We often talk about having the luxury of more time. With more time, we could do more things, we tell ourselves. But without time constraints, it becomes more difficult to prioritise; to know when enough is enough. Sometimes, having no time is exactly what we need to help us make progress, to finish something, to move on to what comes next.

I have more ideas than time in my life to write or draw them – to turn them into something that someone else can experience, consume, consider, and use. And, whilst making something for someone else isn’t the only motivation to make something, it’s certainly an important factor when I prioritise something. Sure, the work I make helps me, but will it also help someone else? The former criterion is art, the latter, a service. If that’s true, then art is inherently a selfish act, a service to one’s self. Whilst work for others is an act of generosity; my time for your experience.

Can a selfish act also be generous?

I tell myself I am a generous person – that I prioritise the wellbeing of others within safe limits of my own wellbeing. Living by this criteria has provided me with wonderful relationships and experiences I wouldn’t have otherwise had. It gives me the feeling of being in service to something greater than myself. But, because of this, it also prevents me from prioritising art. Work that is in service of just one person – me.

But, in the very few cases I have prioritised art – work that is only for me – there have been unexpected consequences. Others have engaged with it and have been moved, changed, and healed. Others have been confused, underwhelmed, unsettled. A service provides a generally positive feeling to many, art provokes a generally polarising reaction – intense but different.

In a world where algorithms are flattening and homogenising our experiences; maybe there’s enough work being done as a service. Maybe it’s time to start being a little more selfish; to find the edges of what it means to feel human and provoke intense and deep emotions, positive or negative, before we forget how to feel. A selfish act that, when offered to the world, becomes an act of generosity.

Most people think that creative work has a better chance of completion if there are fewer constraints. But, working within structure helps because it eliminates some options and through elimination comes focus. Despite what we think about ‘freedom’ in creative work, structure is everywhere.

In graphic design, we use grids to give us an underlying structure on which we build interesting and varied layouts. Newspapers, magazines, books, and the web all have underlying structure (columns and rows) that provide a certain consistency for how content spatially relates. Structure helps the creator make decions and the reader interpret the work.

In comics, panels are typically laid out according to an underlying grid – again, of horizontal and vertical divisions. Rather than this grid ‘getting in the way’ of creativity, it unlocks it – it defines the rules under which most work can be made and a certainty that the reader will use past experience with such grids to be able to read and interpret the creator’s story or message.

Beyond physical structure, there is conceptual structure, too. Stories themselves have structure. Beginnings, Middles, Ends. They have a central protagonist and antagonist. Supporting characters. They have 3 acts (or 4, depending on who you talk to), each with a different purpose and goal. Get all these right and you’ve got a story that most people will understand. Structure doesn’t, however, guarantee a good story.

That’s not to say that we don’t, can’t, or shouldn’t break the rules sometimes. But, you can only break something that wasn’t broken in the first place. When we break the grid or the structure, it’s often for a reason: we want to surprise, we want variation, we want to emphasise a feeling. But, largely, breaking structure is the exception not the rule.

I’ve been struggling to prioritise which story or drawing idea to work on next. They all have interesting bits within them so choosing based on ‘interesting-ness’ isn’t going to work this time.

Same goes for learning. One would improve my drawing skills, another would improve my comics skills, another would improve my colour skills – so choosing by what skills I want to improve won’t work either.

Then I started reading “Art of Photography: An Approach to Personal Expression” by Bruce Barnbaum. In the context of choosing which subjects to photograph and how, he writes:

“The first thing to look for in determining your interests is enthusiasm. I cannot overemphasise the importance of enthusiasm. I once heard that three human ingredients will combine to produce success in any field of endeavour: enthusiasm, talent, and hard work, and that a person can be successful with only two of those attributes as long as one of the two is enthusiasm!”

It struck me light a bolt of enthusiastic lightning. When I’m enthusiastic about a project, it dominates everything inside me. It’s as if every other project I had in mind drops away (forgetting to eat and drink properly included). In a rational world where we’re supposed to weigh up pros and cons of everything before choosing a course of action, I realised there was another, more emotionally-drive way – might enthusiasm work for choosing my next project?

With this lens, the choice became much easier. I simply picked and began.

The problem with enthusiasm, of course, is that it can be fleeting and inconsistent. Enthusiastic one day, not enthusiastic the next. Most ideas I work on begin with plenty of enthusiasm and I think “this is the greatest idea that ever existed!” Then, at some point, they get difficult. I get stuck or I realise I’m lacking a skill to progress it. It’s important to remember that this moment happens in almost every project and is a natural part of creative work. The challenge for most of us is to know that it will pass and get better – overcoming those challenges, improving skills is fundamental to the process. It’s what Bruce would call the second ingredient (for those without talent): hard work.

Noodling is a word I use to describe when I’m messing around. A bit like play. Maybe there’s some idea, or starting point, that sits me down with a pencil in hand, but often there isn’t. Most of the time, when I sit down to draw for fun, I truly have no idea where the marks I’m making will go.

But, I also know that without a little noodling, I’ll never make a pasta. It’s become one of the most important parts of my art practice.

My work is meant for books and stories, not gallery walls. Sometimes I wish it were another way – I like the idea of ‘exhibitions’ and evenings at a gallery. So, I try to experiment with what it would take to make something beautiful for beauty’s sake but no matter what happens, I end up in the same place – I need more panels, more backstory, a stronger character, something more than beauty to drive the work forward.

So, I will never be like them, the gallery artists, but it’s also likely true that they will never be like me.

What the market wants is lower cost, more efficient production, higher output and easily reproducible steps. If that becomes one’s criteria for running an art practice, it’s not an art practice anymore, it’s a business.

One of the key skills an illustrator has to learn, it seems, isn’t about drawing at all; it’s about becoming comfortable with invisibility. For some reason, our culture still largely focusses on (and admires) words, “Do you also write or just illustrate?” is one of the most common questions I get from people who discover what I do. To be an author is something to aspire to. An illustrator? Not so much.

Pictures, we know, transfer information and feeling much faster than words to most people. Using pictures to communicate also doesn’t require the viewer to learn a language. I can write “smile” in English and I will reach an english-speaking audience. But to reach other audiences I need to translate that – Spanish, Mandarin, Swahili. Or I can draw a smile – 😊 – for everyone.

In commercial picture books, the pictures create a ‘visual identity’ for the book as it sits alongside all the other books on the shelf seeking a customer. A buyer doesn’t need to read a single word of the book to know whether it will be cute/fun, scary, serious, literary, or sad. Pictures do all of that heavy lifting on the cover, the best ones don’t just describe a mood, they tell a story.

Pictures work at such a natural and subconscious level that even authors and viewers don’t even recognise their effect sometimes. An illustrator will often be referred to by an author as ‘the person who drew the pictures for my book’. Most of the time, I’m OK with this, but sometimes, I’m not.

Part of the joy of drawing pictures for people in commercial picture books is to see a reaction, to feel that we’ve informed or entertained another human. It’s fundamentally about connection. But, unfortunately, the connection we make through pictures with eachother can often be one way – we send something out into the world, the receiver loves it, adores it, but doesn’t recognise the human behind it.

It’s easy to get a little bitter about this but there is another reaction: to channel how my 10-year-old self would have thought about the power of invisibility because he would’ve loved it!

Mass-produced products exist in almost every physical product category I can think of: Chairs, tables, mobile phones, clothing, food and others. We know the trade-offs we make when we purchase a mass-produced product over something custom or artisan-made. With mass-produced products, we typically save money, the quality isn’t as good as something hand-made, but it satisfies a need.

Sometimes, we decide to invest in something that isn’t mass produced – a custom-designed bookshelf, a set of handmade dinnerware; this also has a trade-off. We know we pay more but the quality is better, it’s likely to last longer, and be more suitable to a specific need or needs. We may even save money in the long run.

It seems to me that large language models in their current form now enable us to mass produce words and images and it seems that, on the most part, it will be fine for most people. And yet, there are people who know and understand the value of something more hand-made and who value it enough to pay for it because we’re already doing that in every other product category that exists. Why would illustration be the abberation?

I can’t remember where I heard this (I didn’t come up with it), but it goes something like this. Imagine walking down the street on your way to work one day and someone runs up to you and wants to tell you about an amazing dream they had last night. Imagine that you’re a kind and generous person and you decide to indulge this stranger, “Yes, OK, please tell me your dream.”

When you agree to listen, they give you two conditions.

“First, before I tell you my dream, we have to find somewhere to sit, it’s going to take at least 2 hours, maybe a bit longer.”

A reasonable person may stop them here and say thanks but no thanks and return to their day. A person with more time might say, “OK, I have the time, let’s go find somewhere to sit.” And so, they find somewhere to sit with this stranger and then the stranger provides their second condition.

“Ok, so, to hear my dream, you also need to pay me $20. Once you pay me, I’ll tell you.”

It may sound ridiculous, almost no one in their right mind would say OK – suddenly this dream is costing the listener time and money. And yet, no matter how illogical, this is exactly what we agree to do everyday when we purchase a cinema ticket and watch a film, or pay another monthly fee to a streaming service and binge a series on the couch.

The act of telling and listening to stories is illogical. It is inefficient. It is kind of insane. It’s also an act of generosity and a deeply human way for us to be informed, entertained, and create connection with one another which is why, despite the ask from the dream-teller, we do it almost every day.