July Check In - Building Pipes

10,009 Subscribers, and counting.

How’s it going?

Summer’s an interesting time, there is a lot of shifting and moving and even renewal.

Does this shift your creative much? How so? Since I’ve started doing these monthly checkins, it’s become a big of a highlight for me, I love to hear what everyone’s working on, and the progress you’re making.

And progress is not just results, some times it’s a shift in mindset or effort.

Tell me about it.

You can leave a comment, or reply this email.

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A lot of things are shifting from me. I’ll talk about them in 3 categories.

1. Illustrating

2. Authoring

3. Substack

Illustrating

The year has started out really slow for me on the illustration front.

I’ve been illustrating a book while it’s being written, which is an undertaking I’ll very unlikely ever do gain. But I’m getting into the flow of it. This is one of the 4 books that only fully materialised last month. But having this pipeline of illustration work coming in is encouraging.

It has taken 8 months to sign some of these contracts, and I tell you this to remind you how slow publishing can be, which is why I feel it’s always important to be doing something as you wait.

Authoring

The goal was always to be an author illustrator.

But for the first 5 years, I let authoring take a back seat and lead with illustration. I felt I was better at it and I could see results more quickly here. That said I’ve always been putting some energy into writing, but there was something missing.

And last weekend I filled that missing piece by doing an immersive 3 day writing retreat with some friends and lead by the amazing

Jen Gubicza

. That gave me 2 valuable things.

A story that I’m happy to show my agent and start shopping around, and a process or framework for developing stories.

Substack

Ten Minute Artist (Daily Ritual)

Ten Minute Artist - Daily Creative Joy

Reached 10 000 subscribers. Hurray us and thank you! Throughout this journey there have been many changes and experiments, yet so many of you stuck with me and brought your friends, and that is the reason we could grow this huge readership.

The next milestone now is 100 000 subscribers. And while the road to 10K was about figuring out what works, I believe the road to 100k is about consistency. I was recently on the

The Illustration Department

podcast with fellow guest

Jason Chatfield

talking about substack and my big takeaway from that conversation is the importance of consistency.

So on this Substack expect more of the same, but better¹

Art Gym (Monthly Practice)

Art Gym: Live Drawing Workshops & Illustration Tutorials

I co-run a substack with

Katie Stack

called Art Gym, It’s a monthly drawing workshop, and this month we pushed it all the way to the end of the month, making it the longest gap we’ve ever had but I’m very excited to get back into it. This ‘same but better’ approach will also extend to Art Gym.

I’m proud to say that Art Gym has been a very consistent practice over almost 2 years. And I’m excited to see this continue to grow!

Art Quest (Playful Immersion)

The virtual writing retreat I did over the weekend was a trial run of another project I’m working on with

Jen Gubicza

called

Art Quest

, This is a more playful approach to the creative career.

Jen and I have been working on content for over a year. And the writing retreat has given us proof that what we’re building actually works. Many of the participants called the retreat the best workshop they’ve ever attended (which is wild)

We won’t hold another retreat until next year, but we are going to start sharing the tools we used in the workshop over at the

Art Quest

substack starting next month.

The Dream

Many of you have a dream of quitting your day job to become an author or illustrator.

What I have noticed, is that the author illustrator thing for most people (99.9%) tends to be a supplement to either a day job, like teaching in college, a real job like an orthodontist. Or require some crazy marketing/newworking i.e cold emailing individuals daily for years. Or having some direct to consumer offering such as a substack, course, what have you.

These are my baskets.

Wouldn’t it better if I focused all my eggs?

As far as I can tell, probably not. But there’s a nuance….

I don’t recommend starting 3 substacks at once! I don’t even recommend trying to start getting both writing and illustration work at once. I believe you find the most success starting on 1 thing and focusing on that, it takes a lot of energy to get something off the ground.

Once it’s in the air though, you free up energy to do something else. All this is not advice, it’s just what works for me, everyone’s different, and I’m just trying to figuring this out.

That’s my update, see you soon!

1. I will be taking a few days off to work on the pipes. In order to have consistent output I need consistency coming in upstream, which means ideas for prompts and meditations on the craft, and so I’ll be working on systems for that. Which really is going to be a spreadsheet of prompts, and meditations, collecting from the books in my library and my notebooks