I’ve been struggling to prioritise which story or drawing idea to work on next. They all have interesting bits within them so choosing based on ‘interesting-ness’ isn’t going to work this time.

Same goes for learning. One would improve my drawing skills, another would improve my comics skills, another would improve my colour skills – so choosing by what skills I want to improve won’t work either.

Then I started reading “Art of Photography: An Approach to Personal Expression” by Bruce Barnbaum. In the context of choosing which subjects to photograph and how, he writes:

“The first thing to look for in determining your interests is enthusiasm. I cannot overemphasise the importance of enthusiasm. I once heard that three human ingredients will combine to produce success in any field of endeavour: enthusiasm, talent, and hard work, and that a person can be successful with only two of those attributes as long as one of the two is enthusiasm!”

It struck me light a bolt of enthusiastic lightning. When I’m enthusiastic about a project, it dominates everything inside me. It’s as if every other project I had in mind drops away (forgetting to eat and drink properly included). In a rational world where we’re supposed to weigh up pros and cons of everything before choosing a course of action, I realised there was another, more emotionally-drive way – might enthusiasm work for choosing my next project?

With this lens, the choice became much easier. I simply picked and began.

The problem with enthusiasm, of course, is that it can be fleeting and inconsistent. Enthusiastic one day, not enthusiastic the next. Most ideas I work on begin with plenty of enthusiasm and I think “this is the greatest idea that ever existed!” Then, at some point, they get difficult. I get stuck or I realise I’m lacking a skill to progress it. It’s important to remember that this moment happens in almost every project and is a natural part of creative work. The challenge for most of us is to know that it will pass and get better – overcoming those challenges, improving skills is fundamental to the process. It’s what Bruce would call the second ingredient (for those without talent): hard work.

Noodling is a word I use to describe when I’m messing around. A bit like play. Maybe there’s some idea, or starting point, that sits me down with a pencil in hand, but often there isn’t. Most of the time, when I sit down to draw for fun, I truly have no idea where the marks I’m making will go.

But, I also know that without a little noodling, I’ll never make a pasta. It’s become one of the most important parts of my art practice.

My work is meant for books and stories, not gallery walls. Sometimes I wish it were another way – I like the idea of ‘exhibitions’ and evenings at a gallery. So, I try to experiment with what it would take to make something beautiful for beauty’s sake but no matter what happens, I end up in the same place – I need more panels, more backstory, a stronger character, something more than beauty to drive the work forward.

So, I will never be like them, the gallery artists, but it’s also likely true that they will never be like me.

What the market wants is lower cost, more efficient production, higher output and easily reproducible steps. If that becomes one’s criteria for running an art practice, it’s not an art practice anymore, it’s a business.

One of the key skills an illustrator has to learn, it seems, isn’t about drawing at all; it’s about becoming comfortable with invisibility. For some reason, our culture still largely focusses on (and admires) words, “Do you also write or just illustrate?” is one of the most common questions I get from people who discover what I do. To be an author is something to aspire to. An illustrator? Not so much.

Pictures, we know, transfer information and feeling much faster than words to most people. Using pictures to communicate also doesn’t require the viewer to learn a language. I can write “smile” in English and I will reach an english-speaking audience. But to reach other audiences I need to translate that – Spanish, Mandarin, Swahili. Or I can draw a smile – 😊 – for everyone.

In commercial picture books, the pictures create a ‘visual identity’ for the book as it sits alongside all the other books on the shelf seeking a customer. A buyer doesn’t need to read a single word of the book to know whether it will be cute/fun, scary, serious, literary, or sad. Pictures do all of that heavy lifting on the cover, the best ones don’t just describe a mood, they tell a story.

Pictures work at such a natural and subconscious level that even authors and viewers don’t even recognise their effect sometimes. An illustrator will often be referred to by an author as ‘the person who drew the pictures for my book’. Most of the time, I’m OK with this, but sometimes, I’m not.

Part of the joy of drawing pictures for people in commercial picture books is to see a reaction, to feel that we’ve informed or entertained another human. It’s fundamentally about connection. But, unfortunately, the connection we make through pictures with eachother can often be one way – we send something out into the world, the receiver loves it, adores it, but doesn’t recognise the human behind it.

It’s easy to get a little bitter about this but there is another reaction: to channel how my 10-year-old self would have thought about the power of invisibility because he would’ve loved it!

Mass-produced products exist in almost every physical product category I can think of: Chairs, tables, mobile phones, clothing, food and others. We know the trade-offs we make when we purchase a mass-produced product over something custom or artisan-made. With mass-produced products, we typically save money, the quality isn’t as good as something hand-made, but it satisfies a need.

Sometimes, we decide to invest in something that isn’t mass produced – a custom-designed bookshelf, a set of handmade dinnerware; this also has a trade-off. We know we pay more but the quality is better, it’s likely to last longer, and be more suitable to a specific need or needs. We may even save money in the long run.

It seems to me that large language models in their current form now enable us to mass produce words and images and it seems that, on the most part, it will be fine for most people. And yet, there are people who know and understand the value of something more hand-made and who value it enough to pay for it because we’re already doing that in every other product category that exists. Why would illustration be the abberation?

I can’t remember where I heard this (I didn’t come up with it), but it goes something like this. Imagine walking down the street on your way to work one day and someone runs up to you and wants to tell you about an amazing dream they had last night. Imagine that you’re a kind and generous person and you decide to indulge this stranger, “Yes, OK, please tell me your dream.”

When you agree to listen, they give you two conditions.

“First, before I tell you my dream, we have to find somewhere to sit, it’s going to take at least 2 hours, maybe a bit longer.”

A reasonable person may stop them here and say thanks but no thanks and return to their day. A person with more time might say, “OK, I have the time, let’s go find somewhere to sit.” And so, they find somewhere to sit with this stranger and then the stranger provides their second condition.

“Ok, so, to hear my dream, you also need to pay me $20. Once you pay me, I’ll tell you.”

It may sound ridiculous, almost no one in their right mind would say OK – suddenly this dream is costing the listener time and money. And yet, no matter how illogical, this is exactly what we agree to do everyday when we purchase a cinema ticket and watch a film, or pay another monthly fee to a streaming service and binge a series on the couch.

The act of telling and listening to stories is illogical. It is inefficient. It is kind of insane. It’s also an act of generosity and a deeply human way for us to be informed, entertained, and create connection with one another which is why, despite the ask from the dream-teller, we do it almost every day.

Pictures in books have a problem. Our education system is currently designed to favour words over pictures. Babies begin with pictures because pictures are ‘easy’. They are intuitive and images are the primary way we experience the world before we are taught the symbols and marks that constitute the written word.

By the time a child is a toddler, pictures in books are paired with words, about 50/50. Soon after that, children begin reading books that have more words than pictures until, having fully grasped the written language, they begin to read stories without pictures–100% words. Having been educated in this way, a person can’t be blamed for assuming ‘pictures are for kids.’

I recently had an interaction with a grandfather in a bookstore who was looking for a book for their ‘very smart 7-year old grandchild.’ I suggested a story primarily driven by pictures but with big themes. He leafed through the book and said, ‘my granddaughter is too smart for this, it doesn’t have enough words.’ Which, of course, begs the question – how many words makes a smart book?

And yet, this same person would likely take their very smart 7-year old grandchild to an art gallery. They would likely gaze upon the works of Van Gogh, Cezanne, or Matisse. They would likely think this experience was important, intelligent and an objective good for their grandchild.

But, paintings are pictures without words. Why stand in front of a piece of canvas from hundreds of years ago, dabbed with colour? Shouldn’t that same child who was too-smart for a picture-driven story in a book also be too smart for a Van Gogh?

Paint on a canvas, like pictures in a book, provoke feeling and tell a story; they stimulate an emotional intelligence and also an intellectual one. But, like with most technology, the Overton Window of the medium will always change. The important thing is that we generate enough diversity across the arts to help people find their way to growing both of those parts of themselves as only the best art can do.

I heard this from a bookseller once: when people come into the shop and ask for a recommendation – a good book – what they’re really asking is, “Does it finish well?”

When something finishes well, it comes to a conclusion. It doesn’t just mean a ‘happy’ ending but rather that the reader walks away with a sense of accomplishment – they learned, they enjoyed, they felt something, they changed.

As a writer, it’s often tempting to try something different, something ‘edgy’ or ‘unusual’ like leaving the audience to decide their own ending. But, it seems, that isn’t want the vast majority want. We want something to finish, and finish well.

Many of the decisions I’ve made in the past have been driven by the sunk-cost fallacy; choosing to continually invest in something because I’ve invested so much in it already instead of whether or not the benefits of further investment will be worth it.

But, this is where it’s useful to remember the old Japanese proverb: When you’re on the wrong train, get off at the next stop. The longer you wait, the more expensive the return trip is.

The tricky part is working out if you’re really on the wrong train and, to know that, you need to know which train you’re supposed to be on and, to know that, one needs to know one’s self.