The other day I posted 7 still images and a synopsis of a personal project I’d been working on called “Colour Hunter”. I did it mostly to demonstrate to other emerging artists that I take my own advice – work on stuff that matters to you without thinking about what a publisher might think. By working in this way, one ends up producing work they like and are proud of and it’s not judged by the ‘success’ of a publishing contract or not.

As it turns out, those 7 still images attracted 5 different publishers seeking to ‘work together on this’. It was never meant for that, but that’s what happened.

The problem with marketing art

We’re living in a time when marketing art is difficult; where obscurity, not piracy, is more of a threat to an artist’s livelihood. The primary channels of getting our work out there, at the time of writing this, are owned and supplied by large tech companies – TikTok and Instagram (via Facebook) – and they have a stronghold on the world’s attention through things like the network effect.

The goal of companies like Instagram and TikTok is engagement – more eyeballs for longer periods of time so that they can charge a higher premium for advertisers to advertise to us. We could moralise over that model for years but the bigger problem for artists is that, what Instagram wants, it will get. Do what we need or your work won’t get seen.

At least, that’s the threat.

There is currently huge pressure on artists to play Instagram’s game. Short form video content is proving a pathway to higher engagement for those platforms (and by engagement, I mean attention, not active likes, clicks and so on). But what does it mean to be a person that produces still images, then?

I’ve seen painters dancing in front of their canvas. I’ve seen illustrators uploading ‘videos’ of a single unmoving image in the hope that Instagram will see it as something they want – short form video content – without having to become a video producer as well as an illustrator. I’ve seen ‘book unboxings’ by authors – another cheap and easy pathway to short form video content without doing too much work outside of their comfort zone.

I’ve felt the pressure, too. I could make videos about how I make art, how others make art; timelapses, instructionals, and podcasts are all possible. But, you know what, for every timelapse I set up, for every video I produce, for every podcast I participate in, I lose time for doing what I want to do – explore the power of the still image.

Some people will say that I’m not like them. That I’m already ‘discovered’. That people are already watching. And yes, that’s true. With 20+ picture books under my belt I’m becoming more a of ‘known quantity’. But my career began 8 years ago with a few still images. 8 years later, 7 still images piqued interest again.

Every artist will have a different appetite for how much proverbial dancing in the front of the canvas they want to do. But, unless you have made the work before you make the marketing, no amount of singing and dancing will grow a career, or, more importantly, an inner life of the artist. Isn’t chasing interior peace in one’s own mind and body the reason we create art in the first place?

Sure, it’s nice to feel seen, but feeling seen is now the business model underlying TikTok and Instagram so it becomes unhealthy for someone trying to explore what they think, in private, most of the time. Perhaps if we did less dancing and more painting or drawing, the work will improve so much that it will speak for itself. Maybe everything else is a distraction?

Among all the reasons for writing, the most important one for me is that I write to think. If I don’t write – this journal, that story – it’s not long before my brain becomes a muddled mess of half-formed, incomplete ideas.

I draw to think, too – either on a whiteboard or in a sketchbook – the physical act of movement, of responding to what emerges on the page that wasn’t there before is critical in helping shape what I see, how I feel, and how I might make others feel.

Many non-writers or drawers assume that artists and writers don’t put pencil to paper or fingers to keyboard until we have the idea. That we wait for ‘divine inspiration to strike, a spirit moving through us or a clear mind image of what needs to appear on paper. The truth is, the idea or the images emerge *through the act*. The best thing about this is that there’s only one way to prove this is true, and you don’t have to have the idea to begin with – just pick up a pencil, or open the text editor, and start.

I’ve recently discovered that every time I’ve changed jobs (about 5 times in my career), I’ve bought a new pair of nice shoes. At the time, I tell myself I need them for the job. Sneakers for the less corporate times, brogues for the times I need to dress up like when I’m consulting to government, boots for when I’m ‘on farm’ with landholders.

I’ve learned, over the years, that how I dress matters. Not just to those who meet me for the first time, like in a new job, but to how I behave when I’m wearing what I wear. If I put on a suit (a rare occasion for me), I stand taller. If I wear my ‘usual’ clothes (cardigan and sneakers), I feel more relaxed.

What does that mean for dressing while art making? Well, I never bought new shoes when I got my first contract – or ever even thought about it? I know that, for practicality, it would be better to wear ‘junk’ clothes; clothes I’d be OK getting paint on.

But, when I dress ‘like a bum’, I feel like one, and when I feel like one, I’m not in a great space for making work. So, instead of new shoes, I bought an apron. And not some crappy plastic kitchen one, it’s a nice apron. When I wear this apron, I feel like an artist. I feel like I can make things I’ve never made before. I feel like I’m part of a longer story of artists throughout the ages; I’m doing something important.

And, whilst I know that feeling a particular way doesn’t make it true, there is research to suggest that what we wear matters. I’d never encourage anyone to buy something when they can make do with what they’ve got but perhaps, occassionally, we can treat ourselves to some new shoes, just to see where we’ll go?

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.

Sometimes, for some ideas, now is not the right time, but it’s not always obvious. Sometimes, we’re not in the right headspace, or our lives are full of things that need more attention. Sometimes, we don’t have the artistic skill to execute what we can see in our minds. Sometimes, we don’t have the right people to collaborate with at the time. Sometimes, now is not the right time.

For some ideas, just like a good sourdough, time is an ingredient. Even though it can feel like we’re slacking off, or being lazy, or just not ‘pushing on’. The difficult bit is interrogating where our inaction comes from. Is it fear? Self doubt? I’m not good enough? No one will like this? I can’t afford to take the risk? Or, does our inaction simply come because the world, or ourselves, aren’t ready for it yet.

Being patient can feel very much like procrastination or fear, but the sources are different. And, ‘waiting’ for something feels like we’re not doing anything. But, as Auguste Rodin (the sculptor of The Thinker) so wisely said, Patience is a form of action.

I remember feeling very excited when I found my first book, Row Row Row Your Boat, in an actual bookshop, on an actual shelf, next to other actual books by actual authors and illustrators I admired. You would think that this would provide the motivation to do another one, and another one, and another one. But, I’ve come to realise that, for me, the motivation has never really been about the ‘legitimacy’ of being published, it’s been about creating physical art – stuff that I can touch and feel – as a ‘breadcrumb trail’ of my evolution as an illustrator, a storyteller, and a human.

Something gets lost in the digitisation

I find that, in the digitisation of my art (via hi-res scanning), something is lost. The texture, the staining, the pencil marks, they all feel different to me when I see it printed on a the same shiny pages within a commercially produced children’s book.

Don’t get me wrong, I get used to it, and I still love my books. But when I open one of my originals from the archive, the feeling is different. The feeling I get from seeing the original is one of scarcity, of preciousness. An internal voice says, “this is the only version of this in the whole world, and it’s right here.” The relationship to the work has an intimacy that I don’t get from one of 10,000 copies sitting in a warehouse somewhere.

Why does any of this matter? Because, in my view, it’s important for artists to be clear on their motivation and where they derive satisfaction. If all we care about is being ‘validated’ through the commercialisation of our work, then what do we do if/when it’s not commercialised? If, however, what we care about is finding out who we become through each and every piece we create, then it no longer matters if someone buys the work. All that matters is that we keep making it.

An art practice is a funny thing. We’d like to think there are rules, processes, or certain ways of doing things; things that are more likely to lead to success and/or failure. But, for every one bit of advice, there’s another contrary piece of equal value.

Take, for example, imposing constraints. I’ve written before about how I find constraints very useful. By imposing constraints, it can free us up to think and work within them. In a world of limitless art subjects, constraining ourselves can help us develop in a particular way. Or, like my studio space; it’s small. But it’s small size allows me to think cleverly about the space – to prioritise ruthlessly. It’s often priority that leads to progress.

Or is it?

On the weekend, I did something rare (for me) – I played with a new type of art material. I had previously constrained myself to watercolour. The theory was that the focus on just one medium meant I could push my ability to use it in ways that people before me had not.

But, in that pursuit for purity, I found myself in situations where I simply could not produce what my brain could I imagine. The frustration grew to the point where I dismantled the one constraint I’ve been living with for years.

In the process of learning about this new medium by playing around with it in my studio (I was painting swatches of the colours), I accidentally squeezed out too much green. So, instead of wasting it by letting it dry on the palette, I picked up a scrap bit of paper and painted a giant green swatch.

That giant (too bright) green swatch became a background for this image. In my mind, it was cute, but nothing exceptional (although I learned a lot about the new medium by painting this).

When I shared this image on Instagram in the last week, a publisher reached out – “Hey Matt, I think there’s a story here.”

There was?

And, sure enough, that prompt led to a new story idea which I’m developing as I write this journal entry. Will this story about an avocado be politically important? World-changing? A significant contribution to my body of work and my identity as an artist? Probably not. But, had I not decided to break one of the constraints imposed upon myself, that painting would never have happened. It’s an image I would never have produced had I constrained myself to watercolour.

Constraints are useful, but then, so is stepping outside of the boundaries we have sometimes to try something new. Like most things with art, there are not rights and wrongs, only what works. The act of art-making is, at its core, an act of discovering who we are and so, don’t we owe it to ourselves, sometimes, to break our own rules to meet a version of ourselves we haven’t met before?

Occassionally, I get people asking me for some advice about how to become a children’s book illustrator. Everyone knows it’s competitive, and they know it’s hard to ‘break in’ – most simply don’t know where to start. I find myself giving one piece of advice: more often than not, a book illustrator’s folio, amongst other things, should show your ability to pair words and images, together.

Now, I know those two things – words and images – can stand apart and still satisfy. Just like wine and food: you don’t need food to enjoy wine. But, a cleverly selected food/wine pairing amplifies both of them – it tells you a lot more about the food and wine individually when you eat them together.

Words and images work the same way. And, if one is in the business of illustrating children’s books, or, in other words, visual storytelling, 90% of the work we do includes words – so why wouldn’t a portfolio show them together?

When you pair words with illustrations, a few things happen:

1. You can tell dramatically different stories (contrasting gentle text with energetic illustrations, for example, provide a very striking mood).
2. You showcase your ‘voice’; or, in other words, how you think. For me, that’s mostly humour and movement.

Take, for example, the words below, from my book with Jackie French, Koala Bare:

“Who wants blue or yellow fur? Grey is the colour I prefer.”

Now, for context, we know the main character is a Koala, and that he’s angry that people keep calling him a bear.

There’s nothing in that text that says that the images need to be in a toy store, that the blue and yellow fur is about toy teddy bears, or that the main character is even that angry. He has a preference for grey, but it’s not a demand. Yet, by pairing these curious and quite ‘plain’ words with an image that shows shattered glass, teddy bears strewn all over, we find ourselves laughing a lot more.

This image could easily have been something else. Maybe the koala is looking sad upon a photo of some bears and he’s missing spending time with other koalas? Maybe he’s in a hairdresser and the barber is styling him right next to a few other bears who are getting blue and yellow perms?

None of these are right or wrong ideas, they’re simply trying to make the point that the way someone interprets a text can be a powerful vehicle of communication to a portfolio viewer.

It’s an easy exercise for any current or future book illustrator to try. Pick a text (preferably the raw text, without illustrations so you’re not influenced), and see how you might illustrate it, naturally. Do this enough times and, perhaps, like me, you’ll struggle to be able to draw an image without the additional playfulness of words. You might also find your begin to see your voice emerge – and that’s exciting!

I see things that others cannot. No, it’s not dead people. But, for the length of my professional life, the number one feedback I get goes something like this, “Matt, you need to take people on the journey. You skip from A to G and others can’t do that. You need to step them through your thinking, from A, to B, C, all the way to G.”

When I was younger, I thought it was an opinion. But, as I’ve grown, I’ve come to recognise it as a pattern. I’m not here to toot my own horn but sometimes facing up to those patterns is what helps us grow so I need to admit it – I see things that others cannot.

One of the things I’ve grown comfortable with telling myself is that I’m an artist and storyteller. I know how to tell a good story. I don’t mean the technical aspects because I don’t think that way (you know, 3-act structure, climax, conflict, etc). I mean, I can just tell someone a story.

Maybe it’s because my teenage years were spent engrossed in cinema and film (I was never a reader), but my default way of telling stories, I’ve realised, is through drawing them. I’ve tried to write them, and whenever I seek feedback its… underwhelming. People don’t seem to be able to get where I’m going with it. It’s too wordy, too didactic, too… unpolished.

But, every time I tell a story with some visuals, people are there for it. I get glowing and overwhelmingly positive engagement (and book contracts) when the stories I tell come with the visuals.

The advice you hear online is to ‘start with the manuscript’ and now I realise I’ve been fighting that advice for years. I keep trying to pump out manuscripts but they never land. A storyboard though? That’s when I get the reactions I’m looking for – when the person who engages with the work says, “I can see what you can see now. I couldn’t see that before.”

This reaction happens when I illuminate someone else’s text, too. The story the writer thinks they’ve told is still there, but the feedback I get is that I’ve added new threads of narrative, or ‘expanded the market’ or ‘expanded the scope’ of the work.

I’m not here to spend time congratulating myself, I’m here to acknowledge that there is not one way to ‘write’ stories and it’s taken me ages to have the confidence to change my practice to a way that suits me, not the way I hear it’s ‘supposed to work’ from others.

As someone who never read a lot of books growing up, writing stories (refining specificity of words, intellectualising it all etc) is not my sweet spot. I can work on it, but I don’t have the natural rhythyms and structure of children’s literature in my brain that make it a natural strength. Maybe it’s because of my love of and long relationship with cinema but what I know is that I think in images and I can see how the meaning of words can change when they’re sitting alongside an image. The job for someone like me is to be OK with that, and then show people what I can see – one thumbnail at a time.

It’s simple, but profound – if you have an idea, just make it. Sure, it almost always won’t meet the expectations you had set for yourself; things never seem to come out as good as you can see them in your head. But, if all they do is swirl around your head as ideas, things get worse, not better. We build a list of all the things we haven’t done, not all the things we’ve accomplished.

Finishing is important. If you have an idea, and you make it, you’ll learn something. And if you learn something, you’ll find another idea, and another, and eventually, if you make enough of your ideas, you might even find yourself improving – or, at the very least, iterating toward something you can be proud of. And, regardless of if anyone pays for anything you make, isn’t the idea that we had fun along the way? After all, yesterday’s work is the best we can do, which means tomorrow’s will be better.