The motivation to sell something, anything, for validation of its value/worth is a strong force in our current culture. It’s easy to think that if people aren’t willing to trade money for the thing I made, maybe it’s not good? No matter how many times I finish a drawing or painting for me, with no original intention to sell it, there has always been a tiny voice in the back of my head that asks, “I wonder if people will buy it?”

But, there’s a difference between purchasing and appreciating, acquiring and connecting.

I’ve only just realised this but what I’m really looking for with anything I finish making is connection. To bring something to the world from nothing and then finding someone, anyone, in the world who says, “Thankyou, that helped me in some way.” A little like sending a space probe into deep space and waiting for a reply. Is there anyone out there?

I recently witnessed someone I hardly know cry over something I made. Literal, actual tears. They never bought it. Never offered to buy it. In that moment, money didn’t exist for me or for them. But, their reaction (and my reaction to them) was a gift that money was completely ill-equipped to substitute for. What happened in that moment is that I heard back from deep-space and what I heard was, ‘That was really nice. Do it again, please.’

And so, I’m leaving the gravity of commerce, and I hope that perhaps others may find this message out there and think, maybe I’ll do the same.

As a software designer, craft isn’t something I associate with digital mark-making. After all, all I’m really doing is changing the colour of very tiny lights, aren’t I? The reason I started watercolour painting was in direct response to spending too much time in front screens – I needed something more… crafty (and less backlit).

So, what is a craft?

Craft, to me, has been something grounded in the physical – time, angles of the canvas, water, pigment, gravity – understanding those in watercolour well enough to produce what I can see in my mind’s eye would take more than a lifetime. Mastering those real-world elements feels, intuitively, like a struggle worth having. Up until now, digital has not.

But, as it turns out, turning lights on and off isn’t actually the challenge with digital (although, it’s exceedingly difficult in its own right). No, digital poses a completely different set of questions that are beginning to feel like craft-led questions. Questions like:

• When I don’t have the tactile feedback of the weight of water in physical brushes, the heat in the room, the thickness of the paint, the angle of the page – how do I make a mark I’m aiming for?
• How do I choose which ‘brush’ to use, and for what purpose, amongst the infinite number that exist as tiny little programs online – all accessible with a quick Google search?
• How can I ensure the colours still feel human? How do I constrain my choices within a seemingly infinite gamut of Red Green and Blue combinations?
• How do make sure I look after my body in the process whilst using a medium that has no natural rest (like when I wait for watercolour paint to dry)? Whilst digital output may not be inherently ‘physical’, the act of mark-making certainly is – I feel it in my bones, my muscles, my eyes. Stuff hurts!

Like with most experiences I’ve had, the question of craft – one I had only reserved for the physical art practice – begins to emerge through play with the digital medium; and yes, it’s a medium. In the same way that clay is, or video is, or dance is. Dividing it on physical/digital lines, especially in a world where those daily lines are blurring more and more, seems like the wrong division to make.

Perhaps, instead of sticking to ‘stuff I used to do’, I should let the work be thy guide and see what happens if spend some time investing in the craft of digital – just like I did with watercolour all those years ago.

There are times when the priority is to execute – to finish the story, finish the painting, finish the work. These times are filled with the logic of ‘productivity’. There is a procedural mindset to completion, there is a timeline, there is no room for tangents and exploration.

But there are other times when what is needed is the opposite. Times where logic and timelines must be intentionally and actively put aside to make room for wandering, tangents, and unfiltered input. It sounds passive but it is indeed an active process. I need to extend my antenna up into the clouds and let the world pass over me and through me. I need to passively receive what may be swirling around up there – no editing, just acceptance. Eventually, over time, the signal is strong enough inside to provoke action and the time to execute re-emerges.

Both modes are work. It’s important to remember that.

Parmesan cheese is categorised by its age. 12 months matured, 24 months matured, 36 months matured and so on. Each age has a different flavour, texture, purpose, and monetary value. You can’t make a 36 month parmesan cheese in 12 months, or 24 months, or even 72 months. 36 months is the necessary time for 36-month parmesan.

Sometimes, making art is like making cheese. The work I make today, I couldn’t have made 5 years ago, 3 years ago, 1 year ago. Now is the right time for this work. Some ideas have been percolating for 10 years, and yet still remain unmade – perhaps I don’t have the technical skills, or the confidence, or I’m doing other things in my life that means that idea isn’t possible right now.

The important thing about parmesan, like art, is that we recognise the advantage in its maturation instead of feeling impatient, frustrated or deflated that our cheese isn’t ready yet – some things need the time and it could be no other way.

Ever since I was a child, I enjoyed comics. I have vague childhood memories of being engrossed in Garfield comics in my school library. I also have similarly vague memories of looking for comics like Fred Basset in the Sunday newspapers my parents bought. I’m not convinced I understood any of it, but I found the pictures completely engaging. I remember trying to draw Garfield – it was difficult.

But, I stopped drawing in high-school at about the time I was told (mostly by my parents) that I needed to ‘grow up and focus on getting a job’. On the surface, that may sound like a lost opportunity but it wasn’t bad advice. It worked out pretty well. It provided financial security (which, in turn, allowed me to pursue an art practise ‘on the side’). Then, 15 years or so into my career in software design, a colleague of mine introduced me to ‘comics’ again, but this time, in graphic novel form. He let me borrow his copy of Y The Last Man. I was hooked… I was almost 35 years old but that 7-year old boy swam up from the depths and re-introduced himself to me.

A tradition as old as time

Now, for the last few days I’ve been walking through through places like the Pinoteca Di Brera in Milan and Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna. And, like many art galleries in Italy, it contains a wealth of very old art – but especially – comics. Perhaps not in the way my 7-year old self or even my 35-year old self would recognise, but they are sequential art, and it’s been happening for a very long time.

It’s easy to mistake ‘comics’ for a relatively modern phenomenon, especially after the proliferation of them in US culture during the 1950s and the influence of Frederic Wertham’s ‘research’ in his book “Seduction of the Innocent – the influence of comic books on today’s youth”. Of course, it’s also been very present in Japan through recent forms like manga. But, in reality, pictures have been telling us important stories, especially for those who struggle with reading, since, well, we’ve been able to make a mark on a cave wall.

This ‘old’ form of visual storytelling is easy to mistake for something else (often just called “religious art”), but in many cases, they are undoubtedly sequential art. My 7-year old self (or my parents) never thought of The Stations of The Cross in church on Sunday as “comics” – I was exposed to those sequential paintings every week for many of my early years. And, in the galleries of Italy, the stories are contained in elaborate alter pieces depicting important religious figures lives (saints, martyrs, mothers). Some even show the presence of speech!

Ever since those high-school days, I felt that my love of visual storytelling – both reading it and making it – put me on the fringe; made me an outsider because in today’s culture it’s still seen as something ‘lesser’ than, say, I don’t know, something more ‘professional’ (Doctor? Lawyer?). But now, if anything, my love of visual storytelling makes me feel like someone whose connected to a past tradition that has persisted since that first mark on the wall.

It also gives me a sense of responsibility – to normalise our acceptance of ‘comics’ as sequential art at to play, extend, and push what’s possible in how we tell visual stories to one another, to inspire a new generation of visual storytellers (and readers). Time to get to work.

I’m currently travelling around Nothern Italy and finding it difficult to remain unmoved by the grand, labour-intensive, multi-generational artworks that were made during the middle ages and renaissance period, almost 700 years ago. I’m not religious, but the work done in service of religion – the architecture, the sculpting, the painting, the music, is, I think, objectively extraordinary. Not just in quality, but in volume, too.

When I think of the big projects that are burning a hole in my brain, like that 300 page graphic novel I need to write, having something divine would indeed be quite useful. A church or god to please, or an eternal hellfire to avoid would no doubt provide the impetus to make the work.

Some of us wait for book contracts to be signed, to be noticed on social media, or we wait for those infrequent but intense ‘bursts of creativity’. In a secular world that worships money (or, at least, uses it as a measure of the success of a work), how does one find another reason to begin, make, and share projects that require extraordinary amounts of patience and labour?

It’s easy, in today’s hustle culture, to lose faith in art for art’s sake. If no one buys my work, is it worth anything? Is it any good? Am I any good? But perhaps all we need is to replace capitalism with humanism – a faith that great, good, and bad works of art help us all connect with one another, either in this life, or with those who follow us when we’re gone.

Now that’s something worth working for.

No, it’s not easy to admit, I have been a professional illustrator for almost 10 years and I haven’t thought much about the definition of it – to explain or make (something) clear. It is derived from the latin, illustrare – to shed light on.

On the contrary, one thing I have thought a lot about over those 10 years is how most people I’ve worked with struggle to see something in their mind’s eye – an inability to imagine. I’ve described ideas in words, talked about plots and structures over coffee, written down explanations of characters and sequences of events, but nothing works like drawing. Nothing.

Perhaps it’s because I need to be better with words? That’s probably true. But I’ve learned a more likely reason is because people need to see the idea… all of it… on the page… to experience an emotional reaction to it – and drawings evoke emotions fast (in some studies, just 13 milliseconds!).

Once someone experiences a feeling, they can do something with it – describe it, react to it, understand where it comes from, or how the stimulus (the image) could be changed to heighten or dampen that feeling. Once something is on the page, everyone has an opinion on it – what it could or should be. That can be difficult to hear and manage sometimes, but it’s more useful than “I can’t see what you see”.

As it turns out then, the definition of illustration still holds true – drawing, more than anything, helps to shed light on things that otherwise sit in the dark. I like that idea.

It’s easy to kill 5 minutes – pick up a phone and start scrolling. Before you know it, the time has passed – thoroughly dead. But what if, instead of killing those 5 minutes, we put down our devices and brought that 5 minutes to life.

The name on the book cover is somewhat of a lie. It perpetuates a myth of the ‘creative’. It implies that one person did it all by themselves – the writing, the drawing, the editing, the refining. But we never operate in isolation. Humans need each other to survive. On our own, we are at risk.

So, when it comes to producing creative work, what’s important is finding the matching puzzle pieces – the pieces that fit with you but also work to extend you, and in turn, extend themselves. Once a network of puzzle pieces form, the work is stronger, better, and more complete, despite what it says on the cover.

But, to do this, one needs to understand one’s own shape first.

If I’m learning piano for the first time, how long should it take to make something that sounds like music? I could spend several months learning scales, correct posture, hand and finger independence, and music theory so I have the building blocks for making something that sounds like music, but all that won’t sound like music. Or, I can learn a chord progression and use my voice to add a melody so that, within a couple of days, I’m making music.

Even outside of art, this holds true. When we learn to drive, we don’t sit in a simulator and learn the building blocks of driving like hazard perception, gear changing, mirror/head checking etc, we just get in and start driving. Albeit, we drive slowly, and with someone in the passenger seat, but we use real roads, real traffic, and a real car; we learn fastest by trying the real thing.

Same goes for making visual art. 

For years, I can sit around and read about art history, pigments and chemistry, properties of different brushes and papers, and I can watch endless video demonstrations. Or, I can pick up a brush, put some paint on it, and make some marks.

This isn’t to say that all theory and fundamental skills are useless, but that the motivation to develop those skills and delve into the theory often comes from making something that sounds like music, that looks like a drawing, as quickly as possible.