When I begin a piece of final art, I begin with ritual. I pull and cut a fresh piece of watercolour paper, at the same time, I’m reminded of who and what had to happen to make this object – the cotton growers, the pulpers, the factories, the pressers – so that I could use it to make the work I’m about to make. I clean and fill water buckets, select the brushes I know I’ll need to use, prepare lighting, make the first marks on paper – the crop marks – all before the final act of art making. I know that once this ritual begins, I’m committed for at least 4 hours to the continual shaping and making of marks on paper.

With each piece of art, there’s risk. The materials that go into the final work aren’t cheap. The physical resources I will use are taken from the world and placed with intention on this piece of compressed cotton. There’s an immense privilege in that. If I stuff it up at any moment before it’s ‘finished’, I have to start again; more resources, more time.

I contrast this with digital ‘final’ art – something I’m trying for the first time as I write this. The same sense of risk isn’t there so the need to ‘prepare’ methodically also isn’t required.

No matter what I’m making, the process is fast and efficient; power button, swipe, tap, tap, go. I can work from anywhere, anytime, and for any amount of time – 5 minutes or 4 hours. I don’t find myself being aware of the thousands of people and precious metals that were needed to create the tablet in the first place – it doesn’t feel sacred to me in the way a piece of watercolour paper does; it feels decidedly commodified. But maybe that’s OK.

One of the things I used to love about physical art for picture books is it felt like a win-win – I experience the sacred and, eventually, it ends up scaled through the commodity of picture books; the money through which I can fund more materials. But now, the digital work flow hasn’t ‘devalued’ the sacred work. If anything, it’s made those moments of working with physical art materials even more more special, more private. I like that.

The other day, I had to drastically prune one of my favourite plants in our small back garden. I avoided pruning it for a long time because I enjoyed it so much so it’s been happily (over)growing for almost 10 years and it gives the garden a certain calming feeling.

In a matter of minutes under the heft of a power tool, it went from lush, full, green and beautiful to spindly, grey, and sad. I definitely experienced feelings of loss that day.

But now, just a week or so later, I’ve noticed new growth – a lush, green, bright contrast is emerging on those grey, spindly branches. These are branches that probably haven’t seen light for many years but here they were, responding to and welcoming the change.

We could learn something from that.

There’s something really lovely about doing the same thing over and over again; getting a better understanding and a deeper connection to the activity over time. It’s what many of us call ‘craft’. Craft extends to many things that, in today’s world, might be considered ‘menial’ like collecting soot to make traditional Japanese ink when industrial solutions exist or mending a thatched roof with straw when it would be much easier to replace with a tiled solution.

I consider my watercolour work in a similar way. The multi-sensorial learning that’s associated with it – the colour-mixing, the weight of water in a brush, the sheen of water on the paper that indicates the right time to place the pigment – these are all learned from ‘menial’ repitition. It’s something I’ve deeply enjoyed and continue to enjoy.

However…

Whilst I spend this time improving my craft, there are also things I’ve said no to. I’ve said no to digital art, for a very long time. I’ve tried many tools over the years and, every time, I fail to get the feeling that physical watercolour gives me – there has been a distinct absence of flow when I’m working digitally.

But, the final resting place of my watercolour work is mostly within commercial picture books – a world that isn’t immune to the consistent and continual commodification of things: how might we do more with less?

Responding to commerce

As an illustrator, I have a couple of options. The first option is that I tell myself I’ll remain ‘consistent’ with my watercolour practice and, if the picture book work dries up because publishers can no longer afford the extra time, attention, and care it takes to convert those physical paintings into a book, I bid that work a fond goodbye and consider it a fun and interesting period of my life – all good things must come to an end.

The second option is to ‘adapt’. To reframe the idea of ‘craft’ not around the physical medium of the work, but the intent – visual storytelling. When the craft is visual storytelling, the ‘physical/digital’ divide goes away because it’s not about that anymore, it’s about image sequence, composition, framing and the image’s relationship with the text. It’s less about the artefact, and more about the process.

I use to say I was remaining ‘consistent’ with my aversion to digital work, but now, I think I’ve been resistant – closing myself off to the possibility and opportunity it brings to focus on a different part of the craft, not just wet paper and pigment.

There are distinct advantages of the digital medium over the physical one when it comes to art-making but there’s one feeling I can quite get from digital, no matter how much I try. With physical materials, I feel like I’m making a dent in the universe – the physical artefact a manipulation of the environment around me. With digital, it often feels like I’m just adding to the pile of space junk.

What if reviews of a work said more about the reviewer than the quality of the work. Would that 1-star review matter?

So, I’m learning to play piano and there seems to be 2 schools of thought on how I should go about it. The first is to find a teacher and learn the proper technique from day 1. If one doesn’t do that, the risk is that I’ll build some bad habits that will be more difficult to unlearn later. Proper technique involves hours of scales and finger exercises, learning music theory and playing ‘simple songs’ like Happy Birthday or Jingle Bells (not every adult’s cup of tea).

The second approach to learning piano seems to be to prioritise fun and making something that sounds like music as quickly as possible. Proper technique can come later. The idea behind taking this approach is to use it to orient one’s self around the keyboard and use one’s desire to play songs and music as the driving force for building an emotional connection to the instrument.

Which one to choose? What if I choose the wrong one?

Proper illustration technique

Any reader of this journal will know that I’ve always felt a bit like an imposter when it comes to illustration. I never went to Art School and yet, I’ve been professionally illustrating picture books across almost every publisher in Australia a few years after picking up a watercolour brush 10 years ago.

When I first began trying to learn watercolour, certain (very experienced) people told me that there’s a ‘proper technique’ to illustration (and watercolour painting). It’s about doing exercises in black and white painting (understanding values), charcoal life drawing, colour mixing exercises and pigment science etc – all that before you should start ‘making paintings’. I never did any of that. Instead, I stumbled forward through trial and error until I found an emotional connection with the medium and produced drawings and paintings that made me feel something.

Sure, perhaps doing some of that theory would have made a difference but, to be honest, I find myself more interested in pulling those ‘traditional learning’ threads while I’m working as an illustrator now because I have a need – I want to amplify the emotion I’ve found in the work and theory can be useful for some of that.

Proper piano technique

So, this brings me back to piano. As I’ve written before, for most things in life, we don’t need a piece of paper, a credential, or someone else’s permission to make art. I’ve never even considered hiring an art teacher to watch me paint so they can tell me how to hold the brush ‘properly’ – so maybe the same goes for learning piano? Maybe the proper technique isn’t about hand position and posture; that’s just biomechanics. And, whilst we all have our individual motivations and best ways to learn – for me, the ‘proper technique’ in any art form is emotion first, biomechanics and chemistry later.

I find an immense pleasure in the mess that comes with traditional art materials – they provide a setting with less control & order which increases the chances of accidents and serendipity.

With traditional art materials, I can put my markers on the left or right of my paper. I can hold a bunch of recently used mark-making tools in my left hand while I draw with my right. I can surround my work surface with all sorts of stuff so anything is in easy reach at any time. I can move using a combination of gross *and* fine motor skills (A2+). A physical art desk is a fully-customised user interface for making images. It actively encourages play, serendipity, accidents, and unintention – all whilst operating with a distinct set of limits constrained by physics and the physical world.

Digital works the opposite way. My ‘palettes’ are in the top right corner. The brushes I use are under the pencils, which are under the markers, which are under the textures, all in the “Pencil Case” folder. It’s neat – conducive not to accidents but order. Digital art workspaces bring procedural thinking to a process that could (or should?) be un-procedural. When I close my digital tools everything is clean and ordered. I can’t walk past them and see, at a glance, something that I could add, improve, or takeaway. With digital, I’m either making or I’m not.

With the mess created by the physical process, my art is always in the background – a presence that I can engage with as I go about my day. It allows my focussed work at the messy desk to infiltrate my subconscious and develop ideas even when I don’t think I’m thinking about. I like that.

About 6 months ago, I was in a flurry of ‘productivity’. I was busy making stuff for me. In that time I wrote and illustrated a 70-page graphic novel, a 12-page comic, and created about 50 drawings.

These projects weren’t for anything – they weren’t for an active client, or a prospective one – they were just for me. Play, in it’s truest form. A past me would’ve thought it all a big waste of time. There was nothing stitching these ideas together, they weren’t part of a bigger picture or plan.

About 1 month ago, I was travelling for work – I was there to attend a workshop about how to measure biodiversity improvement in landscapes. I landed at 9pm on the evening before the workshops and checked in to my very rough hotel. The place was cold and it smelled a little… funky. I had a shower, got into bed and realised there were no bedside lamps, only a single fluorescent light switch near the front door and I didn’t feel like sleep yet.

So, I picked up my notebook and began to scribble some words. Ever since I started this job, it’s always felt a little ironic to me; to have to burn jet fuel in order to attend a workshop about improving biodiversity. So, I started writing about it that evening, in that dodgy motel under the fluorescent light.

2-hours later, at around 12:30am, I realised that I had just penned the bones of a poem about something that, I realise now, I had been thinking about for a very long time; the separation humans have created between themselves and nature.

The next morning, I got to a local cafe at 6:30am and kept writing. By the time the workshops began at 9am I had pages of verse. I returned home 2 days later, exhausted from science, and took a fresh look at the bones of this poem. I refined it further until it felt ‘complete’.

It was a weird poem, and a weird idea. It never entered my mind that it could be a picture book text until my agent replied excitedly with, “I think we’ve got something here; what have you been thinking in terms of illustrations?”

Play that taps into the subconscious

This is where the story ends where it began. As it turns out, without consciously doing it, those 50 or so drawings from months ago, when paired with this text, had harmony. In fact, they were such a good fit that, together, the idea has taken on a life of it’s own and it’s much bigger than the sum of its parts.

There are some storytellers I admire for their way of exploring a persistent theme throughout their career in a variety of ways. Hirokazu Kore-eda comes to mind with his exploration of the different forms a family can take. And now I realise, more and more, that this is happening to me.

See, I’ve been circling the same ideas for a long time. I think it began with Queen Celine – a message about the importance of acceptance and diversity – and it’s since been extended to This Generous Earth, The Mountain and Flower, Evaporation, and now my new text, Hope. The human/nature relationship are at their core. Even my photography went there.

When we view someone’s work from the outside, it’s easy to invent the narrative of intention – they intended to explore this again, they came up with a scenario and, using design and logic, crafted a narrative that provoked further exploration. I could imagine someone thinking the same of my various projects but, in fact, it seems much more intuitive and accidental than that. It’s just that, well, the act of mark marking – whether they are drawings or words – provide a pathway for the subconscious to come to the surface. It seems it’s more about getting the jigsaw puzzle pieces out on the desk and then discovering that they fit together even though I couldn’t see a relationship between them when I viewed them in isolation.

I often wonder why so many people are desperate to get into children’s publishing. And, while I’m sure the reasons for it are varied, one of the things I love most about being able to draw (and it ending up in picture books) is that I end up feeling quite useful – and feeling useful to another human being feels good.

Rendering things fully – photographically – doesn’t leave much room for the viewer to participate in shaping, forming, or interrogating the idea. Words, on the other hand, are the other end of the spectrum. I can describe a ‘blonde man wearing a suit’ but you’ll need to fill in the gaps and the blonde man you imagine will be different to the one another will imagine. This phenomenon explains why we often think books are better than the movie – we’re participating more and not being shown that the main character is actually Ryan Reynolds because a movie director thought it should be.

This has profound implications for stakeholder management, pitching ideas at the right time, and collaboration towards an idea that’s better than the sum of each of everyone’s individual input.

By leaving things a little abstract, we offer an invitation to others; an opportunity to participate in our art and ideas. It’s fundamentally an act of generosity and humility. If people contribute to the idea, they’re more invested in seeing it succeed because they own a little piece of it. And, most of the time, the power of a group of humans working together on the same fundamental idea can influence more in the world than a single person working alone. So, why wouldn’t we give our ideas their best chance to succeed by offering them up with room to grow through the care of others?