One of the most consistent pieces of advice I find myself giving to emerging illustrators over the years has been, “don’t draw for someone else. Draw what you enjoy. Make what you find interesting. Do it for yourself.” I still stand by that as the best advice, especially when starting out. But, there’s also something to be said for evolving an art practice using external influences.
Responding to a brief, engaging with commissions, and collaborating with others (authors, publishers etc) push me out of my comfort zone much further than if I were making up my own work. No matter how much we want to tell ourselves that we can push ourselves to do something ‘different than usual’, our unconscious biases will always be at play in the background (that’s what makes them unconscious).
Rosie the Rhinoceros (Jimmy Barnes) and Herman Crab (Peter Helliar) strike me as my two most recent examples where this is true. It’s also part of the reason why I love illustrating another’s text. There is no way that if I was working on my own, characters and illustrations I’ve invented in response to the text for Rosie the Rhinoceros and Herman Crab would have emerged. I needed that external influence – those prompts, those relationships – to produce the work I did for those two books.
Because of the external influence of another’s text, I painted things I’ve never painted before. Because of that, the work I’ve done since then has grown in variation, maturity, and confidence. I used to think that being in publishing was all about amplifying one’s own work. Now, it’s just another tool in the belt of how to become a better visual storyteller. It sits alongside my personal work, in harmony not competition, and both the personal and commercial work is getting better for it.