see people have a better time when they've done the freak flag course and then do the business course.

Don't mix 'em up, because that's what we were talking about in the beginning was if you are doing that kind of vulnerable, creative work of finding your own voice, don't think about the audience and the business and the client before that because you're gonna, it will compromise your work and you won't be able to take risks and you won't push yourself creatively as much because you'll look, you'll be looking at a preexisting market.

So we separated them. Yeah. We, we always think of it as being in your business car for a little while and then you get out and you're in your creative car. I think for all of us in our careers, there's times where we are really in a creative space and you're pushing your work forward and you're having [00:05:00] nice adventures with your actual artwork, hiding in your studio, not looking on your website or anything.

And then there's times where you feel like, okay, I've got a folio together. I really like it. Now I want to show the world. And we get out of our creative car and into our business car, start working on our website, update our folios, work on our SEO, if that's what you wanna do. So, yeah, I think you know when you're ready for the business bit.

And we have seen a few people who haven't really got their folio together, jump into the business course and then realize, hang on a minute. I can't tell the world about something that is not there yet. It's not ready. It's not outta the oven. I need to go back, get in my creative car again.

The people who often do that are people who might be jumping from other careers and thinking, well, what is the illustration business like? From the outside, I can't see how it works or how people make money. So even though they're not visually ready, they might be brave enough to say, I'm gonna take the course and find out about the industry and see how I could work, make it work for me [00:06:00] before I invest.

In drawing and creating a visual voice for myself. That's what I've always thought for the people who say, yeah, I haven't got a portfolio as such, and we would think, are you mad? Why are you on this course if you haven't got a portfolio? And then I reason that maybe they're just doing a lot of research trying to find out, so we're back to, there's no actual right order.

Again, it all depends what people's plan is and the way they're seeing their strategy or their kind of five year plan. If you're not ready for, if you're not ready for any of it yet, the website is absolutely packed with freebies. We've got freebies that are a taster of each course as well.

So if you're into picture books, we've got thumbnail sketches and the Childhood Illustrated task, which is diving into your own childhood so you can revisit how it felt to be in a child. And it's like a. Your memory is like a treasure trove of amazing, um, possible starts of story ideas. We've got character workshop. I've got a [00:07:00] color workshop. If you're not sure about how color works for you, you could just take that and you need an hour. And people love it, don't they? If you just wanna play and play with color, and don't worry about drawing, do the color workshop for an hour.

We've also got an open day on this. You can see like what is it like to study with us and all that, but. I think a lot of people are worried about wasting. They're worried about they're gonna waste their time, they're gonna waste their money, they're gonna make the wrong choice. And we basically, this video is like, there's no wrong option.

Whatever feels most exciting Yeah. Is the right choice. And it might be that it's just freebies and they'll still be your friend. We don't care really, just among the freebies over and over again. I mean, how many have we got up there now?

I can't say how many, but it scrolls down and down and down the page. We haven't done a business one yet, but we will. And there's a live illustration one. Yeah, there's a masterclass. So if you, I haven't talked about live illustration 'cause I feel like if you wanna do it, you would just do the course.

But there's a a one hour live illustration masterclass where I basically give you [00:08:00] a high speed, high adrenaline crash course on how to do it. Uh, it's good fun, some very biased. And also there's art club. Yeah. On, uh, Instagram, you can scroll down when you can see Mad Grinning faces and the screen cut in half.

That's an art club video on Instagram. So if you'd like to just draw along with us and do some freestyle painting and drawing, join Art Club, that's another freebie. There's lots of stuff you can do without actually buying a course. Oh wait, we made a, a thing.

This was our decision tree. It is very high tech. Which course should I do? Do you want to do the picture book course? Yes. I forgot to say if the answer is yes, do the picture book course, and if it's not, do the freak flag course. The end. [00:09:00]