My computer is a swiss-army knife. The guy in the shop where I bought it was right, I can do anything on it! Send and receive email, design and illustrate, manage social media, edit video, listen to a podcast, browse the internet, and stay up to date with the latest news. It’s one device to rule them all, except, there’s just one thing it’s not very good at, and that’s helping me focus.

The computer, the device I do almost all of my work on, is one massive distraction machine. And distraction fuels procrastination. So, being just a keyboard shortcut away from anything else when it’s time to do difficult, deep, thoughtful work, is really unhelpful.

I find that the times that I feel most productive are when I’m not using a computer. When I’m ‘in my studio’: in front of a piece of paper, using pencils and brushes to make things. There’s no ‘ding’, no ‘alerts’, no keyboard shortcuts, no undo. It’s me, physics, and time and it’s the shortest path to deep, fulfilling spells of focussed work. I slip into a flow state very easily when I’m away from the computer.

But computers aren’t going anywhere, and I don’t think designers of computers or social media are working on ways to help me focus. In fact, the opposite is true. So I guess it’s up to me.

Write and wrong

Writing on a computer is difficult. When I write on the computer, I’m all over the place in the way that I think. I skip from one subject to another, from paragraph to paragraph. It’s as if even though my brain is in one mode/app, it’s still works as though I’m opening all the applications in my brain.

So, how to protect myself against the temptation of all the other things I could be doing, like being sucked into YouTube rabbit holes or replying to emails in between paragraphs?

What I’ve learned is that computer writing is not the same activity as writing physically, even though, on the surface, they look the same – composing sentences and paragraphs with words. I’ve learned that if I write the first draft on a laptop, I’ll need to redraft and edit it many more times than if I start with a physical process. So, I’ve developed a compromise – outline in physical, then execute in digital. It’s like when a TV chef has all their portions chopped neatly and arranged in front of them so they can just get on with the cooking when the camera’s rolling. Writing the outline in a notebook, with a good ol’ fashioned pen, means I can hit a computer keyboard with a lot more structure and focus. I can work in incremental chunks toward the right goal. Once I get through the first 20mins or so of temptation to do anything else but write, I’ve found a flow state. When I’m there, the swiss-army knife doesn’t exist. It’s just me and the writing.

In one of my first jobs I had a crappy manager. They were disorganised, impolite, inefficient, and well, generally, unkind. I wasn’t happy there and suffice to say when the time came, I moved on.

It’s easy to look at an experience like that – one that lasted 2 years – and think, “What a waste of time. I could’ve done so many more things that would have been better for my physical and mental health, as well as my career.” But that experience was transformative in one very important way; I started to understand what bad looked like.

Knowing what bad looks like means we’re still learning. In subsequent jobs since my first, I’ve filtered potential workplaces based on the signals I saw in my first one. I know the sorts of behaviours that denote disorganized, impolite, inefficient and unkind workplaces, and when I see those behaviours, I walk the other way. Not only that, but I ensure my own behaviour doesn’t mimic those things either.

What’s this got to do with art? Well, making bad work in art is inevitable. However, to know what bad looks like, we have to take the leap and make the work, even at the risk of getting it wrong. We have to make the work in order to learn from it and apply it to the next work. I’ve made many mistakes in my pursuit of expressive, joyous watercolour work. I have pages and pages of flat, boring, muddy washes and paintings. But with every painting I complete, I learn what not to do next time, which makes next time’s work marginally better – and so the inevitable loop of the infinite game rolls forward.

Even though my expectations will always exceed my capability, when I look back at my first work (just like looking back at my first job) I realise how far I’ve come – the things I’ve learned to avoid as well as the things I want to repeat. Making mistakes, after all, is just the process of figuring it out, whether that’s work, art, or life.

There seems a universal law – the more you risk, the greater the reward. It governs everything we do from the obvious – gambling – to the less obvious – love.

Putting ‘yourself’ out there takes courage because it means we’re making ourselves vulnerable. Vulnerable to attack. Vulnerable to critique. Vulnerable to making mistakes that people notice. It’s much easier to make mistakes in private, when nobody is watching. After all, we still learn from those mistakes. The question is, if we reduce the risk of failing by doing it privately, is the reward – the lessons we learn – also greatly reduced?

In an age where digital communication is creating the space to protect us from vulnerability (we can craft the perfect text before attempting to communicate with another), those seeking vulnerability, or those who are comfortable with it, are becoming rare. And if there’s one another universal law in this capitalist economy it’s that scarcity creates value.

So it follows that if this is true – bigger risks equals bigger reward and scarcity creates value – then isn’t making art and sharing it widely, aka, being an artist, the most valuable thing we can do for ourselves? We stand to gain immensely from being the few who remain comfortable with vulnerability because through that vulnerability we learn more about ourselves and our place in the world than doing the opposite.

The thing about being repeatedly vulnerable is that once you’ve experienced the reward for doing it, it’s not so scary anymore because what it teaches you is the biggest reward of all – how to be comfortable with being vulnerable in the first place. That’s when the exciting stuff begins.

There’s a fine line between working efficiently and working industriously. I’ve recently completed 3 books, all due within a month or so of one another: Rosie the Rhinoceros by Jimmy Barnes, Graham’s Got the Grumps by P. Crumble, and Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree by Marion Sinclair. That means three different storyboards, three different sets of roughs, and three different sets of final art had to be submitted, almost on top of one another, in the preceding 3-6 months. All this in just 1-2 days per week (because I still work in a full-time job). I’m not gloating, but I’m incredibly proud of the work I’ve just submitted. It’s had a profound effect on my confidence but also, my art practice.

I’ve always felt that I work efficiently. I don’t waste time with 300 versions of the same thing. Once I hit on an idea, I ship it. It may not be perfect, but, sometimes, perfect can be the enemy of done. With three books running concurrently though, efficiency was no longer enough – it became about working industriously.

You don’t normally associate ‘art’ with, say, a mass-manufacturing production line. Art is supposed to take time, careful thought, planning and joyous execution, right? Well, maybe, sometimes. But, I had to make a decision: deliver these three equally important books to the world as soon as possible because I truly believe in their message, or, stretch that out over 3 years. Both are valid, but I’m also impatient and curious about what comes after. After all, life is short.

What’s the difference between efficient and industrial?

If our world has shown us anything, it’s that we’re capable of producing vast quantities of material and information very quickly. So, I borrowed some of the principles of the industrial complex and applied them to picture books. Here are just a few alterations I made to my art practice during these books.

1. Reduce washing up. My usual way of sequencing the work for a book when I’m only doing one at a time is that I tend to work from beginning to end in sequence of the story. I’ll begin with the first (or some key) spread, pencil it up, then paint it. Once the spread is done, I’ll pick up the next one and begin the process again. This way of working isn’t industrious, but it’s meditative. I like changing it up. I also don’t have the space to store many in-progress works. But, for these books, I found some different ways of working. For Rosie, for example, I inked every page first. No colour. I ended up with 16 inked pages all ready for colouring. This meant that I didn’t have to keep washing my ink brush in between painting sessions. This approach also had the side-effect of improving my inking as I went along. When normally I would have had some breaks in between (for colouring), I spent hours on end just with ink. It was, in many ways, really fun. It also had the flow on effect of being able to mix one big batch of colour per character, and colouring that character on various spreads at once. That led to much greater colour consistency and a lot less mixing time. Win win.
2. Change up materials. You’ll notice that the three books have very different styles. To make it feel less like a production line I decided to explore beyond watercolour and pencil. For Graham’s got the Grumps I used a new type of paper, some coloured pencils, and nicker poster paints to keep things interesting. Industrialisation, after all, doesn’t need to be synonymous with a production line.
3. Adopt digital for key parts. I tend to avoid digital work as much as possible because I get enough of that in my other job. But, digital is efficient. Using digital for the early stages of the books helped with planning (mainly around tone and colour scripting). Could I have completed those books in time without this? Probably. But the results would not have been as considered, and I’ll probably continue to use that in my practice, even when I have the time to explore.
4. Meeting the scanner. Shipping physical artwork is slow and expensive. Publishers need to organise couriers, there’s lots of back and forth and so on. But, it just so happens that the scanner for my artwork is situated 10 minutes from my house. If there’s ever an easier way to make things go faster (and safer), it’s to hand-deliver the artwork. I dropped one set of final art off and picked up the other the following week. Not only that, but by meeting the scanner, I’ve established a new relationship and learned a lot more about how I can improve my practice (and my final art) to optimise for the equipment and limitations of the scanning process. I know this will lead to better books next time.

Industrialisation, especially in light of the current climate crisis, gets a pretty bad wrap. But, it has been useful (and harmful) for humans in many ways. Understanding the pros and cons of industrialisation as it applies to an art practice isn’t an obvious connection but it’s a useful one. Will I do 3 books, simultaneously, in 3 months, again? Maybe not. But will the lessons I’ve learned about running a more industrial art practice be applied to the next book? Absolutely. See, the thing about working industriously is knowing that, when you’ve got the time, what it allows for isn’t more books but better ones, and that’s the whole point of this art journey anyway. In the end, the most important person benefits – the reader.

Making ambitious work isn’t easy. Some of the ingredients for ambitious work are in our control or, at the very least, under our influence. We can decide, for example, how much time we dedicate to practising the craft. But there are some ingredients for ambitious work that we simply cannot influence – one of them is timing.

There have been times in the last 7 years that I’ve attempted projects that, in hindsight, I simply wasn’t ready for – landscapes that were too complicated, figures too beautiful, stories not yet fully understood or felt in my bones. I would spend hours, days, and even weeks trying harder and harder to produce something I was proud of. I would wake early, at the crack of dawn, and work long into the night pushing words and pictures around trying to produce a story that helped me capture the picture I had in my head. Being unable to do so, those ambitious projects sat in the draw collecting dust while I worked on projects I was more ready for.

It’s easy to look at those draws full of half-finished ideas, folders full of typed and re-typed manuscripts, and think, “Wow, what a waste of time. Imagine what I could’ve done if I had used that time differently.” It’s easy to see them as failures when, in fact, they’ve been quite the opposite.

When I’m faced with a difficult problem, my instinct is to zoom in; to get closer to the work. To strangle and squeeze as if the tighter the grasp, the more life I’ll breathe into it. I do this by working harder and longer. I think, “If I just spend a few more minutes on this, I’ll get there. I’ll get the expression of that character just right.” But it’s rarely true. In fact, I don’t think it’s ever worked that way. I’ve written before about how creative effort is never wasted but sometimes what ambitious projects need is a little distance.

Squint to see the forest

When I paint landscapes en-Plein air, I squint my eyes to blur the image. This helps me find the tonal contrast of the image rather than focussing on the details – a zoomed out view helps me compose a more pleasing image. It’s the same with writing except I can’t squint at a manuscript, so it needs another perspective.

The second perspective can come from one of two places. The first? Someone other than me; a friend, a colleague, an editor, agent, or publisher. When I’m stuck in the words and pictures, and I get that feeling of wanting to lean in on it – to work longer and harder – the antidote is to send it to someone else. “Have a read and let me know what you think?” or “In its current form, how does it make you feel?” Not only is this more efficient than having me spend hours or days working through something, but it often supercharges the art (or me). After all, anyone generous enough to spend their time critiquing my work is a gift and a statement of belief in me at some level.

The second place from which a new perspective arrives is through time. Putting the work away for a day, a month, a year, or even more gives me space to look at the work afresh. If years have passed since last engaging with the work, it’s likely I’m a completely different person, and so the new me can look at the old me’s work with curiosity, interest, and surprise. Sure enough, because of this, the work moves forward.

Collaboration is the quickest path to progressing ambitious work but we don’t all have a friend, colleague, agent, editor or publisher who believes in our work enough for them to engage and provide that critical feedback we need sometimes. So, in lieu of that, maybe it’s worth keeping it in a draw for a few years and waiting to hear what future-me thinks of it down the road. There’s plenty of other work to keep me busy in the meantime.

Making big life choices can be difficult, especially when they’re about something ‘big’ like a career. How does one decide between being a Wall Street Banker or being an Artist? Those things aren’t directly comparable. There is no pros and cons list that will help me decide which of those is the ‘better’ choice.

Maybe the choice to be a Banker errs on the side of financial security? It’s not guaranteed but it’s more likely. Also more likely is that I’d be tied to a city job. I’d have a certain type of social network. I’d likely have to wear expensive suits, eat at particular restaurants, attend particular types of functions. That’s what it takes to be part of that culture. Maybe I love banking and numbers but also, maybe I don’t. Do I sacrifice my day-to-day enjoyment of the work hours for the promise of not having to worry about whether I can pay the bills this month?

The choice to pursue Art has different outcomes. Less financial security, that’s for sure. And without that, I’d have to watch what I buy, where I live, how much my bills are, etc. I’d spend a lot more energy on managing money but maybe the act of creating art gets me in a blissful flow state; a state I’m unlikely to get from working on Wall Street, and that’s ‘worth it.’

Assuming, for a moment, that this choice is a binary one (I’ve argued before that it doesn’t have to be), trying to choose what’s ‘better’ just doesn’t work. There is another way to frame it.

Time, and the everyday choices we make, change who we are. We can choose to help the lady who spilt a bag of oranges in the shopping mall car park or we can walk straight past. That choice helps define the next one. And the one after that. Soon enough, within a year, we’ve made thousands of choices and, a year later, we’re a different person. People say it all the time, and I know that if I reflect on a personal level, the person I was at 7 years old, 16 years old, 20 years old and now my current age are all remarkably different people.

And so, if we do change in this way, it follows that we will be a different person tomorrow, 3 years, 5 years, even 10 years from now. The question, then, isn’t “What do I want to be?” or “Do I want to be a Banker or an Artist” because that assumes the “I” isn’t fluid or malleable. No, we need to acknowledge that there will be different people up ahead, defined by each small choice we make every day, and we get to choose, every day, in the smallest way, which of those people up-ahead that we want to step a little bit closer, too. We may meet the Banker or we may meet the Artist, or maybe there’s something that our today-self didn’t even know about that tomorrow-self discovers. That discovery? That’s the fun bit.

Is getting published all that great? If your goal is to reach readers, then it’s possible you don’t need a publisher. Before the internet, Publishing (and the process of reaching readers) used to work in a very straightforward and rigid way.

1. The artist makes their work.
2. The artist submits their work to many agents.
3. An agent signs the artist and then goes off to find a publisher to multiply the work.
4. The publisher signs the artist (via the agent) to help them make their book.
5. The publisher then distributes that book to booksellers.
6. The readers then purchase the book and consumes the work.

But now, we’re in a world where it’s possible to go from 1 to 6 without all the steps in between. The sequential, gated process of curation that an agent, publisher, and bookseller controls is not the only way (although it’s still a very valid and important one).

For this reason, it seems that there’s never been a better time in history to be an artist because it’s easier than ever to reach readers or your audience. The only thing that’s still the same is step 1: The artist needs to make the work.

In 1974, we, the humans, sent a message into space. It had the sole purpose of attempting to make contact with alien life. At that time, and still to this day in 2021, we have no evidence for the existence of alien life. For years, creators of fiction have painted various pictures of what the day would be like for us if we stumbled across an Other – a species capable of communicating with us in a meaningful way. Some depict the annihilation of our species, others paint a more optimistic view of intergalactic alliances.

Modern-day marketing likes to talk about being evidence-based with the work we make. The expert advice says, “Understand your target market”, “Focus on the customer”, “Uncover their problems and solve those, for them.” Which, is good advice if your goal is to run a sustainable business. But, the problem with the evidence-based approach of modern-day marketing theory is that it’s disastrous for making art.

Just like the Arecibo telescope did in 1974, there is always a case – a reason – to work with faith, not data. The process of art is to help the artist answer their own questions about the world. We squirrel away in whatever medium feels right, often in isolation, so that we can understand ourselves and our place in the beating heart of the world. And, once we’re satisfied with the output of that investigation for ourselves, we send it out into the world; just like Arecibo.

The message from Arecibo has not yet provoked a response. In fact, it’s estimated the signal is about 47 light-years away as of 2020. But, it’s out there to be discovered. And the hope that one day, in some distant future, a group of humans may benefit from it, makes it worth it. The chances are small, but some hope is better than none.

As artists, we also send messages out into the world with hope; we hope they’ll find someone else who can decipher it, understand it, or benefit from it in some way. Our work orbits humanity’s collective consciousness on social media platforms, every share or like slightly amplifying it to other people like us. We may never find out if the message lands, and it’s unlikely that taking this approach will lead to any form of meaningful income (see Vincent Van Gogh). But, in the same way, that Arecibo scientists may never know about the impact of the message they created, taking the risk of simply putting the message out there may be the biggest act of generosity a human can perform. Whilst the chances are small, some hope is better than none.

When something’s too big and scary to accomplish, break it down, they say. Make it smaller and smaller until you’ve got small, achievable chunks of work.

But there’s an art to breaking things down into manageable chunks. And I don’t mean saying things like, “I’m going to write a novel, so I need to do a chapter a week for 52 weeks then I’ll be done.” Or, if I’m making a graphic novel, simply saying, “i’ll just do a panel-a-day” won’t make it any easier. What makes it easier? Finishing ‘something’.

How to finish

As artists, we all have goals. One day, I want to write a novel. But writing a novel is going to take a *very* long time. I don’t even know what it takes to write a novel. I can get a sense of what it’s like from testimony – other authors who have accomplished the task and share their words of wisdom about how to do it. We’ve all heard it before, “Write everyday”, “Write whenever you feel like”, “Write for you” or “Write for your audience”. For every piece of sage advice, there’s another sage who went about it the opposite way. All that really tells me is that there are different paths for different people. So what sort of person am I?

What’s your skateboard?

In agile software development, we have the concept of building a skateboard, first. It’s a helpful analogy that is intended to describe the simplest way to achieve your goal. For example, if your goal is to get from A to B, you could build a car. But that’s expensive, and it may take a long time. A skateboard is cheaper and lighter and it will get you from A to B, but maybe not in the comfort or glory that you imagined.

Writing a novel is a bit like building a car. It can take professional novelist 3+ years to write a novel. If I’m a novice, it’s going to take me a lot longer than that. And even then, when I get to the end, I won’t know if it’ll be any good for anyone else to read!

But writing a novel is, in fact, simply telling a story. A novel has a beginning, middle, and end. It has characters, plot, sub-plots. It has a ‘writer-style’, personality, brand. It helps the author explore deep questions about themselves. All of those things that make up a novel can be found in a short story, or even micro-fiction. Perhaps, the skateboard version of a novel is a short story. It’s less time-consuming, less expensive, and when you’re done, you can get feedback more quickly on whether your beginning, middle, and end is present; if your characters are well developed alongside your plot. You can begin to understand your writing style. Sure, it’s not a Ferrari, but it’ll get you from A to B so you can learn from it and then build your bicycle.

The same thing goes for picture books. They take A LOT of work to illustrate. Freya Blackwood says it takes her about 6 months to do one book. And that’s when the words are provided! What’s the picture book illustrator’s skateboard? Well a picture-book illustrator is a visual storyteller. They take a set of words (normally about 300-500), and they tell a story within and alongside them. All of that can be achieved in a single image and a few words. In fact, this is exactly what Scholastic saw when they offered me a contract. I accidentally showed them I could ride a skateboard so they threw me in a car and said, “That’s OK, you know how to get from A to B, just do it for 32 pages now”.

Not writing a novel, just getting from A to B

Agile software development has taught me the art of breaking things down. To have a look at what’s going on at a functional level and create new and interesting ways to achieve the same goal for cheaper and faster. It just so happens that it works the same way for any giant goal we set ourselves. Once we remove the ego involved in wanting to tell our friends, ‘we wrote a novel’, the path toward that final goal isn’t as difficult or as epic as it seems.

Humans love magic, most of the time. We perceive something to be magic when the cause and effect of some event isn’t immediately obvious or deducible to us. We say things like, “How did they do that?” when a magician makes a coin disappear from one hand and immediately appear in the other. It’s ‘amazing’.

Hiding the cause and effect of an event has its benefits. Who doesn’t enjoy the surprise when a performing magician levitates their assistant with nothing but a wave of the hand? Surprise is something worth paying for. We love the challenge of trying to work out how it was done. Magic that does no harm, or is there for us as entertainment, is something to be celebrated.

Like magicians, artists can also make magic. There have been plenty of times where I’ve gazed upon a painting, awestruck at their ability to create a particular effect. Amanda Hyatt, Joseph Zbukvic, Alvaro Castagnet are magicians in my mind. And they’re good at guarding their secrets. Their secrets are worth something so people pay handsome prices to attend closed-off workshops in the hope that one or two secrets will be revealed.

Perfecting magic tricks take time – years. It requires privacy for true practice; we cannot safely fail if there is any element of performance to our practice. And yet, the social media machine calls. In a bid to take advantage of the algorithms we’re prompted to post every day (or at least 3 times a week). The power and pressure of ‘fuelling the feed’ is an anathema to making true magic.

I see artists online, many in children’s publishing – the most giving of all art industries –  expose their cause and effect for free, over and over and over again. They post highly-produced videos, sharing their secrets and methods. Walkthroughs, sketch time-lapses, materials etc. Yes, it’s incredibly engaging content, and the social media gods reward them for that; but what’s the cost to their practice in the long run? And is the value exchange fair? I’m not sure that’s clear.

The best, most revered magicians are the ones who don’t reveal their secrets. They’re the ones who are making magic and audiences are showing up to be surprised and delighted, precisely because they are kept in the dark. Magicians (and the best fine artists alike) manufacture and understand the art of surprise, there’s value in keeping things a little private sometimes, even if Instagram or Twitter give us stats to try and prove otherwise.