The Good Ship Illustration

How to stop your illustration style looking generic & blah

• The Good Ship Illustration • Season 12 • Episode 9

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 21:44

Y'know when you feel like your work is neeearly there… but it's missing a lil something-something? This podcast episode is all about that. Overcoming that.

How the heck do you put more humanness into your work?

🧠 What we talk about in this one

  • “Accomplished” isn’t the same as “alive”
  • How generic styles can creep in without us noticing
  • The danger of trying to look like “a picture book illustrator”
  • Why you need to make work that freaks you out a tiny bit 🤪
  • The power of real memories and emotions
  • Ideas that stick: why some stories stay with us
  • How character, tension, and contradiction shape good storytelling
  • Letting your real obsessions lead the way 🐌
  • Yessss, research in bookshops is absolutely definitely part of the job

🕰️ Timestamps

00:00 – Aaccomplished work with no heart
01:00 – “Picture book style” stereotypes and why they’re dangerous
02:00 – Generic vs personal: how to tell the difference
03:00 – Making work that stops an art director mid-scroll
04:00 – Emotion in drawings (and penguins)
05:00 – True stories - using your real life
06:00 – The Nissen Hut
07:30 – Sticky ideas
09:00 – Plots built on tiny universal moments
10:00 – A “Smile in the Mind”
11:00 – Writing craft: thesis / antithesis / synthesis
13:00 – Character dynamics and why Bernard is… Bernard 🦆
14:00 – Films to study (hello, Groundhog Day)
15:00 – How Helen learned to write
16:00 – Why sitting in a bookshop absolutely counts as work
17:00 – Picture books now vs the 90s
18:00 – Jill Calder, Libby VanderPloeg, and holding onto your voice
20:00 – Don’t perform
21:00 – Honesty wins

🔗 Stuff & People Wot We Mentioned

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 🎙

Nov 3 - Finding your unique voice
===

[00:00:00] Hello. Hello. So we thought we would chat today about finding your uni. Unique voice. And the thing that sparked this conversation and made us excited to talk about this is that we've seen a couple of pieces of work today that we've all had a look at that is accomplished. And they, these illustrators think maybe they're ready and wondering why they're not being published, although work isn't being picked up.

And we've all looked at it and think actually, while the work is kind of ready, as in it looks presentable [00:01:00] and accomplished to some extent, it doesn't have any of their humanness in it, like nothing of their personality. They're not telling me something from their own, ~um, in inside, inside their head looking out ~point of view.

It's not personal enough. You know what I mean? That's the work that is really exciting to look at, isn't it? ~Mm. ~Because you can feel it that, that some of their thing is in there. ~Yeah. ~And they can't help but make that kind of ~work. Some of the ~work. So I'm thinking of somebody in particular we were looking at today and their work is accomplished, and then on some level you think yes, they, they could illustrate a book.

~Hang on. My mind has gone off. What was it? Um, uh, yeah, I've lost my track. Who was the bunny? Like, they're accomplished and ready, but, um, the idea keeps coming in my head and then vanish it, come back, come back, come back. Where's my brain? Where have my brains gone? Um, uh, so we often think about if, if you Oh, I know what it was, it's come back.~

~It's come back. It's come back. ~So if you, if you for example, want to be a picture bookmaker, I think sometimes if you haven't read a lot of books, I'll look what's available now and gone in a bookshop and really looked through all the books that are available. You might just have an image in your head of what a picture book illustrator would be.

Hmm. What an illustration should be. Perhaps watercolor with a line and big round eyes or, I dunno, you might just have this kind of stereotype in [00:02:00] your head. And I think if you work towards that, you're going down quite an impersonal, boring route that doesn't show anything about who you are. That's what I was trying to say.

Yes. It's like people's idea of what it should look like. Yeah. Rather than who you are and what you would like to see. And I think that using that word stereotype, although it can sound a bit brutal if the work is of a stereotype Yeah. You need to move sideways pretty quickly. ~Mm-hmm. ~Because ~it, ~it's an industry that we're working in.

So we see examples everywhere that the industry has validated as publishable. That's a level you get to, and here is a style people are working in that is. For example, children's picture book illustration, or that is editorial illustration. And if you start making something, ~especially in the early days of your career, ~that looks like a thing you have seen, which is your subconscious saying now that's what I call illustration.

And you suddenly make some, you get an initial buzz of, [00:03:00] Hey, I can do it. I I'm doing it. Look, I'm doing it. I'm being an illustrator. But then you have to go push out a lot further and get that behind you into something that you haven't seen before, because it's the only way people will look again at it and not think, oh yeah, I've seen all that stuff, wherever that, that generalized, generic illustration.

The only way an art director is gonna stop whizzing through an Instagram scroll is to see something where they're like, what the hell is that? ~Mm. ~You actually need to make something that slightly freaks you out to know that you have moved beyond the boundaries of something that is too generic, too stereotyped.

And I know with picture books, Helen, you always say it's about the like relationship between the characters. Mm-hmm. ~It's like the emotional thing as well, isn't it? ~If you see an image and you can really feel like, oh, that girl really does love that little floppy penguin. Like that's the sort of thing that stops you from maybe whizzing by something on Instagram be like, boring, boring, boring.

She'd be like, oh actually what is that? Yeah. I think it's sort of [00:04:00] recognizing an emotion or, or something in the drawing that you can tell comes from inside that illustrator. So we did a workshop a while ago, didn't we, about ~um, ~how to finish your Picture book idea without the idea just disappearing and you just don't finish it.

'cause a lot of people start an idea, but then they get stuck and they don't know where to go. And I think one of the ways that you can stay focused on your picture book idea is if it comes from things that have either. Happened to you or you've seen happen to kids ~or, ~or things that just catch your imagination Personally, like when we were writing Salty Dog, ~um, ~Katie and I have been writing some stories together and when we get together at my kitchen table and we've got not literally a blank sheet of paper, but we've got our iPad with a blank screen on it.

We chat about what your little girl did this morning or what mine did when she was little, or things we remember from our [00:05:00] childhood or holidays we've been on. And all of that kind of feeds the atmosphere of the story and, and like make something true to build it on. ~Um, ~it makes it real as well, doesn't it?

Yeah, because it's anchored in something quirky. And real that happened because truth is stranger than fiction. You can hang onto it. You can come up with the weirdest stories in the world, but if they don't resonate and have a feeling that this strange stuff really went on, ~mm, ~it doesn't work. But you know when kids do such odd ball and unusual things and things happen in your life, it's easier to work about 'em because you believe them.

You know they were true. If it was part of your imagination, you start, you can start questioning it and saying, oh, that's actually quite a stupid idea. I don't believe in it anymore because it wasn't real to begin with. I think people recognize that authenticity, don't they? That you are very excited by it and it comes from you.

Do you remember how when we were writing Salty Dog, one of the ideas that I really wanted to do right from the start, but it hasn't made it, 'cause often [00:06:00] you have an idea that starts the whole thing rolling, but actually maybe it doesn't even make it to the book in the end was that my grandparents after the war squatted in a Nissan Hook 'cause there was a shortage of houses after the Second World War.

So they squatted in a Nissan Hut and in this Nissan Hut. They had a little fireplace. They built a fireplace. And, ~um, ~my granddad didn't like his mother-in-law. So, ~um, ~one day when the mother-in-law came to visit, he put a ladder up on the outside of the Nissan Hut. He wrapped up a big stone or a brick or something in a jumper and dropped it down the chimney so that ash would just go everywhere and all of the grandmother, ~uh, ~the mother-in-law and she'd be really angry.

It was so hard to get that into a story. It was impossible to get it in. But it helped us like set the scene. 'cause we decided, 'cause near where we live here, there are some upturned boats that people used to use as fishing sheds, which reminds me of the Nissan Huts and all the stories from my grandparents about having all these children that they had loads of children in a [00:07:00] Nissan Hut and they used drawers as cradles for the babies and all of this stuff.

~Um, and it was, ~it's like really integral to the story, even though in the story you never literally see that starting somewhere real really helps the story feel real in your own head. Yeah. It's got that credibility, isn't it? ~Mm. ~The believability, I mean, a really good book actually, it's reminded me, it's called Ideas that Stick.

Mm-hmm. ~And it's maybe got the similar kind of things in it. 'cause it has to be credible and it has to have. A big idea. So they, ~so the example they give is that urban myth about, you know, a man goes for a drink and then, ~um, ~like this beautiful woman gives him a drink, and then he wakes up in a bath of ice and the phone rings and they say, phone nine one one.

~Um, ~and it turns out he's had a kidney harvested and none of it's true at all, but there's bits of it that were believable enough that it became like an urban myth and spread like wildfire. And everybody thought people were harvesting kidneys and stuff, but it was just like the tiny building blocks of what made people all believe that.

Mm. What the other one would be something about a woman would [00:08:00] drive off in her car and then they, they realized either some kind of monster. Or somebody on the backseat, there's the backseat. Oh yeah. Standing on the, on the bonnet of the car. ~I partially remembered, but those were pre-internet. That did spread around a lot.~

People would tell each other these stories or like the thing about have people hiding razor blades in children's sweeties at Halloween. Mm-hmm. And then everyone was like, check all your children's sweeties. So the, it's like everybody has Halloween sweets and they can imagine somebody maybe doing that.

Obviously it's not true, but it's spread. I wonder if there's some, I dunno if it's completely random, but is there's something in that that's in making work that is like people, it stops people in their tracks. Yeah. A story like that. Yeah. And I think if you felt something and it means something to you that.

Even though it's personal to you, everybody else has had that feeling about that thing. Yeah. And I think other people can recognize it if it's real. If it could be, it could either be a really exciting thing or a funny thing or a thing where you're like, oh, how, yeah. That it's that recognition isn't it, of a small moment that happens [00:09:00] in your life regularly and then you realize you're not alone.

~Mm-hmm. ~That everyone else feels this too. Yeah. If you can embed that in a story mm-hmm. There's a, there's a great book called A Smile in the Mind. ~Somewhere in this room, I can't remember. ~It was written by the partners design team, and they worked out a system that to get ideas to stick, particularly in branding, which was their core business, was that to come up with the perfect logo, you suggest the first half of the idea visually.

And people read the visual and they're like, oh, it's a, and ~their, ~their understanding is the second and the completing part of the idea. And when they feel they have, when the viewer has solved the pu the puzzle of looking at a, an image and understanding what this unusual image means, they then feel part of it.

Like, oh, I completed it. And it gives you a smile in the mind. Yeah. And if you have a smile in the mind related to a brand, you then emotionally connect with the brand because it's invited you to solve a puzzle [00:10:00] visually as part of their brand. Mm-hmm. And ~it's, ~it's such a brilliant book. I would use it all the time teaching.

Design thinking because it really explains that whole fluffy area of like what is design thinking? So you don't present someone with the whole story. You just give them the first part of the clue. They do the second bit in their head and then everyone's happy it solved it. Yeah. And it makes you have ~the, ~that essential emotional connection with a corporation, which is what designers have to do.

So if anyone hasn't got that book ~mm-hmm. ~It could be the missing bit. You could go with children's picture books in some way. ~Mm-hmm. ~Just making something stick. Like even paintings, when you see a painting, you're like, oh, there's something about that. That's really interesting when then you hear the painter talking about it and they're talking about their grief or whatever.

And it's like you could, even though you didn't know the thing before you saw the painting, you saw the painting and knew there was something in there. ~Mm-hmm. ~And then when they talk about it, you're like, oh, that's why that was so like grabbed my eyeballs. ~Yeah. ~Oh, I know we're talking about illustration and not writing, but we've kind of veered [00:11:00] into writing a bit.

I think still they're quite similar. Yeah. ~Um, ~I just did one of Emily Howeth booth's, ~um, ~writing workshops. ~Um, and it was a, I think it was a, I can't remember if it, it was a weekend, it was Saturday or Sunday, I can't remember. It was about five hours ~and it was mind blowingly brilliant. And she used films as examples.

So you know how in films as, ~um, ~she described it as like a thesis. They set out the thesis. This character was born here and sees the world in this way, and then there'll be an antithesis. So another character comes along who sees the world absolutely nothing. Like they see the world and so perhaps they hate each other.

But then some big crisis, some big thing happens, and then you have synthesis where the original character has now got their thesis and their anti antithesis mixed up and makes synthesis, and that is your ending. I love how she explained that. It made me think of psychotherapy like we're all born into a family who teaches.

The world is a certain way. Some crisis or other happens where you realize, hang on, the world [00:12:00] isn't the way I've been told and this is not working for me. You learn the antithesis and then you're a fully round person when you can hold both of those ideas and be comfortable. You've got your synthesis at the end.

Isn't that magic? I was so excited how she described it. I was like, ah. I, I, you know, I often think of stories as something, there's a character thinks away, something happens and they change and then you've got an end. But the way she described it was just like, wow. It set all the sparks in my brain. And that happens in real life, doesn't it?

Like you go out into the world ~Yeah. ~And then the rug's pulled from under you and you're like, wait a minute. ~Yeah, yeah, yeah. ~They said, if I got a degree in illustration, I would be instantly successful without even promoting myself. ~Yeah. ~Then you have to figure out the other things. ~Yeah. ~But you think of Salty Dog, that's, you've, you've got three characters, so it's slightly complicates it.

You've got salty and, ~um, ~Bernard. What's his, Bernard? Bernard, I was gonna say Gerard. He could also be [00:13:00] called Gerard. They're very similar creatures, aren't they? Bernard and Gerard will probably have the same life outlook when you put them together, or whether it's Kitty and Bernard. ~Mm-hmm. They, ~they are the thesis and they've each got a very different character.

So when they're all mixed together, especially Bernard, who has a very straight line, narrow way of seeing the world when he comes across Flighty Kitty based on Tanya by the way. I love that. I might, but then they have those two different viewpoints. Is salty actually. They're synthesis, maybe? Yes. Kind of is.

Yeah. He's kind of calm mediator. He's balanced. Like he's always a, he's always steady. He's unflappable. Yeah, he is. I think you put him in as a third character. He balances them out. Yeah, he does. And it's as simple as that. You could just write a story from that starting point. Or maybe that's what people do without realizing.

And it's always the same as it in those films. Like where you get two cops eating, ~um, ~donuts in the car, in New York, one's new, he's the rookie and one's [00:14:00] the old hand. They hate each other from the word go. ~Um, and then, you know you're gonna have a great film. Yeah. That's like tension. Yeah. When Harry met Sally, what were the, hang on.~

Emily gave us two really good films that showed it very, very well. One was Groundhog Day. Oh yeah. So that evening I immediately went and watched that film again and looked out for where the things happened, where the crisis was, where the change in the character happened. Brilliant. What was the other film?

Can't remember. Maybe I'd be giving away too much of Emily's workshop. She's running it again in January actually. ~That's awesome. I'm gonna do it again. It's brilliant. You should do it. You should do it. It was really good. ~How did you learn to write in the beginning though? ~Um, ~just made it up. And you had that confidence.

Here's a story I've written. Well, the thing is that, you know, I'm really impatient and so I sent out samples to publishers and people would say, we really like it when we have a story. We'll get in touch. Yeah. And I thought they meant like a couple of weeks and I think they meant years. ~And I, it was within a couple of weeks.~

I was so impatient. I thought, oh, it can't be that hard. I'll have a go. But I also worked in a bookshop part-time, so I spent many an evening, 'cause the [00:15:00] bookshop was open till 10 o'clock at night and it was really quiet In the evening. I would spend hours and hours. Taking all the children's books off the shelves and reading them.

~Um, that's, so I think that gave me a, ~I worked out what I liked and what I didn't like, ~and that's, ~and then I got impatient with publishers who didn't immediately find me a text. Can you imagine? And I thought, well, I'll just have a go at writing something. And then I was just learning on the job.

~Obviously that's what everybody does, isn't it? ~It'd be funny if the good ship existed back then and you wrote in, you were like, I've been in touch with a publisher. It's been two weeks and they still haven't sent me in text. What is this normal? Do not stand for it. That's what I said. Don't stand for it.

Write your own story. Write yourself a story. Yeah. That's like the dream background for a picture book maker is to have their part-time job in a bookshop that's not so busy that you can't use half your paid hours to be leafing through the entire collection. 'cause lots of people who start picture book careers don't necessarily realize that spending hours in a [00:16:00] bookshop or a library is work.

Oh, it's really useful and essential work. Yeah, because if your view of what is picture book illustration is so narrow. You are gonna do some work and people are like that old stuff. No, we're beyond that now. You know, you, you need to have that full immersion in everything that's possible in picture books to date right now.

So really, if you're looking for a second job, if get a job in a book shop that stays open till 10 o'clock at night, which is why our first advice at the beginning of this podcast, we were thinking about these couple of people that we've been looking at their work this morning. ~Um, ~if they've not gone and done that research in bookshops and ~library and see ~libraries and seeing the huge variation in picture books right now, if they're just thinking back to their childhood and their favorite book, which in the eighties or nineties, ~um, ~the UK Publishing world, I feel like it was a much safer place back then.

And it was a lot of watercolor in line. It was all watercolor like Shirley Hughes. Yeah. A lot of that wasn't there. [00:17:00] And ~um, ~so you're maybe gonna do an impression of stuff you remember rather than seeing. What's exciting in bookshops now? 'cause picture books in bookshops now are incredible, even compared to the nineties when I started out.

Picture books are way more sophisticated and interesting. I'm not, I'm talking very generally. There were lots of amazing books then, but you know what I mean. But ~the, ~the main core of it was quite a traditional Yeah. Small parameters to the creativity. ~I'm thinking. I, ~I interviewed, ~uh, ~Jill Calder last week.

And what came outta that. I mean, we have Jill on our course. I think lots of people who knows Will, will know that Jill's a features in two of our courses with her work and her process. But what's amazing about her, when I first knew her work, it was a, her lettering was incredible and it appeared on a lot of really interesting brands like Whis whiskey companies and cafes and so forth, food products.

So she could do packaging, really interesting, sophisticated packaging, but she could do the illustrations that worked with the lettering as well. And she [00:18:00] worked a lot in editorial. She worked in illustration with design companies, so that could be like corporate brochures or pack or more packaging or branding.

She basically had a dream set of clients ~and, ~and editorial work as well. But now she's doing lots of children's picture book work. But her voice is the same throughout. I don't mean same in that she hasn't bothered to change or develop it. Her voice is uniquely her and she's used it in all these different areas for different ~age, uh ~audiences, different consumer audiences.

But because she's so uniquely and strongly herself, she's made it fit in all those different places. It's quite amazing. I can't think of any illustrators who can do that kind of work with a clear voice that you're like, well, if you've commissioned me for this, you must like the work that I did for fashion magazines or for a bank or for a whiskey company and now use, I will use my same voice in children's picture books and it actually works.

Yeah, that's quite an achievement, [00:19:00] isn't it? ~Yeah, it's really brave, isn't it? Like she just knows who she is and she's herself, whatever the project is, and it's like, it's brilliant. ~The project and the clients adapt their creative parameters for her. So they've seen her work and say, gosh, you don't see that in children's book illustration that often.

Let's try inviting Jill into that creative arena and see what that work looks like for kids. You could say Libby Vander Plague as well, who was doing, we have her on the picture book course, and she had done, ~um, ~lots of memes, lots of editorial and maps, ~and then the nosy Crow commissioned her to do. As lots of maps for children.~

So I think if you hold out for who you are and what you love doing and let the market come to you, rather than anticipate the market and say, hi, I'm over here doing the thing you are already doing with a load of other people, can you employ me? They probably won't because they already have people who do that kind of work.

Mm-hmm. So being unique is important. Well, I think if you go for coffee with somebody, you can tell if they're just saying things that they think you want to hear, rather than saying what they actually think. Do you mean when it's in a polite, they're being too polite? Yeah. Or they're like, you look like you're [00:20:00] interested in snails.

I'm gonna talk about snails a lot. And you'd be like, you don't even like snails. I can tell. Like if somebody was obsessed with snails, that's so much more interesting. 'cause you can tell they're just doing their thing. Being obsessed with snails. That's a very niche example, but you know what I mean? ~Like rather than being like, I've drawn this thing because it seems trendy.~

'cause we're always talking about how you see something's trendy. It's already too late. I was thinking about, you were saying Katie, that we had ~um, ~one-on-one mentoring sessions with a few illustrators. This is sometime, I dunno, 18 months ago or something. And one of them had fantastic artwork. We really loved it. But on her folio, on her website was some work that just didn't fit in at all.

And it was picture, book work. And we said, Hmm, not so sure about that. We like all the other stuff you've been doing. And she said, oh yeah, I was trying to be a picture book illustrator for those drawings. And we said, get rid of them. PIC Publishers will like all of your work anyway. And those things are the weakest things in your folio.

Get rid of them. Do you remember? You could feel it. Yeah.

You've gotta be yourself, haven't you, and [00:21:00] be impolite in your work and don't do an impression of ah, whatever area of illustration you wanna be in. Yeah. Just be obsessed with whatever you're obsessed with.

Yeah. It's easier anyway. I'm off on. Mm-hmm. See you next week. Bye. Bye. Bye.