I’ve been struggling to return to mindless doodling and writing; that space of pure invention; to use the physical act of mark-making to explore what I’m thinking and feeling.

I haven’t quite worked out what it is, but I think ‘publishing’, as a goal, has begun to dominate my thinking. Who will buy it? Who will be interested? What market is this for? These questions are creating barriers – second-guessing, fear of losing touch, a lack of confidence.

Over the years, I’ve known many emerging and unpublished authors describe the same questions and feelings. They all boil down to the same ultimate question, “What’s the point of making art?” And, even though I answered this for myself almost 4 years ago, it’s still difficult to prioritise it when the rest of the world is competing for my attention in so many different ways.

I used to think that self-confidence and motivation were beginner’s problems. But, as it turns out, no matter how many books are published, or awards won, this question still emerges in any artist’s mind at different stages in their career. Well, it’s been my experience, anyway.

And now that I know this is true, I have a couple of options.

I can persist with trying to answer the unsolvable questions – who will buy it, who will be interested, what market is this for – before I put pen to paper. This probably means that days, weeks, or months go by without anything physical to show for all the thinking and worrying that’s been going on.

The other option is just to put pen to paper and then worry about the rest later. By visualising something (or, anything), it’s at least a way of recording all the failures along the way. As any good scientist knows, even a negative result is still a positive one.

Visual art is complex. We make hundreds of tiny decisions to produce a single piece. What should I draw? How should I draw it? What materials do I use? How big should it be? What orientation is best? Do I use line? Form? Colour? What’s the composition? The list goes on. It can often be highly stressful and overwhelming sometimes, so much so that we simply don’t do anything – paralyzed by the fear of making a bad choice within that myriad of options. Of course, the opposite is also true, when I get over those first hurdles and answer a few of those questions, making art is one of the most relaxing and enjoyable ways to spend my time.

I’ve just returned from holidays – a week in the Daintree Rainforest. And, whilst I draw ‘for work’ I also like to ‘draw to relax’. There is, however, a lot to draw in Far North Queensland. Beaches, dense rainforest, waterholes, mammals, insects, food, and people enjoying their own holiday. Deciding which materials to take raise the anxiety levels even before we’ve left. And then there’s the choices we make while we’re there.

But, I discovered something on this most recent trip that I haven’t done out in the field before – constraints. Some of my favourite sketches (and most relaxing moments) were when I was sketching with a single ink brush on cheap paper. It removed the number of decisions I needed to make about materials and colour, and reduced the risk of me ‘making a crap drawing with ‘expensive’ stuff. It was, in a single word – freeing.

And so, I’ve decided to bring this practice home. To keep things simple and not get distracted or overwhelmed by all the ways to create images. Sometimes, all you need is a pencil and some scrap paper. Armed with those, and an imagination, the possibilities are still limitless, we just get to worry less.

I’m running out of room. Room to store stuff, room to experiment with new materials, room to explore new ideas. I don’t know whether it’s because we’re working from home now? Or having spent many years in a pandemic? But things are feeling… ‘constrained’.

Yet, I say that and think – but we’ve got a 3 br house; one we never thought we could ever afford. We have a separate study/office – one that, when the day’s done, we can close the door and disconnect. We’re not working from a kitchen bench or a desk set up in the lounge room or bedroom like some of my friends.

Maybe it’s not about the physical amount of space, then; maybe it’s about how it’s being used? A fancy new monitor and electronics sit intermingled with my watercolours. I’m finding that I’m using coloured pencils joyously but am less inclined to use wet media like watercolour and ink in the same place as my shiny new 4k monitor or laptop.

Maybe, instead of more room, what I need is a new routine? To rethink the space I inhabit throughout the week and tweak it, cleverly, to unlock my ability to create freely again. I wonder if it’s the same for others, too.

This weekend, I spent almost 12 hours drawing; but probably not on the things I was supposed to. See, I’m supposed to be working on two books – both in their very early stages – but I never spent a single moment on them. Instead, I played. I played with ink, with watercolour, with my printer and how I might use it in my practice. There was a huge learning curve, I produced loads of work and, by the end of it, I was tired; but no one paid me for that. I was supposed to be doing the other thing. So, was this an act of procrastination or was it genuinely productive? One part of me feels like I got ‘sidetracked’, the other part of me felt like it was a huge leap forward on a bigger path.

I don’t always feel like I did over the weekend. For some reason, there was an urge to explore, play, and learn. New materials, new techniques, a new challenge. It’s not that the work I’ve got scheduled isn’t challenging or new, it’s just… it doesn’t involve the lateral thinking I could feel firing up in my brain.

What comes to mind is the Liz Fosslien illustration of consistency versus motivation. I reflect on this a lot because, well, sometimes I feel like I’m more in the motivation camp rather than the consistency one. If I was to draw last weekend’s activities, it’d look much more like the sudden burst of energy in the motivation curve, not the consistency one.

The problem, of course, is that whilst I know that last weekend’s activities didn’t directly contribute to the things I’m working on now, they’re part of a bigger story. One where I’m improving my visual communication skills. One where I’m learning about where to go next. One where I’m using my lateral and divergent thinking skills instead of my convergent ones that are often required for live book work. It genuinely felt productive, not like procrastination.

Pigeon holes, definitions, and frameworks can be useful reminders but they can also be detrimental. They can make us second guess ourselves and our intentions toward our work. The can make us feel like we’re procrastinating instead of being productive.

What seems most important is to be clear on the story we’re telling ourselves – what’s the work for, and who will benefit in what way? Once we’ve got that down, even procrastination can be productive sometimes, too.

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.

A friend once said to me, “You’re too socially adjusted to be a real artist.” Friends say a lot of things to me, most of which I don’t remember, but for some reason, this stuck, and I’ve been asking myself that question, occasionally, ever since – Am I?

It’s the classic mythology – the starving artist squirrels away in their garret or studio, alone, for their whole lives, and they produce insightful observations that provide a lens through which that same society can look upon itself to learn something it never knew. It’s often the most insightful and important work an artist can do, and it often requires that solitude; an extraction from the day-to-day flow of things – a pause to ‘come up for air’ and get back in touch with how one truly feels when the influences of ‘mindless reaction’ are removed.

Perhaps that’s what she meant? I’m too ‘in the day-to-day flow of things’? Perhaps I value friendship and social connection more than a ‘real artist’ should? Maybe I don’t say ‘no’ enough to a night out with friends? Maybe it’s my relationships that are ‘getting in the way’ of producing the best work of my life?

But also – maybe that’s just bollocks.

The reality is, different things work for different people, and at different times. Some of us need more isolation than others. Some of us need more social interaction. Some of find inspiration in understanding key political events and the global interconnectedness of things, others prefer to ‘sit outside’ of that and observe the human condition as if from another planet.

So, am I too socially adjusted? Maybe. But when one looks at my work (and it’s fun to reflect on my own work in retrospect), it’s *because* of my love of friendship, community, & connection that stories like Eric The Postie emerge. It’s *because* I engage with the news and think deeply about things like migration, free trade, and the global displacement of the human population that stories like Queen Celine develop. It’s because I care deeply about First Nations’ rights, Social Equality and Inclusivity, that I’m even working in the unique platform that only children’s books provide.

I may not be the tortured artist that people imagine one must be to be an artist at all. But, as I’ve said before – an artist is just someone who asks questions. Whether you’re someone who prefers to work alone, or doesn’t particularly enjoy the company of others, or whether you’re the total opposite, what seems common is that we care – we care to observe whichever environment we find curious, and take some of our precious time on Earth to seek an answer for ourselves. And then, as a complete act of generosity, we share that with the world in the hope it may help someone as much as it helped us make sense of things.

I’ve got one foot in big tech and another in traditional publishing. The worlds couldn’t be more different.

Software is driven by a culture of ‘open-source’. You make something, and give it away for free. The theory is that, over time, by standing on shoulders of giants, as an industry, it will arrive at a better place than if it was all kept to ourselves. There’s an expectation, from the outset, that people will take our ideas, change them, and give us back something entirely new, something that we might then evolve even further. It assumes that ideas are infinite and malleable and will only get better with time.

Publishing talks about copyright. They talk about ‘protecting’ the rights of the author. That if someone uses the work, the creator of that work should be paid ‘fairly’ (whatever that means in legal terms). The theory is that paying people for these ideas will provide the motivation for those artists, and others, to keep producing work. This right to be paid for your ideas in this industry is fought for ferociously. It assumes that ideas of an individual are worth something significant.

In the software world, there’s little to no curation. There are millions of projects of variable quality across the internet. In software, this is a good thing. The crowd decides what lives, and what dies. Beneficial code and ideas tend to spread, bad ones don’t.

In publishing, it’s highly curated. Publishers have a finite number of book slots to fill every year. Projects are picked on the merit of the idea when measured against what will sell, and what’s come before. That selection is made by people in a particular class of society. Publishing produces less ideas, but they are believed to be higher quality. However, those ideas come at a cost – people need to be readers and books cost money and not everyone has access to a library.

To be perfectly honest, both have pros and cons but, right now, I can’t help but believe that open-source is, in fact, aligned with a greater good. There is an inherent bias in publishing, on a number of levels. This is no one’s individual fault but the result of systemic and structural inequality – the same inequality that governs all aspect of our culture. I know that publishers are working SO hard to change their practices, to try to dismantle the inherent biases that have formed their own cultures over the years but that’s going to take time. What do we do in the meantime? Protect our ideas so that only the wealthy have access? There’s got to be a better way – maybe that’s open-source?

I genuinely believe that people will pay to consume stories, and the arts, if they can. When I see my books and works pirated, it brings me a little joy, not despair, because the biggest threat to the arts isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. I’m also privileged in many ways, the biggest is that I don’t rely on my artistic work for income. That’s a game changer. But, the ASA reports that the average annual income for authors from their books is around $11,000 AUD, so, with that in mind, it seems that most authors aren’t relying on their artistic work for income, either? Is that because of an inherent undervaluing of the work artist’s produce? Or something else? Stamping down on pirating, or trawling the internet for breaches of copyright won’t bring that annual income number up to a living wage. The time and energy spent doing that may be better spent creating the next work.

I don’t know about other authors, but I don’t work in the arts for income. Others I know say a similar thing, or, at the very least, it’s not the primary driver. If money was important to us we’d all join the finance sector. Self-expression is important (but that changes when a publisher gets involved anyway), so the real reason I work in the arts is to change culture.

Right now, publishers bring curation, distribution, and a second perspective that generally leads to higher-quality work (but may also risk biasing away from audiences who don’t have the education or means to engage with a ‘higher-quality’ work). Automation will destroy their competitive advantage of distribution (and the economy of scale printing costs they benefit from in large-scale print runs) over time. That leaves ‘curation’ and ‘quality’ as their only advantage. But who are the gatekeepers? And who should be? Should literature be controlled by the educated few? Or should authors and illustrators aim to get their work in as many hands as possible to create a more diverse literature landscape that is a truer representation of the world as it is? Even if it means ceding a few dollars to get the work in the hands of people who can’t afford it.

I don’t have answers to these questions, and I’m very aware I’m coming from a privileged position here. Media companies are eating each other as a solution to ‘staying alive’ so we’re slowly moving toward a less diverse media landscape, anyway. Publishers are leaning more and more on celebrities as a way to ‘keep up’ with how to reach buyers in a noisy and uncontrollable attention-landscape unleashed (and controlled) by the internet and social media services. Publish a celebrity and you buy their audience. They’re doing their best to ‘protect’ ideas, but the internet is a force that even media companies can’t comfortably reckon with or predict. It’s changing too fast, too organically, and with not enough transparency.

Meanwhile, software is eating the world. There has never been a better time in history for an artist to reach the widest audience possible. We are no longer sitting in a provincial market square in France that sees 17 walkers-by a day. In a button click, we have access to millions of people. To limit access to an idea that may change a life seems short-sighted and unintuitive to me.

What we really need is more people engaging with the work. I know, as do many privileged people, that the arts and stories change lives. You only know that feeling from being privileged enough to have had the experience. Stories lead to a kinder and more empathetic world. They lead to better educated people and better education solves a lot of the world’s problems. Maybe what we need to do is let go, to stop squeezing our manuscripts and our illustrations tighter and tighter for fear of not being paid or acknowledged. Maybe we need to keep making the work that we know does good and have faith that it’ll find a place in the world – whether that place can afford it or not.

No matter how experienced I become at communicating my ideas, I often find myself falling into the same trap – submitting some storyboards or roughs that, in my mind, nail a brief, but inevitably, are misread by the audience (publisher and/or editor). I forget that visual communication is a strength of mine, so what may be obvious to me is not always obvious to others.

If I want my pitch to land with the gravity with which I intend, I need to do everything I can to help bridge the gap between my deep understanding of visual storytelling and the audience (most often, a publisher or editor) and that often means educating folks along the way.

I don’t know if this is the same as others, but with my work I often have a reason/s for every choice I make. The reasons behind my choice of framing, or the sequence of some drawings within a book are more akin to a scientific process, rather than a ‘creative’ one. The rules of effective visual storytelling have been around for as long as we’ve been able to draw on cave walls and I apply them, rigourously, to ensure that the goals of the work are achieved.

Uninformed audiences feel these things when they experience them, even if they aren’t consciously aware of what’s happening. The most common experience is when we watch films. So, when I’m doing storyboard or rough sketches, what I’m imagining is the final result – I can see the final art, coloured, in my brain. But, I forget that the image formed in my brain from a few rough squiggles is far more complete than what’s on the page – the thing that others will consume early on in the picture book process.

What helps with this is being explicit about the reasons behind the choices I’m making. Adding detailed explanations of why a certain perspective is important for a particular type of image, or why one particular image followed by another is the most appropriate way to communicate what we’re trying to communicate. It feels boring and obvious and I often catch myself thinking, “Really, you need this to understand what I’ve drawn?” But it’s almost always true.

Sometimes I use other visual references, sometimes words and explanations are enough. It’s often based in the language and principles of film, sequential art, or graphic design. Things like hierarchy, gestalt principles, camera angle language, colour psychology, typography etc form the basis of the what I use to explain the work well.

If I don’t provide this background and language, the feedback I get tends to be less useful in making what I’ve presented better; it tends to produce feedback that isn’t mindful of the goals I set out to achieve which ends up being frustraing and confusing for everyone. It’s a bit like producing a maths solution without showing the working. The working provides the context for the final result – it provides a way for another brain to follow my logic to understand the conclusion I’ve come to; even if it’s not quite the answer they were looking for.

So, the challenge we have as visual storytellers is to present something that describes and explains a clear and compelling intent, but sets up the next conversation for success – the one about how to amplify the work and why.

By educating our viewers on some of the principles and language behind visual storytelling, not only do we help our storyboards and roughs become more understandable, but we transfer some of the power we hold to others, and the world becomes better for it.

I love getting feedback. If I didn’t, I’d never share anything I create with anyone. Feedback is what helps us know if people feel the same things as us, or see things a different way. But, even though feedback is glorious, it’s also confronting. Disagreement can be uncomfortable at the best of times, it can be diabolical at the worst of times – especially when it comes to feedback from the art we make.

Part of the problem is that no one trains or teaches us how to accept feedback graciously. The other part of the problem is that no trains or teaches us how to give it mindfully. Humans tend to think in solutions rather than problems and so when someone writes a list of all the ways your art could be better, it can be confusing and confronting because we just don’t know why someone has had that reaction and we bias towards thinking there’s something wrong with what we’ve made.

Categorising feedback helps

One way to make feedback easier to receive is to ask for it in a specific way. After all, if the feedback giver has never been trained to give feedback, it’s likely they’re not going to do it well, or they’re going to structure it in a way that makes sense to them. What we need, as artists, is to seek feedback in a way that makes sense to us.

In art – or, specifically, the moment that the art becomes design within a picture book context, I’ve noticed 3 types of feedback that I tend to receive from publishers. No one has ever categorised their feedback in this way to me, it’s just me finding a pattern in the feedback I’ve received after 20 books. The three types are:

1. Direction. This is feedback that is really a “must” – you “must” find a way to alter or change this thing because it’s a problem. It’s the feedback that most editors find most confronting to give, but it’s often the most useful. It tends to be structural or critical to the story or scene. Things like, “this character only appears once, are they important?” or “That plane looks like it might be on a downward trajectory ending in a crash – we can’t have that.” Direction isn’t non-negotiable, but it’s the most important type. As feedback givers often think in solutions, not problems, sometimes direction-style feedback needs a conversation to uncover the ‘why’ behind the direction.
2. Suggestions. This feedback is a type of “should” or “could”. In other words, this colour ‘could’ change, or this colour ‘should’ change. Suggestions are less critical than direction, but they’re an important perspective. It’s a moment of grey. Maybe I never saw it that way, or I still don’t see it that way but someone else does. It takes humility and critical thinking to unpack the why behind the perceived problem or improvement. It’s often just a misunderstanding, and often a small tweak is all that’s needed.
3. Comments. This feedback is equivalent to ‘thinking aloud.’ There’s no direction, no suggestion, just a spark in someone’s brain about something they see. “The cat looks fluffy?” or “I love the rocket, will it be red?” Comments can be confusing because, as art should, it’s sparks “something” in the viewers’ mind, but it’s unclear whether that something is a problem, or simply a way for the artist to note where things aren’t clear, or what’s sticking out and what’s not. With commentary, it’s always worth clarifying whether it’s either direction or suggestion first. Sometimes, it’s just lovely that someone noticed a detail.

Now, whenever I get feedback, I categorise the response into these 3 buckets. It helps me have a clearer and more productive conversation with the editor or author upfront. Is this a must? Is this is a could or should? Why is this comment important? Knowing this makes things much easier to iterate on. And iteration, in my experience, tends to make things better. After all, everything’s a draft.

Some of the best meals I’ve cooked at home have been when we’ve been down to bare-bones food in the fridge, pantry, and freezer. Seemingly disconnected ingredients like stale bread, some leftover stock, a tin of beans and a fried egg can come together to make something truly heartwarming and satisfying. It’s not that there is nothing around; it’s just that there’s no rule or pre-meditated idea that stitches it together. There is no recipe for this sort of cooking. No celebrity chef cookware you can buy to improve the taste or flavour. It’s a combination of serendipity and one of life’s most base urges – hunger.

I’ve also come to realise that not everyone has this ability out of the box, but it can be learned. The more you teach yourself to understand the relationship between salt, acid, fat, sugar, and heat, the more able you are to take a random bunch of ingredients and put them together to create something that most people will find pleasing; maybe not mind-blowing, but pleasing.

And so now I reflect on writing – inventing ideas, images, and storylines that capture our attention and lead an audience through an emotional beginning, middle and end. It’s very similar to the ‘cooking something from nothing’ process. Not everyone has the ability out-of-the-box but it too can be learned because they do have raw ingredients. A person they sat across from on the bus yesterday. The person who swims 50 laps of the pool at 9am every day. The chef who travels a 140km return trip every day so he can serve a restaurant of 8 people every night. The bird that pooed on their head that time. Or the time their friend was eating hot chips and a seagull swooped down and stole one.

The events, people, and places in which we live our lives are the raw ingredients. On the surface, they’re unrelated, but, like with salt, acid, fat, and heat in cooking; the more you understand the elements of good story telling – character, plot, story structure, conflict – the easier it becomes to take those every day events as inspiration and stitch them together to create something that wasn’t there before; something new.

So, if this is true for cooking and storytelling, it’s probably true for other forms of invention; we’re never really creating something from nothing. What we need to learn is to see that nothing is always something, and bringing them together well – whether it’s a good meal or a good yarn – just needs a little curiosity and a dash of knowledge. Bon Appetit.