In many ways, watercolour is inconvenient. I know that if I went digital with my art, things would be easier for me. I’d be able to expand my client base. I’d be able to work from anywhere rather than be constrained to my studio. I’d be able to correct any mistake, remove any blemish. It would also be way cheaper for me—no more expensive brushes and paints and papers that need replenishing every few months.

If I went digital, it would be better for publishers, too. There would be no artwork to post or insure. No lag in time for sending things off to scanners or colour-balancing images when they returned. There would be more space in their office because they wouldn’t need to store my work for over a year before they then have to spend more money to send it back to me. There would be more space in mine, too.

In a world that increasingly values cheaper, easier, faster, and more convenient, watercolour isn’t the ‘smart choice’ in which to ground business. But, it is a unique one, and maybe that’s more important.

I used to think the word patience was a substitute for waiting. When we’re children and we want our Christmas presents, we’re told to be patient. When we’re demanding dessert earlier than usual, that word again – patience. We can’t wait to grow up, can’t wait for our next birthday party, can’t wait for our friends to come over. It’s no surprise then that we equate waiting with patience as we approach adulthood.

But patience, as I’ve learned, is something a little different. It’s not just waiting. It’s not just anticipating or looking forward to something, either. Patience involves a curation of the inner self. A change of viewpoint. The growth of a perspective on the world that isn’t just sitting on our butts and ‘waiting’ for something to happen – the inevitable birthday party or Christmas present. No, patience is active.

People say watercolour is the most difficult medium but I don’t agree. I think what they really mean when they say that is that unlike oils or acrylics, watercolour requires much greater levels of patience. It’s not watercolour that’s the hard bit, it’s actively understanding ourselves as we pursue something out of reach of instant gratification.

When I reflect on what taught me patience, I can’t help but come to the moment I begun watercolour. With oils and acrylics, it’s possible to paint all day. I mean, physically put brush to canvas as much as you like. But to achieve beautiful watercolour, it’s the moments between when the brush and canvas come together that are important. Watercolour, above all mediums, requires time; time for the paint to settle into the fibres of the paper, time for the heat of the room to evaporate just-enough water so that the next stroke can be placed, time for the pigment to settle evenly or unevenly as gravity decides. Those in-between moments involve more than just waiting. They are shaped by the teleological pursuit of a glowing result. There is constant inner-cultivation and reflection that grows the more I paint with watercolour. It leads to an active acceptance that, in life, some things cannot leapfrog, or fast-forward through that universal vector of time. It creates an awareness of all things physical.

There’s no doubt in my mind that patience is not passive. It’s different from sitting at the bus-stop without getting frustrated that the bus has not yet arrived, even though it’s 20 minutes behind schedule. Sitting at that bus stop, day after day, will not make one a more patient person. Patience requires the active and persistent observation of oneself and one’s place in the world. It’s not simply about waiting for something to happen, it’s about a journey to the acceptance of the fact that we are not always in control, that we can’t have that thing right now, and that it’s OK.

Over the years, I’ve found it’s important to have two streams of work. Let’s call them Practice and Performance.

Practice is the private stuff – The stuff nobody sees. It’s just for me. It’s the core of ‘art’ i.e. a way for me to engage with the world and understand what I think through the act of making stuff. It might be painting, drawing, poetry, sculpture, or music. The Practice is the essential building blocks for the stuff that the world eventually does get to see. I don’t have to compromise in Practice because it’s just for me. There’s no negotiation, no collaboration, most often, there’s no goal. It’s at once heart-wrenching as it is heart-warming. It requires so much energy, but also gives a lot of energy back to me.

Performance is the public stuff. The stuff that requires collaboration, negotiation, compromise. It’s still fun, but it begins with a purpose. It’s not just for me. It’s a problem I’m trying to solve for someone else. There’s a reader (or viewer) now. A publisher. An editor. I’m trying to convey a message. Achieve a goal. It’s a telic pursuit, not an atelic one.

Neither is better or worse as both are critical to growing as an artist and being able to fund the journey along the way. But, in this age of social media, where the algorithms are driving us to post more and more lest we be forgotten, it’s harder and harder to keep the sanctity of the private practice, the stuff that really matters. We are urged to blur the lines: share ‘works in progress’, reveal what’s going on behind the scenes. We’re told that we get the best engagement that way, the bigger follower count, we’re ‘building our audience,’ which, they tell us, will make us more money.

But the privacy that is essential to any practice is the stuff that feeds the artist’s soul. Without that soul food, there is no performance or, even worse, everything becomes performance. when that happens, well, we’ve no longer got a space to answer questions just for us, what we end up with is just constant anxiety about the follower count and no room to grow.

When I think about tools of the trade, I used to think about physical tools: brushes, pens, paints, paper and so on. Buy the best you can afford, look after them well, and they’ll last you a long time. But what I’ve come to realise is that there’s another set of tools of the trade that we don’t often talk about: the body and the mind.

First, the body

Drawing pictures, whilst enjoyable, is a surprisingly physical trade. In my case, that physical labour isn’t what we come to think of when we say physical labour. My trade doesn’t use large motor skills to lift heavy loads. Instead, it uses very fine ones. In the past, I’ve found myself sitting for 8-12 hours a day, lost in flow, with nothing to eat or drink, only to emerge from it feeling tired, hungry, and completely physically drained. I generally focus on an image that’s no more than 60cm from my eyes, and even then, only on a radius of about 20cm at a time. I’ve looked at my eyeballs in the mirror after one of these big flow sessions, and I can see the blood that’s been directed toward controlling my iris and eye-muscles whilst I paint. I can see the twitching in my eyelids sometimes. It’s just like finishing a weight-lifting session at the gym but on a micro-scale.

It’s not just my eyes that are affected by this depth of focus. My back is required to hold a sustained posture in front of the drawing board for long periods of time; a bit like a ballerina who must hold their posture perfectly for the performance, smiling the whole time.

Second, the mind

The physical strain on the body is one thing, but the invention of any intellectual work requires a well-trained mind, too. Yes, there’s a lot to be said for the natural ‘strength’ of some writers or illustrators, but untrained strength will only get you so far. To really succeed, the brain needs the creative fuel required for lateral thinking, humour, sensitivity, romance, excitement – all on demand. It needs to adjust to the anguish, despair and difficulty of creating anything from scratch, as well as the elation that happens when things click into place so that I’m able to judge the good work from the rubbish.

How to looking after the tools of the trade

My practice has evolved from the early days of illustrating on an Ikea dining table with a bit of 2×4 to turn my drawing board into something with a slight angle. Some of them have been physical changes (e.g. I created my own desktop easel and purchased a standing desk), but many of the changes I’ve made have been behavioural ones.

For the body, I’ve learned to work in approx. 90-minute increments, setting a timer if I need to. It means I can look out into the distance to re-focus my eyes on something at regular intervals, letting all those tiny muscles controlling my iris have a break. I’ve taken to pilates and yoga exercises every second day or so to make sure I exercise a range of movement throughout my whole body. I take skip-rope breaks to get the blood moving through my body.

For the mind, I read daily: novels, poetry, comics, and magazines like The New Philosopher. Novels expose me to rich prose. Poetry exposes me to abstract thinking and imagery through words. Comics and movies teach me visual storytelling techniques. Magazines about philosophy constant bring me new ways to view the world. I also make sure I’ve got scheduled time for mindless, repetitive tasks like walking or cycling. I’ve a rule that there are no podcasts allowed in those times. These are completely and utterly not negotiable for me right now. They’re sharpening the very tools I need to do the best story-telling work and invention that I can.

It’s obvious when I say it out loud, but like the physical tools that need cleaning, washing, and care, the body and mind work better if we look after them properly. Without them all working together, making anything becomes impossible.

When I began art-making, the advice I found on the internet was “buy the best you can afford.” So I did. I bought expensive paper, expensive brushes, expensive paint. But, at first, a curious thing happened – I just didn’t use them. Why? Because I was scared of making a mistake. What if I waste a $30 piece of paper? What if I damaged a tiny, $70 brush? What if, after spending $300 on paint, it turns out I’ve bought the wrong ones?

Sometimes, working with less expensive materials is all you need to start creating. Art-making is already laden with the fear of failure; could we be making it worse by encouraging people to buy ‘the best they can afford’? I’ve learned that I paint a lot more if I’m not using canvases but cheap plywood from Bunnings. I buy large sheets of it for about $15, cut it up at home and get about 6 or 7 decent sized painting surfaces. What I make wont’ be worthy of galleries, but chances are it won’t be anyway because I’m only starting to learn. Instead, I’m painting, and when it comes down to it, that’s the most important thing and the hardest part.

If the choice is between finishing something, or perfecting it, done wins. Every time. Because done invites feedback, and feedback helps me improve. Once we admit to ourselves that perfect is impossible, all we’ve got left is done. And if it’s true that we learn from what we do, then the more we do, the more we learn. Getting to done, not perfect, then, is the fastest way to improve.

Some of my favourite works of art are difficult to describe. It’s not that they’re technically excellent (although it’s often true that they are). And it’s not that they’re my favourite colours, or subject, either. When I look at some of my favourite works of art, what’s common to all is that there’s a truth in them. A way that they’ve peeled back the veil of trained attention that exists between me and the world and shown me something as it actually is. It reminds me of this passage from Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

“Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap!”
“The what?” said Richard.
“The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a …”
“Yes,” said Richard, “there was also the small matter of gravity.”
“Gravity,” said Dirk with a slightly dismissed shrug, “yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a discovery. It was there to be discovered.” … “You see?” he said dropping his cigarette butt, “They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later.”

The idea that ‘gravity was there to be discovered‘ sits with me all the time.

From a very early age, our attention is honed. From the moment a teacher or parent says to us, “Sit up straight and look at me,” we’re being taught to focus. And focus is useful for so many reasons. But, of course, it also means we miss certain things in the world, like the glaringly obvious gorilla. When our attention is trained on something, the truth of the world as it really is goes missing.

For me, art has become a journey of truth-seeking. To see through the veil of focus and attention to something larger, different, on a grander scale. Like Newton who ‘discovered’ gravity – a thing that was ‘even kept on at weekends’ but took us 1600 or so years to ‘see’ – art making is about searching for the world as it really is, not simply representing a world we think exists.

A few years ago, I spent too much money on plates and bowls crafted by a local Melbourne potter. A potter I’d seen at markets for years, her work getting better and better with every throw.

Plates and bowls. Such ordinary objects. Objects that are so easy to acquire for any price, at any time, in our ever-connected world of mass-produced goods. I had a perfectly good set of them before these new ones. They did exactly what plates and bowls should do – hold food.

But something happened when I brought these new ones home and retired our old, white porcelain ones we bought from Big W. I realised that I had to use these items. I suddenly became hyper-conscious that every meal was an opportunity to interact with these objects crafted by someone who I admired. This person became part of every. Single. Meal. Because of this, meals became more special, more intentional, slower. I cooked different food, better food, more regularly. It was like having a guest over but without the pressure of having to make conversation or entertain.

Everyday objects tend to go unnoticed, precisely because we use them so often. They become, literally, a part of the furniture. Our attention is better fixed on what’s changing, what’s new, on how we could optimise and improve all the things that we’re told we should improve upon. No one ever mentions the plates and bowls. Cutlery. A tea kettle.

A little while ago, I wrote about what you’re buying when you’re buying art. And yes, at first, I did spend too much money on those plates and bowls. But what I didn’t realise until afterwards is that I wasn’t just buying plates and bowls. I was buying a habit change, a different way to look at the world, a different perspective on everyday objects. And when I think about what I paid for that, I got the deal of a lifetime.

When I learn anything, mimicry is important. It’s the whole theory behind role models and heroes – you can’t be what you can’t see, right? When I was learning golf, I copied players that were better than me. When I was learning how to be a designer, I did the same. I also did this with cooking: Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Luke Nguyen, Rick Stein. So, why should writing be any different? Here comes my dirty little secret? I copy great writers, word-for-word.

Yes, that’s right, I have a folder on my computer full of text files with great writer’s words, but I write them. My heroes are all there: Oliver Jeffers, Roald Dahl, Les Murray, Caroline Magerl, Stephen Michael King, Isobelle Carmody, Mem Fox, everyone. Writing is as much an intellectual activity as it is a physical one. While I read voraciously for intellectual training, voraciously copying helps re-enforce how it feels to write a good story. Where does the punctuation land? How many syllables in a line? How does it feel to end a chapter at a cliffhanger? It’s only when you feel it that you get a better sense of what you like and don’t like about writing and style. You can choose what to take into your work and what to leave behind.

I’ve been doing this for years, and it’s been so transformative that it’s one of the first things I tell anyone who asks me how to become a better writer – do what anyone who’s learning will do – copy what you love, word-for-word, until you feel it in your bones, until it gets into your muscle memory. It’s surprising what your fingers will do, automatically, when you begin to write for yourself. So go forth and become a copycat, just feel it, then watch what happens.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from building software it’s that the designers and engineers need to sit together. They need to talk together, design together, build together, test together, iterate together. In every software project I’ve ever worked on, when this happens, so does magic. The work is more creative, more efficient, more beautiful to look at, and it works better. Unless designers and engineers are in direct contact with one another, every day, for the life of the project, the output will never be as good as it can be.

Turns out it’s true for co-creators of picture books, too.