For many years, I’ve struggled with ‘digital’ as an art medium. No matter the tools or the technology advancements, I’ve never been able to get the same connection between heart and hand from digital tools as I have physical ones. I used to think it was me. Then I thought it was the medium. But now I know what it really is – a combination of both.

One of the things I love about physical media is that they come inherently constrained. A pot of ink and a sharpened piece of bamboo goes a long way to creating lines like Quentin Blake’s. Oil paint and a palette knifed helps to create work like Richard Musgrave-Evans. A brush, water and colour are the foundations for some of my favourite artist’s work. And, of course, it’s not the materials alone that are responsible, but a combination of the constraints of those materials and the artists that wield them.

So, when it comes to digital, what are the tools? Well, the problem is that they are infinite. Millions of possible brushes, colours, canvas textures and software are at the artist’s disposal. And then there’s the hardware – wacom, cintiq, tablet, pens, mice, the list goes on. It turns out that I haven’t had a problem with digital per se – I’ve had a problem with infinite choice.

So, following this thread, I’ve experimented with a hypothesis-led approach (very scientific, I know) to try to learn something new about myself and the medium. So I frame it up:

“I believe that by constraining the options within digital I will have a better chance of producing work that pleases me. I will know this if I can create some illustrations I like within a few hours of sitting down to play. And this belief won’t be true if I still end up producing not a single thread to follow.

So, that’s what I did.

Using an iPad, Procreate, 2 brushes, and 12 colours, I set out to explore where the combination of those things and me would lead. I used my design blog articles as the foundation for exploring some concepts for editorial illustration and, well, begun to play. Here’s what happened.

Constraints are freeing, not limiting

So far, the hypothesis seems to hold true. I really like where these are going. There’s something there. They are far from perfect but I can certainly see my admiration for Leunig and Ralph Steadman in them. They are yet another reminder to me that imposing limits on one’s self (even if they are somehow just made up), provokes progress. We *think* they’ll prevent anything from happening but in fact they promote something. And, something is better than nothing, which is where I was at before when faced with digital as a medium.

If someone asks me, “Are you a hare or a tortoise?”, I answer tortoise, every time.

I’m a planner. I love working methodically, consistently, and therefore sustainably towards a goal. This gives me lots of time to do divergent thinking, and just as much for convergent thinking. I use consistent and transparent communication to make sure that anyone I’m collaborating with knows where I’m up to, what’s concerning me, any questions I have, and anything I need from them, when I need it, well before I need it. When I work in this way I can work efficiently and industrially when I need to – but still, deliver high-quality work and remain calm throughout.

I know others who work the opposite way – last minute, just-in-time, frantic. Tasks are completed the night before a deadline, or they are prioritised based on the last email that hit the inbox, or the last one they paid attention to. Some people love working this way because it can feel full of energy, fresh, ‘creative’, and full of sparks. Most workplaces operate like this, it seems, and they call themselves ‘fast-paced’.

The problem is when the tortoise and the hare try to work with one another. They can only change and adapt so much but, fundamentally, the approaches are different. If the hare cannot see the value in the tortoise’s approach, any collaboration is headed for failure.

Sprinting to the finish has and, I dare say, never will be fun for me. And so, there are only two options. The first is to continue working with hares and end up tired, frazzled, and frustrated. The second is to just find other tortoises.

My natural state is introversion. In fact, it’s probably closer to ambiversion. So when I look around and see other people like me, children’s book authors and illustrators, I don’t feel like I fit in.

I’m not zany. I don’t have an abundance of bottomless energy. I can be silly, and imaginative, but in a quiet way. I look at illustrators playing dress up for kids and others making hilarious faces and being extrovertedly humourous. I think, Is this what kids like? Do the illustrators and authors who do it find it liberating? Is this what ‘works’ for kids? Or is it what works for selling books? Are they linked?

When I think about how I present myself to the world, it’s natural to compare myself to others, we all do it. But even if I try to adopt the zany creator persona, I can’t keep it up for very long, and sure enough, I end up back in my introverted, quiet state.

So, this is me. Quiet. In a world dominated and geared for extroverted people, I’m one of the quiet ones. I’ll build my audience, bit by bit, and connect to the other quiet ones in the world. After all, diversity in all things is important, and the way to present yourself online is no different. After all, Roald Dahl doesn’t have an Instagram account and he’s doing just fine.

There’s a difference between performance, and practice. But in our social media driven world, the lines are blurring, and nothing infuriates me quite as much as all those artists out there who are doing ‘quick sketches’ that aren’t sketches at all.

This is thumbnail sheet of what I call ‘quick sketches’:

And, if you search the #quicksketch hashtag on a service like Instagram, it becomes pretty evident, very quickly, that I suck and that there are so many other people who are faster and better drawers than me.

But, then maybe there’s another possibility.

Knowing what I know now, having practised as a professional illustrator for almost 6 years at the time of writing, is that the vast majority of “quick sketches” I see online are NOT quick, or sketches. A timelapse makes something look quick. My timelapse? It took 6 hours to do! Six. Hours. Maybe I work slowly? Maybe I should be faster? Do I really care? The answer is no. My work looks the way it looks because of the time it takes.

So I’m beginning to tune out. I’m done with looking at others’ ‘quick sketches’ from the internet. I’m sticking with my ‘slow’, ‘unformed’ and let’s be frank, sketchy sketches. I’m fine with that, because if you’re trading in scarcity, speed doesn’t matter.

I’ve never had a “portfolio” – a document or a curated set of projects that I use to get illustration work. Folios are strange things because almost never are the criteria for folios clear or universal. Illustrators are told that “every publisher is different.” If that’s true, then a single portfolio will never be appropriate – we would need a different one for different clients or publishers; I don’t know about anyone else but that sounds tiring to me.

Instead of a portfolio, I have work. I draw. I paint. I write. Then, I share it – on my website, on Instagram sometimes, and on Twitter. Unless I’m working on a specific book or project, I don’t draw or paint or write for anyone but me. Then I share it. And, over time, through making the work I want to make and sharing it, different people see it. Some resonate with some images. Others resonate with others. I have people who enjoy my writing more than my drawing. I have people who enjoy my animals instead of the way I do plants. My dogs instead of my cats. My digital work instead of my analog stuff. There is no folio, there is just my work.

Most often, when people are hiring other people, they tend to need to know that you can do what they need done. If I’m going to get my toilet fixed, I’d like to know that the person I hire has fixed toilets before. If someone is going to install a pool, it would be good to know they’ve done many pools before. I wouldn’t let someone who has never successfully pulled a tooth safely from a mouth do it to me for their first time. But if they’ve done it before, I’m more likely to hire them to do it for me.

The fact is that the work you do is the work you get. And so if I don’t want to fix toilets, or build a pool, or pull a tooth from someone else’s mouth, I just won’t do it or tell anyone I can. But if I really want to draw dogs in children’s books then I’ll do that – then share it. If I really want to do underwater scenes, then that’s what I’ll spend my time drawing. Not for anyone else – not to fit a brief or pitch myself in some new or different light – but just for me.

The work I’ve got is the work I’ve made and shared. I love drawing Australian animals and making them more contemporary in style to anything that’s come before. In fact, I love anthropomorphising almost anything (but especially animals). I love the ocean (and especially rockpools), and sunsets, so I’ve made work that satisfies that deep desire. I love soft watercolours with a bit of pencil linework showing through. I love splashing ink with bold colours and character design. I’m not a fan of illustrating the built environment yet, hard lines and hard shapes (things like cars etc don’t really do it for me). These choices and biases are driven by a need to satisfy the requirements of publisher x or y – it’s just my work.

The thing is, publishers know where to look – Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Etsy – they are normal humans doing what normal humans do. They see stuff they like, or that fits a style in their mind for a book that they’re thinking of publishing, and they see an artist who can do it for them.

It seems to me it’s far easier to work this way – enjoying each and every illustration you make – rather than trying to draw things you don’t like because the goal is to published at all costs. Chances are, a publishing deal may come along anyway, and if it doesn’t, at least you’re enjoying your limited time on this planet.

The law of diminishing returns is an economic law stating that if one input in the production of a commodity is increased while all other inputs are held fixed, a point will eventually be reached at which additions of the input yield progressively smaller, or diminishing, increases in output.

In English – at some point, doing more or throwing more at something doesn’t necessarily get you more.

When to stop?

It worries me when I hear illustrators say, “I’ve done 99 versions of this drawing to get to the right one.” Really? There wasn’t a single ‘good enough’ drawing in the first 10? Or the first 5? At the same time, I also hear illustrators say, “I can’t get enough spontaneity in my work.” And, well, after 99 tries, isn’t it clear why?

Illustrators constantly seem to be navigating this space between ‘spontaneity’ and ‘perfection’. We have a vision in our minds of what we want to achieve with a drawing but something gets lost in translation when our hands and eyes start to work together to try and get it down on paper. Our expectations are always ahead of our ability to meet them. If it wasn’t that way, we’d just stop making. And so, having felt a sense of failure at the first attempt at achieving that vision, we try again, and again, and again, until we’re looking at 99 versions of the same thing.

I can’t help but think that the law of diminishing returns applies to illustration. At what point, during the accumulation of illustration after illustration, do we stop? Sure, iteration leads to improvement – every version is a draft, after all – but why do we stop at 99 and not 10? or 5?

Calibrating to ‘the other’

Over the years, I’ve learned that others don’t see what I see. What bothers me doesn’t bother others. In fact, often what bothers me is the stuff that others *love* – the *imperfections* and the mistakes. Could someone who isn’t me tell the difference between attempt no. 3 and attempt no. 99? With each attempt, does the spontaneity degrade? Where’s the happy middle? Who are we illustrating for anyway?

I don’t know if 99 or 3 is the magic number. Maybe it’s different for each person and each drawing. But, at some point, it’s useful to remember that I’m not the audience when I’m making a book, the reader is. The ‘artist’ must give way to the ‘designer’ at some point – the question isn’t “Is this drawing good enough?” the question is, “Does this drawing give the reader what they need?” When we set our limits by someone else’s standards, and seek feedback from them early, it’s easier to know when enough is enough.

If we spend less time creating 99 drawings of the same thing to try and get to perfect, maybe we get more time to create 1 spontaneous drawing of 99 different things. I know which one I’d prefer, and which one my audience would prefer, too.

After three years of journalling weekly, I finally gave myself permission to take a break. I felt horrifically guilty about it for a while – breaking a commitment to myself always feels like failing – and journalling has always been a really positive way for me to reflect on what I’m thinking and feeling in any given week: a way for things I may or may not have noticed to bubble up to the surface. But, I also value experimentation and shaking routines and habits up a bit, at least for a while, to see what happens.

Stepping away has become an essential part of my art practice over time. I’d do some deep and extensive illustration work, then put it aside for a day, or sometimes a week, and re-visit with fresh eyes. I see things I never noticed before, and new ideas often come from a fresh look at work I was, at one point, so deeply in.

As it turns out, stepping away from the journal for a month has brought a similar sense of clarity and reflection to it. Not just about the day-to-day writing of the words and the weekly penning of thoughts, but the point of it; the purpose. Not only that, but there’s an eagerness within me that wasn’t there before, an eagerness to help other artists on a similar journey benefit from what I learn on mine.

Taking a bird’s eye look at the work on the journal, there are now over 180 individual journal entries! I’d never imagined that the journal itself would become a body of work but here we are. It’s an example of the things I’ve picked up over the years – things take longer than we expect, consistency over quality, chipping away at things, drip-by-drip, all come together to create something of substance. Something special.

Stepping away needs the opposite, too; periods of leaning in. And so now it’s time to do a bit of that again – just like refining a drawing after some time away. What I’ve learned is that perhaps three years of relentless journalling might be too much? Maybe the work would benefit from stepping away a little more regularly? But then again, maybe not. The fun bit is working it all out.

In January 2019, a study found that growing up in a house full books can be a major boost to literacy and numeracy. Could art supplies work the same way?

Availability leads to Opportunity

Occassionally, I get in the mood to play with stuff. Random stuff. And whilst I love watercolour, sometimes a mood strikes and collage seems like the fun thing to do. Other times, it’s coloured pencil rendering, or playing with ink, or playing with oil or acrylic paint. And so if that mood strikes and those materials aren’t available, neither is the opportunity. This is the story I told myself in order to give myself permission to start filling my house with art supplies to see if the study about books holds true for other things, too.

Opportunity leads to Experimentation

With a house full of art supplies, I’m more able to act on impulse. I feel like painting in acrylic? Bam! I whip out the acrylic paints and I’m on my way. If I feel like some considered, almost meditative pencil rendering? Bam. I’ve got that, too. I still consider myself a watercolourist at heart – it’s the medium I tend to enjoy the most, especially for illustration – but that doesn’t mean I can’t dabble in the others.

And the thing about dabbling in mediums other than my favourite one is that I learn things that my favourite one can’t teach me. I know that because of my dabbling in acrylic painting, I’m developing a better sense of tonal values and contrast. I didn’t know that before I started but it’s definitely happening. And because of my access to and use of coloured pencils, I discovered their strength in helping to amplify my watercolour work. It also helped to reinforce my love of watercolour.

This idea of learning through undirected play – the thing we encourage children to do so much of because we know it has benefit to them – seems to stop at some point after childhood ‘ends’. But isn’t the end of childhood just a manufactured idea? One that lines up strongly with ‘the time to get serious – set goals and achieve them’ as adults: the moment when we’re expected to contribute to the industrial complex of Work?

The truth is that experimentation – learning through play – isn’t just a child thing, it’s a human thing. And, in our attempts to transition ‘aimless children’ into ‘goal-seeking and productive adults’, we’ve also de-prioritised this method of experimentation as a way to learn. In fact, it’s so well removed from our way of thinking that we have to re-learn it as a skill as an adult. Corporations call this ‘Innovation’ but it is, in essence, learning through play.

Experimentation leads to Innovation

Followers of my work may notice something – my work is changing. I can feel it and I suspect that the growing availability of art supplies in my house has something to do with it – first we shape the tools, then the tools shape us.

Rosie the Rhinoceros is the first time I’ve used ink in a book. Why? Because I had it laying around one day – a 3-year-old ink bottle – and I just decided that I felt like playing with it. As I played, I learned what it was good for (and what it wasn’t good for). I used cheap paper, cheap brushes, and focussed on feeling ink – how it moves, how it dries, how it works. A short while after this, the Rosie manuscript came along. She was a bold, flowing character with more energy than watercolour was able to capture. I knew, intuitively, that ink was going to be needed for her.

And now that Rosie is out in the world, it’s led to additional interest for ink work – a manuscript of similar energy arrived. The work you do is the work you get.

Innovation leads to change

Whether its books at hand, or art supplies at hand, surrounding ourselves with novel ways of getting in touch with how we feel helps clarify things for ourselves. And the clearer we are about who we are, the better we can be for others. As someone famous once said, the only constant in life is change. But goal-driven change (I’m here and I want to get there) is only one approach. The other one – the much more interesting one – seems to be “I’m here, and I have no idea where I’m going, but I’ll play my way there”. And all it takes is a little access to something different in the first place.

For me, making art is a personal exploration. It helps me clarify my thinking and answer questions that bubble up in my brain – Queen Celine began with the question: what if free trade suddenly stopped? Rosie and Eric the Postie helped me explore the different approaches to finding one’s identity in a world that said you couldn’t.

I could explore these ideas intellectually – stare into the sky and let the idea roll around in my head – but that tends to lead to circular thinking and I end up with no greater clarity on what I think or why I think it. So, art provides a physical medium to explore the ideas and ensures that I have some forward momentum and an endpoint to the question I’m pondering. And note, I use the word ‘endpoint’ and not ‘ answer’ intentionally.

The problem with attempting to display one’s thinking in public (as art is so wonderful at doing), is that a vulnerability that exists. After all, what we’re really doing is saying, “I had this question, I explored it for a bit, and here’s where I landed. What do you think?” We’re exposing our workings (just a scientist or mathematician does), and inviting critique. Inviting critique is incredibly confronting.

Sometimes, it turns out that people also had similar questions to the ones we were trying to answer. They can see the work we’ve put in to try to answer it for ourselves and they can have a few reactions:

1. Appreciate the attempt for what it is – an answer – but realise it’s not their answer. Our work may influence their thinking somewhat, perhaps provide another perspective, but it’s not going to transform them in some meaningful way.
2. They disagree. Whatever endpoint we reach is not something they can understand or want to engage with. They have their own point of view and that’s fine. We go separate ways with things all the time.
3. They love it. Our endpoint resonates with them really strongly, it’s as if we’ve answered their own question that they never thought to explore in art but may have pondered from time to time.

It’s with this first audience that we can often get some thoughtful, perhaps useful, commentary – “I see what they were trying to do here”, “It’s a noble attempt at…”. There will always be the second audience, which may be most difficult to overcome. And it’s with the third audience, the ones who may have had similar questions, that we tend to get the warm and fuzzies over the work we’ve achieved with responses like, “I really love this, I want to buy it!”

The fourth audience

But, there’s another audience – the ones that prevent us from making the work in the first place for fear that this audience will be in the overwhelming majority. Sometimes, we find ourselves in a situation where no one else has asked the question that we’ve asked ourselves. No one could care less about free-trade, or whether the world may inhibit our ability to be our true selves. It’s with these audiences where we hear the most confronting commentary, “This is pointless. I don’t get it. I don’t understand it. Why would anyone waste their time with this?” This, to many of us, is a ‘disaster’.

When this sort of commentary is brought to our attention it’s easy to connect our work directly to our identity – if people think this is a waste of time, then maybe I’m a waste of time. If this is pointless, then maybe *I’m* pointless. If no one gets me then why would I bother to try to answer any more questions for myself? And so we stop making or sharing anything.

But, here’s the thing. Our work is not our identity, even though it comes from a personal place. Our work is simply and literally an endpoint for a question that no one but ourselves asked. Chances are, that question has an infinite number of endpoints and there are thousands of artists, essayists, scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers seeking to arrive at their own endpoints. Just because someone can’t imagine why anyone would bother, or that one particular endpoint doesn’t resonate with them, doesn’t mean we’ve failed or that we’re a failure.

If anything, our work is an act of generosity. We’ve spent a small portion of our finite time on the Earth attempting to provide a perspective on something – something that we’re interested in or something that’s been bugging us. Some people will value that and others won’t. But art, just like science, maths, philosophy etc, often deals with questions no one thought to answer. Without that innate curiosity paired with the courage to show our workings to the world, we wouldn’t have the rich, vibrant culture and knowledge we have today.

Today’s culture and knowledge have been built upon over 1000s of years – each of us attempting to answer the questions that plague us in our own way. To avoid contributing to that makes us all less well off, whether the small group of detractors know it yet or not. And so if our work is simply an endpoint and not an answer, the only thing we can do is keep contributing, learning, and watching for those who are interested in answering the same questions as us. Their contribution may help us refine our own thinking and improve the next attempt we make at arriving at a new endpoint. We might also do the same for them. That’s the way it’s always been.

Inefficiency is slow, sub-optimal, a waste. Why would anyone want inefficiency when the alternative, efficiency, could be achieved? Our whole industrialised world is geared toward optimizing for efficiency – faster, better, stronger in less time.

But there’s also good inefficiency.

Freeways could be straight. Straight freeways would be way more efficient. But, designers of freeways shape them with gentle curves because it keeps the driver aware and awake – requiring them to pay more attention to the road. A straight freeway may be more efficient but they’re also far more likely to encourage drivers to fall asleep at the wheel. Winding freeways are a good inefficiency.

Walking instead of driving is a good inefficiency because of its benefits to cardiovascular health and bodily strength. The time required to create a true sourdough bread (and the health benefits it provides) is a good inefficiency compared to the nutritional value and speed required for a more industrialised loaf.

When I first started painting with watercolour all I could think about was how incredibly inefficient it was. You mean I have to paint a layer and then, depending on the time of year, wait almost half a day for it to dry? I found myself frustrated with the process. I wanted to start painting, and keep painting. But watercolour (unlike acrylic or even oil painting) doesn’t allow for that. Digital, of course, is the most efficient – but the most efficient at what?

The inefficiency that’s inherent in beautiful, glowing watercolour is, for me, a good inefficiency (turns out it’s also commercially valuable too). Any other medium simply wouldn’t give the same result. And yes, I’ve tried making it more efficient by using hairdryers and warming pads etc, but there is simply no substitute for giving it the time it needs to soak, and run, and dry.

In a world obsessed with productivity and efficiency, there’s still space for the inefficient. In fact, those who dare to lean into inefficiency might find themselves with a scarcity that people value way more than anything efficient.