Open Studio: “Wouldn’t it be fun if….”
Some things I’m working on.
Open Studio, is the section of this substack where I invite you into my life as an artist, illustrator and substacker. What I’m doing, what I’ve learned and what I’m thinking about. It’s also a way for me to process the weeks gone past and what’s coming up.
Open studio is free for everyone, so if you enjoy it please consider sharing it.
On Sharing
It’s difficult to figure out exactly what to share.
There are things in early discussions that are really exciting that might not make sense to share until the ‘right time’, and others that may or may not happen. Then there are delusional ambitions which are also better left to talk about once they happened.
So I won’t be talking about those.
But I will say that after working almost exclusively on kids books for the past 5 years, I have been looking at other markets and I have been sending work out, and I have gotten a good response. I think deep research helped with that.
I’ve also had a couple of people reach out to collaborate on things, in person things, and it was good timing because I was ready to say yes to both.
On Picture Books
This week I finished the rough sketches for a book, I’m working through books at quite an intense rate now. On one It’ that last leg, where we’ve worked through thumbnails, roughs, and even samples for coloured spreads, so it’s really plotting through to finish colour on all the spreads. Another is waiting for feedback, and a third is at the beginning, text just finalized and thumbnails starting.
Jane Porter wrote a great piece on cheers and grumbles about picturebooks where she likened making picturebooks to a conveyer belt and I 100% agree with that analogy.
You’ve got to do some little bit of work and put it on the conveyer belt, pick up another piece do your bit, then place it back on, and on and on, and it’s years from start to finish. And if you stop putting stuff in the beginning of the conveyer belt, you’ll only notice the impact years ahead. The same holds through that if you keep putting in stuff at the start of the conveyor belt, you can expect good things to come from it indefinitely.
Jane also pointed out that the ratio of things that come to fruition is about 10%.
Now if we take that as fact, it’s something to grumble about, or something to work into our process.
I think where it gets hard is we sometimes expect things to come more easily than they actually do. There actually is a treshold where the time and effort return a result. Do we really want it that bad I suppose is the question we ask ourselves.
Where am I at on Picturebook? I think I’m starting to optimise for fun and ease. I think what we find easy and fun is a clue to what we should be doing with our time. I’m not saying every moment and aspect of everyday needs to be fun and easy. But it needs to balance up.
So with Picture-books, I’m balancing that out.
And to me that means when picking a subject, pick the one that’s fun to draw. When creating a character or designing a page, doing it in the most fun way. There are like two voices in our head sometimes, one says it should be done this way, the on the one says, wouldn’t it be fun if….
You actually get to choose to listen to the second voice.
Substack
I do a few things on substack.
This years with a closed group of 12 people, Jen Gubicza and I are leading a group through an end to end process of building a picturebook dummy, we call it Art Quest . It’s a huge lift, but it helps us carry ourselves and the group to actually get a dummy done!
Then with Katie Stack we have a community that comes together to practice drawing in a very purposeful way at ArtGym, this week we made comics, by digging up ideas and turning those ideas into a little comic strip.
Over here at Ten Minute Artist - Drawing and Journal Prompts I give ya’ll’s a project every month and this month’s project was also about making comics. Making comics falls under the category of authored work, and speaking of conveyer belts I’m in the early days of producing authored work and finding markets for them.
July Cohort
I have a flagship program on this substack called Gameplan: how to be an artist. It’s for people who want to start (or start again) either making art regularly for fun or even for profit, and it guides you through a 60 day journey, step by step with as little as 10 minutes a day.
Hundreds have gone through the program and we have a new cohort starting on Monday. July 6th. If you want to know more toggle on July Cohort Preview here.
I might be exhibiting at the Kuala Lumpur Art Book Fair, with a long time collaborator, it’s just for fun, we’ve sent in a n application and if we get in, I think I’ll produce a Zine.
Thanks for Reading,
Thanks for the mention, Adam!