It’s much easier to tell a group of friends that I have a rule – Fridays and Sundays are for studio work – than to say “I’d prefer to stay home and work in the studio on Fridays and Sundays.” Preferences can be bargained with, “Oh, just this once!” they say, “You work too hard” or “You can’t work all the time”. When it’s a preference, it’s flexible, when it’s a rule, it’s not. People understand rules and they respect them. It’s not that I don’t want to see them, or I’d prefer to stay indoors like a hermit and paint, no, it’s not that at all. It’s just, I have a rule.

Everyone agrees that a choir needs four main vocal ranges. The soprano takes care of the high female range. The alto contributes the low female vocal range. The tenor (hello, Pavarotti) is the high adult male voice, and the bass is the low adult male voice. If one of these roles are missing, the output isn’t as rich or moving as it could be.

A picture book is no different. Sure, there are two names on the cover: the illustrator who draws the pictures and the author who writes the words, but there’s a cast of people who are critical to bringing the book to the world (editor, publisher, designer, printer etc).

When it comes to school and work, though, we seem to have a different mindset. From a very early age, each of us is supposed to be individually wonderful at everything – maths, science, history, geography, art. Right from the beginning, we’re trained toward an individualist mindset. Instead of spending time and energy identifying and honing an individual’s strengths, and teaching us how to work together to produce rich and moving output, as is the default in a choir, we spend exponentially more time and energy teaching kids to be good at everything. If you’re weak at maths, we get tutored for it. But we (or, at least I) don’t go to after school art classes if we can see a kid has a propensity toward expression with colour, shape and line.

A strengths-based approach to growth, paired with a focus on working together, not only means that individuals can spend more time doing what they’re good at (and therefore more likely to enjoy it), but we’re able to create the richest and most moving music, together – something greater than the sum of its parts.

If only I had more space. I’d be able to store more supplies and have a separate place for digital and physical work. I’d keep things in more easily accessible ways so I could maintain my flow state. I’d be able to store different types of paper, and play more expressively with acrylics, and paint in oils because I’d have room to let them dry.

But, I used to say this sort of thing in the previous place we lived, which is much smaller than the one we live in right now. So, compared to that, now I’ve got heaps of space. And so I can’t help but think that maybe what I need isn’t more space, but to think differently about what I’ve got. It seems that no matter how much space we have to make our work, we’ll always want more because the more we have, the more we fill it. The problem with more options is that, beyond a certain number, we tend to be overwhelmed by them and end up not doing anything at all. There’s a name for this, it’s called the Paradox of Choice.

In 2000, a study was conducted about the paradox of choice. Researchers set up a market stall with 24 kinds of jam for sale. They gave samplers a $1 coupon off any jam. On a different day, shoppers saw a market stall with only 6 kinds of jam instead of the 24 from the previous day. The larger display attracted more samplers but ultimately led to fewer sales than the smaller display.

And so, no matter what our situation, maybe it’s better to work within constraints. What can be achieved in a small space, or with limited supplies, may be exactly what we need to unlock our mind and produce work that still answers the questions that the soul asks of us. It’s certainly true of why I began using watercolour over other less portable and messier mediums. Perhaps we are more resourceful if we have fewer resources.

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.