September 27, 2022

Important work

When I’m choosing whether or not to illustrate a text, or prioritise a project, the one question that seems to rise above all is, “Why is this important?”

With a finite amount of time on Earth, having a framework to help with decision-making can be helpful. Like with anything important, most of it can’t be decided by a formula but having some guidelines or rules help the process.

Who’s on the team? Knowing the team I’ll be working with is important to me. Why? Because, above all, I prioritise spending time with lovely people. I want to know if they’ll push me creatively. I want to know if they communicate clearly and promptly. I want to know if they listen or tell. I want to know if they take risks or play it safe. All of these questions help me get a clearer picture of the people I’ll be spending the next 3 months with. I also want them to have fun and enjoy the process, too, and perhaps even form a friendship that outlasts the book. If publishers have 40 books on the go at once, I want this one to be the one that’s the most fun, and the easiest one because, in the end, that contributes a lot to making it the best one.

What’s the story about? By this, I don’t mean what’s the plot. What I care about, when I’m choosing to illustrate a text, is what the book is for. Is it helping explore a conversation between parent and child about grief? Is it trying to teach kids about their emotions and how to deal with them? Is it trying to make children feel and understand humour? Knowing what change a book is trying to make in the reader is critical to influencing my decision.

Does it answer a question I’ve also had? I’ll be frank – I have a lot of questions. I explore them in my own texts but, you know, there are so many hours in a day, and so I look to other texts to trigger those questions in me. Some, I’ll admit, are boring – they’re an easy no. But others are where art lies – addressing a question I never thought I had until I read it. When one has those moments, it’s difficult to turn them down because, now, the project is about using the process (and getting paid) to explore my own answers to those questions, and that makes it exponentially more interesting and always produces better work.

Is it worth the ecological cost? I’ve written about this before but I still think about the use of natural resources in a book and ask myself, ‘is it worth those trees? Those plastics? That glue? Those carbon emissions for distributing in Australia and across the globe?’

What might I learn from it? This is the catch-all because there’s no way to make this into a formula. Perhaps what I’ll learn comes from the answer to the first four questions? For example – maybe the editor has a style of working that I’m not familiar with. By taking on this job, I’ll learn about whether I enjoy that way, or can take something from it to add to my existing practice. It may also be that the text calls for a new art medium (like ink in Rosie) or working in a new or novel format. I learned a lot from that book. I know that I get a huge dopamine hit from steep learning curves, so I definitely bias a decision toward that.

What’s the commercial benefit? It would be remiss of me to not include this in my thinking but, to be honest, it’s fairly unimportant. It’s not that I don’t care about it, it’s just that it’s too difficult to know for sure. Advances are certain, but they don’t really paint a decent picture of the financial benefit. No one, not even the publisher, has a firm grasp on the financial return of a book (if they did, they’d have a lot more revenue and publishing would be thriving). Trying to decide to take on a project based on the possibility of scaled income isn’t useful. Some books I’ve worked on that were supposed to be commercially successful were not. And others that were just ‘cheap and cheerful’ turned out to be some the best earning books I’ve worked on.

I reflect on what I’ve just written and am reminded of the privilege I have to even think in this way – to even consider the choice of saying no. But, I believe that any artist’s work, no matter how trivial, is defined by what they say yes and no, to. And so, if an artist is their work, it would only follow that one should decide upon it deliberately.

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