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

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

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

But also – maybe that’s just bollocks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categorising feedback helps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve been guilty, at various stages in the last few years, of falling back into an old habit. To dream up images in my mind’s eye (normally while watching mindless television), and being satisfied enough with having invented them that I don’t feel the need to draw them. Why draw them when I have already imagined them, right?

In my head, these images are perfect. Great line, colour, composition, and character. In my head, I can produce many of these perfect images very quickly – way quicker than if I were to draw them. I can tell a whole visual story in a few minutes and, well, the job is done.

If I try to draw these images I can see so clearly there’s a risk they’ll come out differently. Worse. Imperfect. Sub-optimal. My hand can very rarely perfectly translate what the mind’s eye conjures. So, instead of taking the risk, or accepting imperfect, much better to not start at all.

But therein lies the problem. An undrawn image is, well, exactly that, undrawn. And if I don’t draw it it doesn’t exist to anyone but me. And if no one else can see it, how can I validate whether it’s any good, or could be better? And, without that, how can I make progress as a storyteller or artist.

But if I emphasise getting the images out, things happen. I increase my luck surface area. I get feedback from others. I learn from my own failures, difficulties, and successes in the process. I grow.

If I don’t get the images out of my head, they don’t go away. I can’t move on. The same images just swirl around in various circular ways and, well, I end up at the same place I started – the beginning of nowhere.

Only by getting the images out do I have a children’s publishing career. Only by getting the images out do I get the warm and fuzzies when a child or caregiver responds to the work. Only by getting the images out do I feel an energy to keep moving forward, to take bigger and better risks, to answer the burning questions that only come from doing the work.

So, my advice to my future self whose reading this some time soon, if you’re feeling stuck – get the images out. It’s the only way to get to all the good things that come from those images. Most of the good is centred around building relationships and community with others; one of the things I value the most, so it’s guaranteed to be worth it.

I grew up thinking about emotions as either positive or negative. I could be happy or sad, angry or calm, pleasant or unpleasant. The goal, I learned, was to avoid the negative emotions and try to spend more time feeling the positive ones.

But, what I’ve come to realise is that what’s important isn’t the emotion, but the energy associated with it and the behaviour and action that energy provokes. The energy within the emotion, whether a pleasant or unpleasant one, can be the source of incredible things.

Take, for example, grief; specifically the sort of grief that accompanies the loss of a loved one. The emotions of despair, hopelessness, and alienation dominate our being for, perhaps, longer and with more intensity than we like when we lose someone. They are, quite specifically, unpleasant feelings.

But, despair, hopeless, and alienation are also high-energy emotions. And we have two choices when we lose a loved one. We can dwell on what we’ve lost (which is an important part the grieving process), but we can also be thankful for what we’ve still got. We have a choice about how we can use the intensity of what we’re feeling and it can drive us to what we do next.

Some of my favourite art has been produced by artists who say that it came from a place of high-energy emotion (and it’s often the unpleasant ones). I’ve done this myself – whether it’s from losing someone we love dearly, or the despair I feel that comes from thinking about the existential threat of climate change and our impact on the planet.

So, whilst emotions still exist on a positve (pleasant) and negative (unpleasant) axis, and the unpleasant ones are still ones I prefer to avoid most of the time, the energy level of those emotions tend to be what I try to focus on. I know that I can use those unique and intense human experiences to drive me to action; to approach the act of art-making with a high-energy curiosity and determination to develop answers (or, at the very least, perspectives) to the questions those intense feelings stir up.

I’ve been struggling to return to mindless doodling and writing–that space of pure invention for pure invention’s sake; deep and personal exploration of what I’m thinking and feeling.

I haven’t quite worked out what it is, but I think publishing as a goal has been taking over. Who will buy it? Who will be interested? What market is this for? These questions are creating barriers to my thinking and my making and it’s not unique to me.

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

I used to think that self-confidence and motivation was a beginners’ problem but, as it turns out, no matter how many books published, or awards won, this question still emerges in any artist’s mind at different stages in their career; well, it’s been my experience, anyway.

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

The other option is to just put pen to paper and then worry about the rest later. By visualising somethig (nay, anything), it’s at least a way of recording all the failures along the way. Like any good scientist knows, even a negative result still tells us something. It seems there’s only one way after all.

Everywhere, all around us, video is closing in. Whether it’s the millions of on-demand television series offered to us by all the channels in the world, or the rise of video on social media (TikTok, Instagram Stories) whose business models increasingly depend on the rich data sources that video provide. It’s everywhere, and it’s growing. So, where does the humble still image go from here?

There’s no doubt in my mind that video tells stories. At 24 frames per second, each minute of video is composed of 1440 still images. When arranged in sequence like in video, the opportunity for storytelling is greatly enhanced (hello, movie industry) and because video also involves a multi-sensory experience (hello, sound), there are some clear benefits to the way stories are told using video.

But, if anyone has ever stood in front an oil painting in an art gallery, they’ll know that there’s a story there, too. Each brushstroke tells a story of the hand that created the work. Which colour went on first, the movement of the hand that blended them, allbeit, a lot of the time, imperfectly. The materials themselves tell a story – oil, watercolour, acrylic – all had their technological moment in the sun, and continue to do so. We very rarely see egg tempera used in today’s paintings but, that in itself, tells a story of the artworks that do contain it i.e. it tells us when it was painted.

Comics and graphic novels also tell stories. Sure, there are not 1440 images per minute to devour, but it’s precisely in it’s select frames where the story lies. In graphic novels and comics, the artist’s job is to whittle the imagery down to what is essential. To be deliberate and selective over what to show and what to hide. More impressively, by not showing 1440 images per minute, the creator also controls the images that can be crafted in the readers’ imagination between frames. Look at any Calvin and Hobbes comic to see the power of less frames, not more.

See, there’s a problem with video – 1440 frames per minute – that no data hungry social media platform seems to want to prioritise in the way they’re influencing culture. It’s disrupting imagination. When every story is told in precise, high-resolution detail, there’s nothing left for an audience to do except watch (and scroll) on auto-pilot – not remembering what they saw, when they saw it, how it made them feel, or how it changed them. Perhaps this is great to ratchet up the platform’s engagement numbers; those same numbers they use to price and sell ads to their advertisers. But, there’s a risk we end up unable to fill in the gaps, in anything, when it’s handed to us on a 1440/images/minute platter.

Picture books, on the other hand, have 32-pages and anyone who has ever constructed the visual narrative within one knows that there’s not a great deal of room there – but there’s enough. There’s enough to tell rich, powerful, clever stories that change hearts and minds, one page turn at a time.

The craft of the illustrator and author is to work together to determine what should be in and out, and why. It’s this reductive, intentional work that, whether people realise it or not, creates the ‘magic’ that an audience feels when they read a really good picture book. To create space for the reader to participate in the image building and storytelling process of sequential art is a magical experience (both as a creator and a reader) – a reminder that humans are exceptional creatures of communication, inference, deduction, logic, and, most importantly, emotion.

Storytelling in video is great, don’t get me wrong. I love film as an art form. But, the best ones, the ones that stick with me, do the same as still art – they intentionally invite me into the narrative building process. It’s why it’s scarier when the director of a scary movie hides the monster rather than reveals it straight away.

Human imagination is, quite likely, the most species-defining characteristic we have. The intense creation and distribution of amateur video won’t stop that – we’ll get incredibly adept at better and better storytelling; using those 1440 frames/minute to beautiful and arresting effect. But video won’t kill the still image. In fact, it’ll probably end up being a little like the effect that electricity had on the candle – it didn’t kill that either, it just made the use of candles much more special; we’ll probably just fall in love with it even more.

I chatted to a next-door neighbour the other day. She hadn’t seen my latest picture book, Rosie the Rhinoceros, until very recently. “Matt,” she said “can I just say that I loved Rosie. You’re becoming more like you!” Hmm, I thought, becoming more like me. I never asked her what she meant but now I can’t help but try to work it out.

Rosie is the first book I’ve illustrated using ink as well as watercolour. It was certainly a risk for me. I’d never used ink in this way before – bold, confident line work – but in my character discovery of Rosie, I had no choice; pencil just didn’t become her. Inspired by the beautifully energetic line of Bill Watterson’s work in Calvin and Hobbes, I studied the art of the comic line intensely. And, as is most often the case, through pure play and exploration, the style of Rosie revealed itself so naturally before me.

But, what I thought I was doing was finding the medium to match the character. Rosie has a confidence & energy in her that the bold flowing line captures perfectly. Yet, here was the next door neighbour saying that the book itself felt more like the me she knew.

But that’s often it, isn’t it? The perception of ourselves very rarely matches the ones we plant in another’s head as we meander our way through life. For example, ever since I was little I’ve always found myself in leadership roles (first in junior sport, then in school, then at work). People say my confidence inspires their confidence. But, inside, I couldn’t feel any further from a ‘confident leader’! Yet, when I look back on my life, the evidence would clearly suggest otherwise.

If I was to portrait myself, I would not consider bold, confident, flowing ink lines in the Rosie style; but I do, deep down, acknowledge some level of authenticity in that work. I bloody enjoyed it, to be honest. The bold lines freed me from the laborious but meditatively intense work of pencil and wash. I had been, in that book, closer than ever to the idea of play I bang on so much about; and yet, I thought it was Rosie, not me, who was to blame.

Sure enough, as if I needed yet more evidence of this authenticity, my new book, Herman Crab written by Peter Helliar, was commissioned off the back of the work I produced in Rosie. “We love the bold character design of Rosie,” formed part of the brief. Herman is a very different character but, again, the freedom in the line produced something different in the work.

With Rosie and Herman, I thought that I was simply evolving – becoming a more logical and conceptually-oriented artist. And, while that may be true, perhaps what’s also happening is that I’m finding those authentic marks that Bruce Whatley talks about; the marks that make me, me. I always thought it would happen more consciously than this. I would somehow logic my way towards something authentic. But, like with most things true, perhaps it’s only when the brain gets out of the way that the heart has room to speak?