Whenever I tell people that I make picture books, one of the first questions they ask is, “Do you write and draw, or just draw?” And, I don’t know whether they mean it like this, but it’s the ‘just’ draw bit that gets me.

My knee-jerk response when people ask whether I ‘write or just draw’ is to rush to say, “I do both,” as if I have to justify myself or prove to someone that I can be as clever with words as I can be with pictures. They then go on to ask whether ‘there are any that they would know.’ As if, amongst the millions of picture books printed and distributed since humans could print and distribute, mine may be one that they had have seen before. But, I can’t help myself, looking for some sort of validation, I say that I’ve worked with Jackie French, Jimmy Barnes, and Peter Helliar and 9 times out of 10 the response I get is, “Oh, no, I don’t know those. Do you know ?”

Maybe it’s because I feel I got lucky, that I shouldn’t be here, that I’m somewhat of an imposter in this world of writing and drawing and ‘being published’. But, rushing to prove myself to other people – I write, and draw, and work with people who are ‘successful’ – feels like a response worth letting go. The goalposts of “success” or validation in any professional endeavour will always change – the first book was a milestone, the second was another milestone, winning awards, being published internationally, the bar keeps being raised so it’s always just beyond reach. But, it’s also not like I’m ungrateful for the journey so far – this work has been fundamentally life-altering for me; not from a financial perspective but through the way it’s changed the sort of person I’ve become and continue to grow into.

Maybe, instead of justifying my ‘success’ to those that enquire about it, I should just respond with, “Yes, I’m very lucky to be able to do this work – is there a book that you hold dear from your childhood?”

I’ve never done this before is a scary thing to have to admit. Because, if you’ve never done it before how do you know you’ll be any good (or even competent?) If you’ve never done it before, how do you plan? how do you reduce risk? how do you decide that it’s the right thing to do?

I’ve recently agreed to take part in a charity art auction that requires me to do a 1.5×1.5m canvas painting in a medium I’m unfamiliar with. I’ve never done this before.

Doing things you’ve done before is safe. You’ve made mistakes and have since corrected them. You’ve understood your limits, and the limits of the materials you’ve worked with. You know what not to repeat, and what to do again.

But, at some point, the thing you know how to do so well now was a thing you never did before. That could be about making art, sure, or it could also be about making pizza, meeting a new person, visiting a new city, or simply sleeping on a different side of the bed.

If almost everything we know how to do was something we had never done before and, most of the time, it’s worked out OK, then maybe we owe it to ourselves to try the new thing we’ve been putting off. After all, doing things we’ve never done before, whilst scary, can also unlock new pathways and passions in our lives that we’ve also never had before.

If I ever ship a piece of art, I always get the same question from the post office, “Would you like insurance with that?” The idea is that if the postal service loses my work, or it gets damaged, or it just doesn’t make it to it’s destination, they’ll pay me some money for my loss. But when it comes to an original piece of art, how much is it worth?

The easy answer to a question like this would be to say, “Well, if I sold this piece on the market today, I’d ask for X dollars, so I’ll guess I’ll insure it for that much.” But, monetary value (or exchange value), is just one domain of value and, to be honest, it’s not one I really ascribe to a piece of paper that contains my time, accumulated skill as an illustrator, and, let’s be honest, my heart.

I always refuse insurance because when something I care about that much is lost, money doesn’t make it better. Sure, I can buy enough materials to replace the loss in a physical material sense, but money can’t buy the time, place, and emotion that was present when I was making the work – art just doesn’t work like that.

When I think about what painters should paint, a few things come to mind immediately: flowers (or still lifes), vast landscapes (i.e. mountains, rivers, lakes, valleys), & portraiture. It should be in a semi-recognisable ‘style’, fairly representational (i.e. look like the thing it’s supposed to be), and beautiful. To me, those things are what comprise a ‘painting’.

Or are they?

What about the ordinary things that others don’t notice because they’re part of the everyday – malls, hardware shops, rubbish on the side of the road, a homeless person. Are these the sorts of things painters should paint? Would they sell if they were painted? If they didn’t sell, does that mean they are bad paintings?

What about photography? What should people take photos of?

I’ve recently discovered The New Topographics – a photographic movement of the late 60s and early 70s in America where photographers started taking pictures of the unextraordinary – and, I mean, the really unextraordinary. When we look at these photos in today’s image-saturated culture, it’s easy to think, “What’s the big deal? People can take photos of whatever they want?” But, at the time, these were photos of things people thought you shouldn’t take photos of.

What the photographic artists were doing, of course, were creating images they thought were important – reflecting on the sprawl of human habitation into places that humans had not been before. But to people ‘used to’ looking at ‘photographs’, these images could be described as banal, unphotographic, and ordinary.

Similar leaps into the unextraordinary also happened in Japan at similar times – photographers like Daido Moriyama and Toshio Shibata were making photographs that no one in Japan had seen before: prostitutes and industrial infrastructure. Capturing these images was not what photography was for, but they did it anyway. They caused a stir.

In both of these cases, these Japanese and American photographers moved photography on. As one expert described – they gave us permission to take photographs of new and different things.

And so, when I look at what’s going on in Children’s Literature, I can’t help but think, what should an illustrator illustrate? Happy children interacting with happy animals? Bears in bow ties, elephants wearing pyjamas? What about diversity – able-bodied kids of colour? Same-sex parents? What’s too far? What are we not ready for?

What we’re not supposed to draw are children with missing limbs. Children who may be improvising their way through life with low vision or blindess. Children dealing with chronic illness. Children interacting in the ‘real’ world – a world of climate change and natural disasters, rising homelessness and inequality, a world of prejudice, bias, and one where where humans and robots co-exist. A world as it exists, with all it’s messiness, joy, sadness, happiness, excitement and despair.

But what if we did? I’m not sure anyone would buy it, but would it do what The New Topographics did for photography? Would it move us on? Would it give us permission to draw things that have not been drawn before? Maybe it’s worth a try.

Some people prefer crunchy peanut butter, other people prefer smooth. It’s not that one is better than the other, they’re just different. And, no matter how compelling-a-case I could put together for why crunchy is better, I will never win over devotees of the smooth variety.

Same goes for art. While some types/styles of art may appeal to a bigger audience than others, there will always be a smaller audience for a type of art – some like crunchy, some like smooth.

So, when we’re judging ourselves and our work based on quantitative metrics like how many sales, how many followers, how many likes, and so on, we’re looking at the wrong metrics. If you’re trying to sell smooth peanut butter to crunchy fanatics (and no one is buying it), it easy to think your smooth recipe sucks rather than what’s really going on, you just haven’t found your people, yet.

Whenever I hear people in publishing talk about inspiration, it’s always about books. “I loved them as a child”, “they saved me”, “I can’t live in a world without books”. So, what does it mean for someone like me who didn’t ‘grow up with books’?

As someone who isn’t natively a ‘book person’, it can be difficult to fit in. “What was your favourite book growing up?” is a question that comes up a lot at conferences and the like. And, whilst I fallback on things I do remember (like Mr Men, or Grug) they are very fallbacks because my favourite stories came from movies – Indiana Jones, The Goonies, Back to the Future, and especially Neverending Story (yes yes, I know it’s a book). But, no one ever asks about them. In fact, they’ve even cut them out of interviews and say things like, ‘because our readers like books’.

Writing (and words), have always seemed intellectually superior to me, whereas drawing has always felt ‘basic.’ People talk about the “great novels” but, at least in the circles I grew up with, people never really talked about the “great comics.” It’s enough to make one feel as though you’re not a real writer until you can write with words.

But, as I’m growing into a version of myself that’s becoming more certain about who I am, I’ve realised that some of the best writing happens with pictures – we just don’t notice it as ‘writing’.

There’s probably some scientific reason why images and words are perceived differently to one another – the latter requiring more ‘effort’ and therefore being more ‘cerebral’ than the other. But, what I know is that images are, quite truly, a universal language. They work on a different plane to words – they provoke emotion and communicate messages far more efficiently than words. One only needs to look to our accelerating, globalised culture for evidence of this. And, in a world that is seeking faster and more efficient, pictures win.

Both words and images are simply abstract marks on a surface; that surface might be a page, a piece of light-sensitive film, or even a cave wall 20,000 years ago. Making any of those marks is fundamentally human and so, instead of focusing on words or pictures, maybe it’s about words and pictures – whatever it takes to think better and tell a good story; the ultimate human act.

A few months ago, I decided to start exploring film photography. I bought myself a vintage 35mm film camera, a few rolls of film, watched loads of YouTube tutorials about how cameras work – the exposure triangle and so on – and read lots of books. Then, I just started taking photographs.

In the process of taking those photographs, I wasn’t thinking about what I’d do with them. I was focussed on understanding the technical skills of using my camera, reading light, exposing well, and being increasingly aware and sensitive to what was in my frame before I pressed the shutter button. I simply took photos of things that interested me. With every 36 shots, I reloaded a film canister and started over.

A week or so ago, I finally received scans of 6 months of photographs. There were, as expected, some I really liked and some I completely stuffed up. But, what emerged from these 180 or so individual frames was a pattern – I seemed to enjoy taking quiet photos of people and nature.

Seeing those photographs gave me an idea: human – nature; a photographic art project exploring the main thing I’ve been thinking about, subconsciously and consciously for the last few years: humanity’s dependence on and relationship with nature.

When I picked up my camera, I wasn’t thinking about this project as an output, I was simply interested in learning about how to take photos, what photography might be for, and whether I’d enjoy it. (And, as it turns out, I really love it). But, what’s more interesting to me is that what happened with the camera already happens with my drawing practice; the meaning of the work evolves from doing and seeing the work, first.

In my drawing practice, I sit down with a pencil and paper and just start making marks. It’s in the process of viewing those marks that ideas about what I want to draw emerge. In my photography practice, it’s the same. I simply take photos for the experience of taking photos and, in viewing the final images (sometimes, months later), see things that I never saw before. Seeing those things give ideas to explore further. And that, in turn, feeds the physical act of making photographs.

There are many people I know who are intimidated by the blank page – I don’t know what to draw, I don’t know what to say, I don’t know what to make a picture of – but I’ve learned, in several mediums now, that the only way to know those things is by engaging in the act, first, no matter how ‘aimless’ it seems to begin with.

There’s a difference between doing something for your livelihood and doing it for your humanhood.

Livelihood requires trading your labour for money. Illustrating for your livelihood often involves drawing for someone else’s need. Illustrations for an annual report, a corporate animation, an advertising campaign, a magazine editorial, a complement to a cook book. There’s nothing wrong with this, and it can be fun, but, in the end, it’s about providing yourself with food, shelter, and warmth.

Humanhood is something different. Humanhood is about trading your labour for something that isn’t money – a better understanding of yourself and your place in the world. Because you’re not solving someone else’s problem, almost* no one will pay you for developing your humanhood. Drawing for your humanhood is an investment in yourself.

Sometimes, the work we do for our humanhood changes what we’re able to sell for our livelihood. For example: Maybe, in private, we explore new materials, or a new way of drawing; the sort of artistic evolution that results in some new and surprising work we’ve never done before. That work can be ‘marketed and sold’ to a buyer looking for that sort of thing. But, as soon as the contract for the work is signed, even though it came from the work we did to develop humanhood, is, in the end, solving someone else’s need – that’s why they’re paying us. Same goes for the art and design of picture books, by the way.

It’d be great if the work we did to develop our humanhood was purchased by someone, consistently enough, to provide ourselves with a livelihood, but that’s almost* never the case. But, once we’re able to differentiate between the two modes and maintain an honesty with ourselves about who we’re working for at any given time, we’re able to do both, even better than before.

*almost – it’s worth noting that there are exceptions to every rule and there are cases where anything is possible.

There are hundreds of books (and millions of YouTube videos) about art-making. From the philosophical position – why do we make it – to the concrete instruction – here’s how you paint it. The world is saturated with advice, guidance and instruction on how to make art or ‘be an artist’. It’s easy to think – what could I possibly contribute to this?

There are also, by now, probably billions of drawings of koalas, teddy bears, fire engines, hammers, parents, children, racoons, foxes, ice-cream, and all the things that typically end up in children’s books. Do we really need another version of any of those things? Someone’s already done it, so why bother?

But, perhaps the reason to bother is that people perceive the world in more than a billion ways and so the chances are pretty high that your take on how to paint light, or why you make art in the first place, will find a kindred soul or two and start a fire in them to do the same. Maybe your take on a koala will be the one that finds a small heart, somewhere in the world who says, “I like your koala better than every koala that’s come before.”

I’ve been writing on this journal once a week for 3 years. I’m pretty sure I haven’t had an insight into the art experience that hasn’t been written about before by at least one other soul in the history of human existence. Why do I bother? Well, first and foremost, writing helps me think and learn, so, on one level, I do it for myself. But, the reason its public is that maybe my take matters to someone out there, like a message in a bottle floating in vast viridian ocean. Maybe it washes up on the right beach, at the right time, when someone’s got a moment to notice.

If they don’t? That’s OK, writing those messages into the ether is still useful to me.

What if illustration was a secondary career, not the primary one? What if you didn’t have to rely on drawing to put food on the table? What if, like me, the illustration work and the ‘day job’ could co-exist and, in fact, improve one another?

Golf, animation, design

When I was 16, I had to make a decision – to pursue professional golf (yes, I was a good golfer) or go to university and study something completely different. I chose the latter. Not from fear, but because I enjoyed the game of golf too much. I couldn’t imagine ever enjoying being in a position where a 3ft putt would decide whether I could eat that week. That sounded (and still sounds) terrifying.

My other interest was animation. In fact, I thought I wanted to be an animator. Pixar and Dreamworks were just hitting the stage at the time, so I picked a uni course that opened that possibility. But, I tried 3D animation for 3 weeks in the first semester and realised how it just wasn’t for me. Too fiddly, too technical, too… disconnected from the fluency of what drawing was for me, even though I didn’t really do it much in high school, anyway.

But, what I discovered at University was Design. Design as a practice. How it applied to architecture, objects, & software. That there were people and decisions behind the spaces we inhabit and the everyday tools we use. Before then, I never really thought about that, but since then, it’s almost all I’ve thought about.

I began a career in Design almost 20 years ago. I left the idea of drawing or animation behind in high school. I would be a designer. It blended the appreciation I had for aesthetics with the enjoyment I got from making tools for people.

I worked as a Designer for 15 years. Mostly making software products that paid (and continue to pay) surprisingly well. On the most part, I enjoyed the work but found myself burning out in front of screens (I was staring at a lot of them, most of the day).

As an escape, I picked up a pencil and piece of paper for the first time in 15 years, and just drew things. For me. It was meditative, imaginative, and it re-ignited the storyteller spark in me. Because of my Design career I had enough money to buy nice materials and try many different things.

And then, a funny thing happened – I was ‘discovered’ on Instagram and offered an illustration project; in fact, 3 books… at once.

It doesn’t have to be a binary choice

Now, 8 years after that moment, I’ve got 20+ books in market and a continuing career in Design. They work together and activate different parts of my complex self. I hear illustrators who say, ‘but I can’t do anything else but draw.’ I wonder what the chances really are of that, given humans are such complex beings. Perhaps those illustrators are just more afraid of ‘letting illustration go’. As if you either are or aren’t an illustrator. But, it’s not a binary choice. It can be an ‘and’ not just an or. I’m living proof of it.

For me, the Design work I do activates the logical, deductive, and scientfic part of my brain. It forces me into situations with people that, left to my own devices, I’d probably normally avoid. But, the flipside of being in these uncomfortable situations is that I’m gaining different perspectives on how others go through the world – that’s critical to evolving my picture book work.

The illustration work I do activates the inner introvert in me – it is quiet, meditative, and isolating. The interesting thing about this mix of Design and Illustration is that they both share the most fun bit – lateral thinking and imagination. Once I’m exhausted from collaborating with others in Design work, I get to spend time alone drawing things.

Design and Illustration also work together to help me manage financial goals. I don’t need to illustrate a book to put food on the table, which means I can pick and choose the illustration projects that appeal to me emotionally. I know that, because of this, I also produce better and more authentic work, which, once again, feeds itself with more projects I like to do because it’s the authenticity that sells.

I can’t imagine how much pressure one would be under to make illustration the primary income stream, not just for oneself, but also supporting a family. It changes everything.

If it’s your primary income source, then when things are lean you may need to draw things you don’t feel like drawing which, in turn, creates illustration that you may not be authentically proud of. But, what inevitably happens is the work you do is the work you get so those illustrations become your body of work and people then believe ‘that’s the work you do’, so they ask you to do more of it. Unless you’ve got personal projects on the side to help direct a folio towards somewhere you want it to go (which is just extra, unpaid work anyway), you end up cornered.

From a financial perspective, the way people buy illustration is incompatible with the way bills come in. Bills are regular – like waves at the ocean. Project-based income is not; it’s lumpy. There are some periods of abundance and periods of scarcity. One might say, “save some of the abundance for times of scarcity, like a squirrel stores nuts”, but, with illustration, there’s no guarantee that another nut is coming at all. Or, at the very least, it’s not in the illustrators control, no matter how much ‘marketing’ or ‘self-promotion’ you’re able to do. That sounds incredibly stressful.

I’ve experienced freedom by committing to illustration work as a secondary income stream, and along with finding a primary one that doesn’t drain my creative energy, I’ve found it’s possible to have both. Maybe there are others out there who may find the same thing?