This is not a program to help you become a Children’s illustrator, unless that is what you want to become.

But at the moment a lot of my examples and experience comes from being a children’s illustrator, so bear with me. I had just finished my first Children’s Picture-book Course with (100% Recommend), and I had 5 portfolio pieces, I threw together a website and started reaching out to agents.

One agency wrote back with a list of things they needed to see to consider me.

Kids, animals, consistency, diversity the usual suspects…

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When I was starting out on my journey to become an artist for the second time, I stumbled on this strange book.

It was a recommendation by Mathew McConaughey the actor, via a podcast, and the book is called The Greatest Salesman in the World. It’s by Og Mandino. It’s a strange book almost game like in quality, prescriptive and directive. I recommend it, just take a pen or Sharpie, and cross out the word salesman and replace it with whatever you like.

The book works just the same, for me I cross out salesman and wrote ‘illustrator’.

Remember at this time I was unemployed, and living off savings at the beginning of a pandemic.

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said this, or something like this…

Once you find your tools you’ll find your style. As you start getting drawn to the artwork of certain artist, it makes sense to explore the tools and methods they use to make their art.

It might surprise you, you might discover that the thing you like is the marks certain tools make. Or you might discover that there are certain types of art that you might enjoy consuming, but not creating.

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The style conversation is a tedious but necessary one.

The consensus is to keep working, and style will mysteriously and magically emerge. And there is truth in that, the problem is, what do we do in the meantime? It took me 40 years to come to my style.

The conversation is so tedious that many would sidestep the question about style altogether and instead talk about voice.

The way I would see that is that style is like clothes and voice is the body.

There are two problems.

1. The only way to develop your voice is to use it, and this development takes time, decades, and who is to say when it is ever ‘ready’.

2. All benefits of Style and Voice come from being it being recognizable.

I would argue that one needs to resolve these problems and develop something like a professional style, in order to enter certain markets as a professional.

And that this step can be done by anyone, in ten minutes.

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Once in my previous job working in a tech startup.

As a small team we collected 1000 emails in 3 days from potential customers at a trade show. We did that by talking to them, sometimes individually, other times in groups.

The internet is a great way to reach true fans, but possibly the most powerful way to make a connection is to go direct.

In my case I flew half way around the world to attend a trade show, but there are other ways to go direct.

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Fans want to know what you’re working on.

Start there. Create a regular cadence of letting your fans know what you’re working on. This is easy if you’re always working. You might have seen a trend on social media that says, ‘Don’t show your work, show you working’.

How exactly we do this is a matter of taste and style and just as important as what we share.

Let’s start with a list of do’s on and don’t’s

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Once you’ve decided what to offer your True Fans, you need to make sure they can find you.

To do this, you need to be findable.

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To have fans, the first step is being a good fan.

It’s like dating advice, how you find a good partner is by being a great partner yourself. By being the best possible version of your have. Fans respond to generosity. That is the best place to start.

And the best place to practice generosity, is to join fan clubs.

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Project Notes: This week we’ll be getting a bit more personal in our diaries as we question our goals as creatives in relation to money, some of us might have no goals for our art related to money at all, and then it might move on to selling something at a weekend market, to making a living. In every case we’ll explore the questions. For the assignments, feel free to share sparingly, cover some key details if you need to or be as open as you like.

"To be a successful creator you don't need millions. You don't need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans."

— Kevin Kelly

That’s a relief ainnit.

As a kid of 5, or even 25, I hardly knew what a million was, it was an abstract unattainable concept. It was equated to making it, in any field, it felt like any thing worth doing was only worth doing if you could get a million something out of it.

Sell a painting for a million dollars, sell a million copies of a book, have a million dollars in the bank, and so on… But how do you get from anywhere to a million. And more importantly is a million even the right number?

Kevin Kelly’s famous article, transformed that idea, and should probably be credited to why the creator economy is even a thing.

Today we’re going to be talking about numbers, specifically the money we will need to earn from our art, to just do the thing. ( if you have no intention to make money from your art, I hope you will take this as a form of general knowledge, or perhaps, a ‘what if’ exercise.

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Project Notes: Continue working in your artist diary for 10 minutes a day, use week 2 as a menu of options if you need some ideas.

Writing on stage has been about showing your work so you can make it better.

Many aspiring artist have a closed loop of making something, then trying to make it better, without showing it. They think that showing their art is a once and done, and so it has to be absolutely perfect.

In reality showing it, is a repeatable step.

We can show our work to different audiences and at different stages. We can show iterations and developments and sequels and side shows, and every time we show it we get feedback and can use it as a chance to make it better.

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Project Notes: Continue working in your artist diary for 10 minutes a day, use week 2 as a minute of options if you need some ideas.

I read when I was 11 that being a comic artist is great work if you can get it.

The article in Wizard Magazine went on to explain how every comic fan want to draw Spider-Man, and at the time there were only a couple of opportunities to do that, so everyone was fighting for the same spot. And that lead me to believe that being an artist or an illustrator was an ultra competitive job where, you’re goal was to be the one.

To outdo everyone else and get that scarce job. I was wrong.

Obviously.

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Project Notes: Continue working in your artist diary for 10 minutes a day, use week 2 as a minute of options if you need some ideas.

I’m going to share this sketch from my sketchbook on substack notes today along with the story behind why I made it.

Sharing this way, is away to start a conversation around the work we are doing. In the same day I’m also going to share a page from a book I’ve illustrated or some work related thing. I’ll share something you made. And I’ll probably share something about my newsletters.

I probably share more than most, you will need to find your own cadence.

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Project Notes: Continue working in your artist diary for 10 minutes a day, use week 2 as a minute of options if you need some ideas.

Today we think of our practice as a means of collecting tried and tested material

Crafting something is a long uncertain process a maker should show her work

— Austin Kleon

A comedian is someone who can do the most terrifying job on earth (speaking in public) and make it seem effortless.

A comedians prowess is measured in minutes, how long are they able to stand on a stage in a room full of strangers and make them laugh, reliably. It’s measured in minutes not because it’s a test of stamina or mental prowess. It’s measured in minutes because everything the comedian says on that stage is part of an act.

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Project Notes: Continue working in your artist diary for 10 minutes a day, if you don’t know what to work on use week 2 as a menu. This project explores one aspect of interfacing with an audience, in the tech world you might call this discovery or product market fit, next week we’ll be talking about earning true fans, this is not that yet… this is the step before, figuring out who you’re making art for and what you want to make for them.

Today we will ask when is a work of art done?

All in all the creative act is not performed by the artist alone…

the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting the inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

— Marcel Duchamp

A work of art is never really done is it.

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This post is part of a 60 day creative program called Gameplan, I made this post free, because I felt it was too important to paywall. If it helped you, please consider sharing, and if you’d like to join this epic journey that I’m creating for 400+ paid subscribers, we would love to have you!

This is day 4 of How to Draw Anything, today’s dispatch is titled Hidden Characters. You can check out the entire Gameplan here.

Author Notes: One of the differences to writing this program as a newsletter rather than a book is that I can interact with you in real time.

I get to see how you’re responding to the assignments, and I get your emails with questions.

I remember when I was doing my first picturebook course, I felt so lost, It was like being at a 12 course meal, getting served course by course and not knowing what was coming next.

Is the next thing going to be sweet or savoury.

Will I like it?

Will I still be hungry by the end of it, I wonder if there will be meat, or seafood, or maybe some pasta.

Am I doing this right. What is the point of this all?

In the assignments thread I see a lot of you are having fun, some enjoying the process and some struggling with certain things and pushing through.

All of us are here for different goals and I think the most common ones are.

1. You want to build a practice that you continue indefinitely.

2. You want a space for some personal work amidst professional work

3. You want to get paid gigs. And you want to know how this is going to get you there.

I’m going to take some space today to answer the third one. If you’re in that position I hope it will give you a sense of how things fit together, and if you’re not in that boat, you might still find it of interest.

When I took a course in illustrating children’s books in 2020, it was the first art related course I took since graduating art school in 2000. And my goal then was to be a Full Time Picture Book Illustrator.

I reached that goal (hold the applause)

I’m not sure it was the best goal. I have no regrets, and I am very proud of the accomplishment. I seem to have an indefinite amount of childrens book projects ahead of me.

I think it’s a mistake to think, that being a working artist means, you get to do ONE type of a creative job for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. And I have been thinking about this for awhile. But yesterday I got a chance to speak to Andy J. Pizza via his Creative Pro Talk, and in a group we explored this topic through a variety of lenses.

One of them being that if your dream is to be a painter, painting whatever you want for 8 hours a day is probably not going to be a realization of that dream. Most creative people can sustain 2-4 hours of creative output a day.

This is taxing work.

A way that seems to work for many freelance artist over a long period of time is to have separate streams of incomes. This is not something that can happen over night, but is built strategically over time. Someone suggested the way to think about it is having multiple categories of income.

Some people have a part time design job, or maybe an art adjacent job. When I decided to become a children’s illustrator, the first thing I did was get a part time job. Spending that 1 day a week in a corporate job, bought me time to work on my portfolio and my first books, and paid the bills while I waited for the irrational advances to come through.

Writing this is not a massive money maker, but I love sharing what I do and connecting with all of you and that trickling income does help plug the gap between book payments.

And even now I’m building other income streams for my creative work, and continuing to take courses and seek guidance from people far ahead of me.

So to bring that back to the person who needs to make money right now. I would say, step one is to get a job. My part time job was to design app interfaces and interview customers to understand how they use an app. I know people who, work at museums, design wedding cards (Katie Stack ), sell products and markets (Jen Gubicza), while they create their own work, some do graphic design or work as a nanny.

It is difficult to rely on you new creative endeavour as a primary source of income, you’re learning the ropes. That’s why we started this journey with sacred time.

If you can’t become that high voltage version of yourself and have unlimited creative energy for 10 minutes a day, then how to find an art director is not going to help you, that’s the easy part.

The hard part, is living like an artist.

To do the thing even if it’s for only 10 minutes a day in the beginning, then you need to figure out what YOUR unique thing is that is also valuable to someone else. There must be that overlap of someone desperately needs something that you are utterly passionate about.

That is the goal we’re building towards. One step at a time over 6 projects. Then over a 1-1 discourse. So hang in there, enjoy the process, and if you need to, get a job.

I’m not saying this to sound harsh, only to be as helpful as I can possibly be.

Then let’s build a creative practice, that grows into a creative business, maybe multiple creative businesses, freelance or otherwise. And if you’re happy to stay at Creative Practice, that’s fine too!

Onward!

Project Notes: For this project divide your spread into two sections. We will use the right page for the Art Assignment, and the left page for notes.

This project is meant to supplement your daily art practice rather than replace it. It will give you tools to tackle your daily practice with more confidence and skill. I will leave it to you to decide how you will make time for this extra practice.

Welcome to day 4:

“It’s the feeling of playing with a toy that plays back”

— Lynda Barry

Find Characters

Everyone has their own version of this practice.

In fact, this is how we all start to draw. I live with a 5 year old I’ve seen it happen in real life.

“This is a bunny”

“The bunny wants to get to the carrots, but there is a monster in the way, the bunny jumps over the monster”.

Sometimes, I leave the door to the studio open and let the 5 year old come in and draw on her own. You overhear conversations with the drawings. We have this natural ability to start with marks, decide what those marks mean.

The marks become characters, characters you can play with and who play back.

Assignment 14: Splotches, Squiggles and blobs — Finding characters

We begin in the usual way, leaving a page for notes and a page for the assignment, in the assignment page, create a grid of 6 squares

Then make 2 blotches, 2 squiggles and 2 blobs.

Like so…

Take Time to look at each frame, really look, look until something looks back at you, then draw its eyes. Once you have that, draw the rest of the character.

You might end up with something like this. Now in the notes, the natural thing to do like what I have done is comment on the process, what you like, what could be better, all the usual stuff.

Instead of doing that, try asking the characters some questions.

• Where are you going?

• Why the face?

• What are you scared off?

• Can I help you?

• Is there something you want to tell me?

• What are you looking for?

• What’s your name?

If you did that… Wow.

Look at yourself, you just drew like a 5 year old. You also used some random marks and turned them into characters even the beginning, or middle of stories. Maybe you even made a friend.

In 10 minutes. Yeah, you have incredible talent, and so much inside of you that is longing to come out. This is the part of the process we are at, getting good at letting all that good stuff flow.

Later on we can figure out how to put it in a box and put a price tag on it. Cheers! You now know how to creat characters.

Share your assignment in the Gameplan Chat below. The chat also serves as a gallery.

Gameplan Chat & Gallery

PS: All the dispatches and assignments will be made available in one place, and that is the post called “Your Gameplan”, you can check back there for links to all the dispatches and assignments as they become available.

Project Notes: For this project divide your spread into two sections. We will use the right page for the Art Assignment, and the left page for notes.

This project is meant to supplement your daily art practice rather than replace it. It will give you tools to tackle your daily practice with more confidence and skill. I will leave it to you to decide how you will make time for this extra practice.

Welcome to day 2:

Shapes

“Observational drawing is all about shapes, light and shadows and reality as we see it. Once we have mastered these concepts, it is possible to deconstruct and select what we deem relevant, adapting reality to our personal point of view”

— Isabelle Arsenault

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Project Notes: For this project divide your spread into two sections. We will use the right page for the Art Assignment, and the left page for notes. In the example below you’ll see I left the left page for notes, and used washi tape to mask an ‘Art’ area. Once the washi tape is removed, the blank white space will create a nice frame for the artwork.

This project is meant to supplement your daily art practice rather than replace it. It will give you tools to tackle your daily practice with more confidence and skill. I will leave it to you to decide how you will make time for this extra practice. Perhaps you will take an additional ten minute slot per day. Or maybe you can manage a few hours somewhere in the week. Revisit the first project, if you need help making the time for this additional practice.

Some of you might also already be thinking of doing this using ‘No extra time’ and somehow baking it into their daily practice, you’re free to try that too.

It’s just important to maintain your self initiated daily practice, while adding these skill builders.

With that let us begin!

Welcome to day 1:

Mark making

“You are only ‘n’ actions away from any goal”

The way to attain any goal is to take a series of actions.

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