Staying focussed on creative work – one project at a time – is difficult. In fact, it’s probably one of the hardest things to do in the new attention economy we live in. We’re exposed to millions of snippets, moments, and ideas every day – each one is a thread on which the creative brain can pull in order to invent a new piece of art.

So how does one prioritise? Well, deadlines help. Once you have that elusive ‘contract’ with a publisher, you’re obliged to deliver against it. The problem is contracts are elusive. Having someone care about your work, at all, is elusive. So, if those two external motivations don’t exist, what’s left? The only answer is the artist themselves.

What questions are you trying to answer?

The drive to make things (art, performance, software) comes from our need to answer the questions that percolate in our minds. For me, I use the medium of pencil and watercolour, words and pictures, to play through scenarios and what-ifs? For example, Queen Celine (before she was a book) was attempting to answer the question, “What if our national borders closed for good? What if nothing – the people, the things we produce in a society – never change? Is change good and necessary? Are we better off because of it?” I prioritised her because, for me, I wanted to know the answer to that question.

Pip and Pop, my webcomic that isn’t published by a traditional publisher, was and remains important. The question about how we resolve intergenerational communication and the growing divide between the old and young created a burning need in me to work through the pros and cons of each generation’s perspective on things. What I’m learning from that simple comic is that there’s a lot to learn from one another.

Perhaps, instead of thinking about all those creative projects that are drawing our interest, we can reflect, rather, on the questions we seek to answer for ourselves and prioritise answering those in whatever medium helps us work through it. We may even find (like I did with Queen Celine) that there are enough people trying to answer the same question such that someone in a position of influence thinks it’s worth re-producing 10,000 times with that elusive contract after all. And if not, at least you’re answering the questions in life that are important to you – you’re finding the answers you seek.

Sometimes, I forget that there are people in the world who struggle to visualise things in abstract ways. I know, it’s a stupid thing for an illustrator to say, but I need constant reminding.

I’ve been in many meetings & pitches where I’ve presented someone some sketches, maybe a storyboard. It’s as rough as guts but, in my head, it gets the idea across. The point of the pitch at this stage isn’t the finer details, but maybe the story arc, or the flow of words, maybe some rough layouts. In my head, I can see how these basic sketches will become gorgeous, full colour, emotionally raw images and how those images will complement the words to produce a stunning story. But, many others can’t.

What does it mean to be a visual person?

I’m told this all the time by people with whom I collaborate, “I’m a visual person.” It turns out that when I hear those words I confuse that with “I’m OK to fill in the gaps in partially completed work.” What I’ve come to learn about people who say they are ‘visual people’ is that, often, they’re the opposite of abstract thinkers. What those ‘visual’ people need are concrete, final-art-ish rendering of the vision inside my head. It’s only when I take the time to paint a few images of the ‘final state’ that those visual people ‘get it.’ Once that vision is drawn and made concrete in their minds, then they’re able to think abstractly about the storyboard or the sketches as a way to arrive there.

I often think that I’m wasting time by fully-rendering an idea so that others can ‘get it.’ Or, by rendering something fully, I’m missing out on the wonderful feedback and input from my collaborators that I know will make the idea better. Maybe it’s just a lack of confidence in myself?

In my head, it’s quicker for me to rough something out and talk people through it. But, I think that approach is giving me a false positive because it’s not the art I want to save time with, it’s the conversation. By spending extra time rendering a fully-formed vision for someone, the conversation goes much quicker – the feedback I receive is clearer. Feedback, after all, is the fuel I need to make my idea better, and so the quicker I can arrive there, the better off everyone is.

I’m a big fan of Nigella’s approach to cooking. Unlike the scientific, mad-scientist brand that someone like Heston Blumenthal has created for himself (which I also love, by the way), Nigella’s approach to food is a comfort. She makes cooking feel achievable by putting the focus on the primal and intuitive feelings of food. But, just because I have the recipes for her amazing food, doesn’t mean I can cook like her.

I see many artists talk about how copying other artists is not an ‘authentic’ way to produce ‘art’. How mimicry is a bad thing. How they should be able to ‘come up with their own work’ or ‘be original’. But, even the greatest artists (and cooks) must begin somewhere. It seems that style emerges through mimicry, not by avoiding it. Even if I buy Nigella’s cookbooks, and use them everyday, the dish I make will never be like hers, and that’s OK.

It’s a quote I come back to, often, in my creative and innovation practice. The famous Henry Ford quote, “If I asked people what they wanted, they would’ve said a faster horse.” It’s meant to be an explanation for creative genius, that you can’t research your way to innovation because most people, on the whole, cannot imagine a future that leapfrogs our current tools or culture.

Publishers are, generally, pretty risk-averse. In every book or artist they choose to publish, there’s an element of gambling. If we ‘invest’ in this book, what will it return? Will it pay for itself? Will it produce a profit?

And, like in horse-racing, there are safer bets than others. In an objective, increasingly commercial world, books authored by celebrities will have a higher chance of a good commercial return than a story by someone no one has ever heard of. Why? Well, celebrities have their own reach (thousands or millions of social media followers), and also ‘brand recognition’. The theory goes that if someone likes a well-known comedian’s comedy, and they see a book by that comedian, even if that comedian has not track record of writing good books, they’re more likely to purchase it because they believe they’ll be more likely to enjoy it.

In many ways, the de-risking of book publishing works similarly to the sentiment that Henry Ford tried to express. True originality scares people. Publishers, on the whole, know what works. Whether it’s the percentage of celebrities v new authors, or certain subject matter over another, there are safe bets. But, every now and then, a publisher takes a ‘big risk’. They publish something that’s outside of the normal, safe, cultural evolution. Sometimes they lose, but sometimes they win, big. There are millions of kids books about poo, farts, bums, and mums. There are far fewer kids books about death, disability, racism, or grief. But when books from that second group come along, they blow us out of the water. Yes, they need to be done ‘well’, but they often are. I love Enchanted Lion Books and Gecko Press for this reason.

As an artist, and one who wants to remain published, it’s safe for me to pitch books and stories to publishers that I know are in their ‘safe-zone’. Need another bunny story? I got one. How about one about love? Yep, here you go. But, the power and beauty in books for children is that they are one of our last spaces where inter-generational conversation is possible. It’s one of our final ‘public squares’ where true conversation and exploration can still happen. If there was ever a place to influence our world, this place is it. It’s partly why it’s such an honour and pleasure to be working in it. But, to change things, things need to change. And so while what publishers will tell us is that they want a ‘faster horse’, it’s our responsibility, as artists, to show them that what they really want is to get to their destination – a better, more inclusive world – to be part of the change for good.

I spend approximately 90% of my non-sleeping hours in collaboration or conversation with others. From the moment I wake up and say good morning to my partner, I enter into almost hourly context switching – different people, different problems, different conversations. Then, when evening descends, it’s back to dinner-table conversations with loved ones before a final good night and preparing for doing it all over again tomorrow.

As my day job has progressed from maker to manager, the way I split my time (and the resulting way my attention has had to adapt) has not been optimal for the art practice or deep thinking. In the last few years, alone-days have evolved as a circuit-breaker to try to help me adapt to straddling the art and non-art world which I inhabit. They are a stand-in for what I’ve lost in the process of ‘advancing’ my software design career – solitude.

It’s not a very creative term for it, but alone days are literally that – an entire day that I spend alone and disconnected from technology. Armed with a simple pen, notebook and perhaps a magazine or novel, alone days provide an immediate and short-lived space to let the mind wander. They are days that involve me reflecting on and synthesising the last few months of focus and effort. What did I learn? What did I enjoy? What should I try to avoid repeating? What should I do more of? They are critical not only to my mental health, but for re-focusing my attention on what’s important for the coming few months. Without these alone days, it’s easy to drift; to become opportunistic rather than intentional about how I spend my one, precious, unrecoverable resource – time.

In a world that is shouting endless slogans, truths and non-truths, one where media companies and individuals are constantly vying for and trying to commercialise my attention, alone-days have become my defence mechanism. I don’t know if it’ll be sustainable or, as the world continues to hyperbolise and intensify it’s demand on my attention, I’ll need more of them. But, right now, they actively create a space for that ever-elusive state of silence. It’s only through quieting the world that I can start to hear the thoughts that are charging through my own mind – it turns out that, for the artist, they’re the most important ones. It’s the voice that others want from us and are too busy to listen to for themselves.

It happens a lot. I get home from work and I can’t muster the energy to sketch. “What’s the point?” I tell myself, “I don’t have a project on right now and the idea of trying to ‘invent’ after I’ve been in deep problem-solving mode all day just seems too much.” But sketching seems to be a bit like exercise. Going for a run (or any exercise) sounds like a horrible idea before I do it, but I’ve never returned from a run and thought, “that was a waste of time.”

Our brains are inherently geared to conserve energy – so whether it’s sketching or running, it’ll do almost anything to get out of it. But, where exercise has an immediate payoff, I never quite know when sketching will pay off – the only thing I do know is that it always does.

Here’s just one example. Four years ago, I created a set of images that, at the time, was nothing but ‘fun’ – I created the images because I felt like it. And now, four years later, I can see how that moment of ‘fun’, sketching something ‘for nothing’ has subtly but absolutely influenced what I draw, how I draw it, what I notice in the world, and, more surprisingly, a paid contract.

A paid contract was never the goal. And most of my creative ‘play’ doesn’t end up like that. In fact, most of it feels like it goes nowhere. But, after a continued practice, years in the making, I know that sometime, somewhere, that creative will pay itself back, and I may not even notice.

Am I producing ‘art’ when I’m illustrating a picture book? Well, it depends on how and, more importantly, when you look at it.

I’m slowly starting to come to understand the purpose of art in my life. And if you’ve read almost any other journal article I’ve written over the last couple of years, you’ll see that, for me, the purpose of my art practice is to help me answer questions. Queen Celine explored what happens when you block the free movement of people – who wins and who loses? Eric helped me explore what it would take if you were driven enough to live the life you wanted to live, even if society put up all the roadblocks to stop you. I’m working on stories now that try to answer questions like what value does anxiety play for survival, or what if there’s a way to see ourselves intrinsically linked to nature and not separate from it?

Picture books are a funny medium because, for me, these stories (and books) begin as art in the truest sense. Eric, Queen Celine, and the other characters and worlds I’ve invented are stages where I can play out scenarios that are bothering me or that I’m curious about. The act of drawing and writing these things help me work out what I really think. As isolated thought experiments, they really do work. But then, a publisher comes along and wants to share it.

It’s at the point of sharing it, that moment of the ‘contract’ and ‘the publishing deal’ where the art is replaced with something else; I suspect it becomes about ‘design.’ The need to consider the experience of the reader (or many readers, hopefully) and ensuring you’re communicating a clear and concise message. During the creation of art, the audience is of one – the artist. But as soon as that message needs to scale, and commercial collaborators are interested in a profit, the audience changes. Now, in the context of a publishing deal, even though that original thought experiment may have answered my question or helped me clarify what I think, the priority is the reader, not the artist. So, naturally, things need tweaking.

This transition from art to design isn’t a bad thing, in fact, it’s 100% necessary if I want my question presented to a broader audience. The editors I’ve worked with over the years have been critical in taking the tangle from out of my head and straightening it out on a page for others to consume. My way isn’t the only way to answer or explore a question, so getting someone else’s take is critical in the process of further refining what I feel and think about a problem. The act of book-making helps me answer a different question – How else could I explore the answer to these questions that I have.

I think it’s possible to get a little too wrapped up and emotional about a book if things start to feel as though they’re diluting the original intent, or, “I’m just rolling it out.” Understanding the subtle transition from art to design means that I can be sure I’m still maintaining a healthy art practice, and getting to the bottom of the questions that I seek to answer, whilst still telling a story that makes those answers a little more accessible to a larger audience.

Making money from artistic work is difficult. In a recent survey by the Australian Society of Authors, creators make, on average, 11,000AUD from their creative work. That’s not much to live on. I’ve written before about where an artist’s income comes from, and why it’s probably possible and, at least for me, preferable, to balance a ‘normal’ job with creative work. Essentially, it boils down to a supply and demand problem. Too many artists and not enough people seeking their work.

But, the other day, I was thrilled to wake up to an email letting me know that one of my books, Eric The Postie, has been pirated. Available to people to download, for FREE! The person on the other end of the email wasn’t as thrilled as me, but I couldn’t help but be flattered. Why? Because people are spending their time and energy seeking out my work. In a world where people are being offered billions of choices a day about what to read, watch or listen to, the fact that one of those things is little ol’ Eric is amazing to me!

Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media, famously once wrote that the greater threat to authors or creative artists is obscurity not piracy. The question he ponders is what’s the value of being read against what’s the value of selling a book?

What’s being pirated worth?

Piracy is a difficult value to calculate because it’s trading in attention, not money. For argument’s sake, let’s say someone buys Eric the Postie for $20 and I end up with about $1 of that in royalties. That’s one family, one sale, one dollar. They may like or dislike the book. If they like it, they may seek my name out on a bookshelf at some time or another in the future. They also may not because, let’s face it, there are millions of alternatives. I don’t know how many customers walk past a shelf in a given bookstore in a given week, but it’s likely in the 100s, and that’s being generous, and in most cases, it’s likely the same hundreds of people every few weeks or so because they live or work nearby.

Now, let’s say someone uploads a ‘free’ copy of Eric the Postie. Let’s say that it’s shared on a modestly-populated online forum that sees, maybe, 1000s of people per day. Suddenly, my work is in front of 1000s of different people so, from an exposure point of view, I’m already winning. But, none of those people are buying it. Assume I get 1% of those people downloading it – that’s 10 people. Those 10 people read my story. Some like it, and some don’t. But, I’m working with 10 people now, not just one from the bookstore. And, they’re actively asking for the book, so chances are more people already know they will like it than those who won’t.

The people downloading Eric are probably not the people who walk into bookshops and buy books. Maybe they shop online – Booktopia and Amazon – but they’re probably not the book romantics I would love them to be. But, they’re reading my book. If you look at it through the attention-economy lens, there’s value in that. Shouldn’t I, as someone who is trying to get my message out there, enjoy the fact that more people are reading, even if they’re not paying?

But it doesn’t stop there. Once I’m winning in the attention economy, just like when Coca-Cola plasters ads everywhere – people become more aware of my name and my backlist. A stronger association between “good books for kids” and “Matt Shanks” is generated in their brains. We can’t really measure, in concrete terms, the power of that, but we know that there will be a certain percentage of those 10 people per day, when they’re tasked with looking for a present for their nephew or niece, or happen to be in a mall and need to entertain the kids for a bit so they dump them in a bookshop (like I was when I was a kid of parents who never read very much), there’s a greater likelihood that my name, or my books, will be the one that will be interesting to seek out over and above “people I’ve never heard of”. I’m a safer bet.

When I was younger, using Kazaa to discover music because I had no money, I found and listened to some brilliant bands. I’ve since formed life-long connections with those bands and their music. As I’ve become more affluent, I’ve bought CDs, LPs, attended live concerts and bought more merchandise than I know what to do with. Had those bands not been found on something like Kazaa, I would’ve spent all of that money on different bands, the former ones fading into obscurity. In the long run, and in my specific relationship to them, it’s been commercially beneficial for those bands to have been pirated. I won’t be the only for which that’s happened.

I’m not saying piracy isn’t a problem, but I don’t think it’s as problematic as we think it is for an artist’s bottom-line. As far as artists go, if people are finding the need and motivation to seek out your work specifically, or share it with others, it’s a really strong signal that you’re making the right work. There’s no strong correlation between making good work and economic success anyway, but that’s not necessarily why artists do what they do. If we were after economic success we’d stop making art and have a job on Wall Street. To produce true art is to work to answer the burning questions inside of ourselves. The miracle of piracy, or, put another way, free-sharing at a scale never before achieved in human history, is that it shows the artist that there are others like them, people who are struggling to find answers and who believe that maybe you’ve done the work to find them. That, in many ways, is just as comforting and flattering, if not more, than having a few extra dollars in the pocket.

One of my favourite reent quotes from Seth Godin is “If you want to ride a bike, don’t watch a video, don’t read a book.” There are just some things that you can only learn by doing, over and over again.

When I was a kid, I loved comic strips. Our school library had a lot of Garfield and Snoopy and I remember spending many hours there poring over the drawings, watching how the writing and the panels interacted with one another to produce yet another brilliant punchline. Of course, as a kid, I didn’t know that’s what I was doing, but as an adult it seems so obvious now.

Like with many young people who had an interest in art at primary school, when the ‘reality of the world’ began to take hold in high-school, I made choices that would set me up ‘to get a job’ and not ones that involved any sort of art-making. I never really returned to comics (or art) for about 15 years. You might think, ‘Oh, what a shame’ but there’s a silver lining to all things.

Re-discovering comics

I’m not sure when or how it happened, but I’ve been re-kindling my buried love of comics over the last few years. I unashamedly love reading them and I think the shame often associated with it has something to do with how we preference text literacy over visual literacy from a very young age. I’ve got a growing comics collection, including my treasured set of Calvin and Hobbes, and I’m slowly understanding my preferences for genre and subject matter (as well as artists like M.Sassy.K one of the colourists from Isola).

But, I’ve never made a comic, not one. I’ve read books on how to make them – most famously, one I had since childhood, but also Understanding and Making Comics by Scott Mccloud. I’ve watched videos on them, too, and there are some lovely resources online to help one get their head around what’s involved in making comics. But, as Seth Godin says, “If you want to make comics, don’t watch a video, don’t read a book.” I know the theory: good characters, panel arrangement, layouts, colour palettes, joke writing and pacing, the art of lettering etc. I’ve studied it all, but there’s nothing as helpful as, like I say a lot, just doing the work.

Meet Pip and Pop

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about true art-making is that its purpose is to help me answer questions. In Queen Celine, I was trying to understand what I thought of change, good leadership, and bio-diversity. In Eric The Postie, it was about exploring tenacity when even in the face of lost opportunity, if you think creatively it’s possible to find a way through.

A question that’s been bubbling away in my brain for a while has been the one about intergenerational conflict. Seeing the rise of phrases like “Ok, Boomer” have been deeply worrying to me because it shows that we’re inventing ways of closing conversations, not opening them. Pip and Pop gave me a way to explore this. They’ve taught me that each generation has something to learn from one another. We’re all imperfect, and we’re all just doing our best. No one is truly right or wrong, there is no right or wrong, and to be honest, in the cosmic scheme of things, a lot of it is humourous.

So, who’s Pip? Pip is a young’un. He’s living in a fast-paced, connected world – part of a global community. He’s a ‘digital native’ – part of a generation that has never known a world without the internet. Pop, on the other hand, Pip’s grandad, remembers simpler times. Times when nature was the primary entertainment. Times before the internet where one read the local paper, engaged with the local community, worked hard, built a life step-by-step, and looked forward to and enjoyed retirement. He struggles to engage with this highly connected world, the gig economy, political correctness, mental health and trauma – it’s changing too fast and it’s difficult to keep up.

Pip and Pop, as it turns out, have complementary strengths and weaknesses. They have a lot to learn from one another, but the only way they can both benefit is if they create a space to listen to one another.

Lessons from Pip and Pop

It is remarkable what I’ve learned so far in my exploration of Pip and Pop, and it’s all stuff that books and videos simply cannot teach you. Some lessons are just re-affirming what I already knew, but others were complete surprises that only revealed themselves to me because of the practical nature of the learning method.

I know these ‘final’ images have broken a lot of the rules of comics. The contrast isn’t great, the colour palettes could be better, the drawing isn’t as crisp as I would like. The list of imperfections goes on. But getting them perfect was never the point. Going through the process of writing a comic – construction of humour and timing, panelling it out, gridding and inking, attempting typography, understanding the value of traditional and digital approaches to colouring, it’s all contributed to giving me a more profound appreciation of the professionals I admire, but also a desire to keep pushing myself to understand the medium through practice, not theory.

Beyond the practical understanding of what it takes to create a comic, Pip and Pop are still helping me answer questions. Not just on the page, but in life. Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, talks about how he doesn’t feel that he’s making Calvin or Hobbes do anything, because they have a life of their own. Pip and Pop are giving me a similar feeling. They are with me in every conversation I have with people who are younger than me and people who are older than me. In some cases, I hear Pip and Pop speaking, not the person I’m speaking to. That’s a profound shift in cognition based on a bit of time spent with pencil and ink.

It’s something that most people won’t notice, but Pip and Pop have shifted, in subtle ways, the way I think about and create my picture book work – mainly about the way I think about colour, but also the way I think about visual storytelling. This experiment is unlikely to end up anywhere, and I’m OK with that. That was never the point.

The most important lesson I’ve learned from all of this is that learning anything new is an exercise in vulnerability. It seems that we’re more open to that as children, and less so as adults. As adults, we’re supposed to have ‘figured it out already’ right? What makes it hard is that we have to admit to ourselves (and more importantly, others) that we don’t know something and that the most likely outcome is that we’ll stuff things up. Over and over again. In a culture that rewards and celebrates winning over failure, that’s hard, at least at first. But the universal rule seems to be that those who find a way to be comfortable with failure are the ones that end up winning in the long run when winning just means answering the most important question we’re here to answer – understanding who we are in a deeper way which, when you think about it, is the whole purpose of making the art we need to make.

When we think creativity, we seem to envision a stimulating mess. Piles of papers and colours and art supplies, post-it notes of ideas on the walls, a ‘creative genius’ scribbling furiously as their meagre hands try to keep up with the speed at which the brain is making new and exciting connections. And yes, there *are* moments of this, but in order to make the most of the moments, what’s required is absolute organisation and rigour.

I can no longer count the times when I’ve been in creative flow, pretty much the scene I’ve just described, and I go to reach for the next tool I need to take my idea further – a particular brush, just the right colour, or an eraser – and I’m suddenly stopped in my tracks. I can’t find it. I dig under the piles of papers, scan the desk (and the floor), look behind the stuff I’ve got stacked on the shelves but sure enough, I have to stop. I have to step out of the flow. The momentum for the idea goes on hold and, sometimes, it’s difficult to get back.

In order to make the most of those rare moments of flow, I’ve learned to keep things organised. Everything in its place. The layout of my space is changing regularly, but the important thing is that I know where my tools are when I need them. I can rely on them to be there. When things are organised – jars labelled, items consistently positioned and put away after every working session – it’s far easier and quicker to get into flow and stay there. Maximising the hours spent in that flow state means that I’m also maximising my chances of capturing the weird and wonderful connections that my brain makes on the fly, and that tends to lead to better work, work that even I didn’t expect, and work that seems to make others smile.