Justifying Work is easy. Work is defined. It has goals, objectives, key results. It has a beginning (a start time or a first activity), and it has an end (either the day is done, or you’ve hit your goals). Work is often the stuff that results in income, but it doesn’t have to. Work is typically generated by someone or something else, and given to us to complete. Work is the stuff you do before Play.

Justifying Play is difficult. Play is extra-curricular; the stuff that happens only when there is no more work. Play isn’t as defined as work, either. True play does not begin with a goal. It doesn’t come from someone else, so we can’t Play on someone else’s behalf. We have to make our own Play, and there’s risk in it. In fact, there’s so much uncertainty in Play that maybe we’re scared of it. The easy thing to say is, “I can’t play, I have to work.” We never seem to say the reverse.

The thing with Play is that it’s always beneficial – it has never wasted my time. In contrast, Work often wastes a lot of time; spending all day getting that manager that report that no one needs anyway – that’s work. Play, if nothing else, feeds the soul, every single time.

I’ve got a lot of work on right now. Books to deliver, deadlines to ‘hit’, people to impress. But I only have that work because, 12 months ago, I prioritised Play. I took the risk to try something new, something out of my comfort zone. I said, for once, “Sorry I can’t work, I have to play”. What comes out of play is fresh thinking, new materials, and ultimately, new ways to produce the Work. Work that is good. Work that is useful. Work that helps others build empathy, compassion, kindness. The best work comes from Play.

If I’m undergoing surgery, I want to know my surgeon has done the appropriate study and achieved the appropriate certificates so I don’t die under her knife. If I’m building a new house, I want to know my builder has gone through appropriate training and has the appropriate certificates to build my house so that it doesn’t burn down or collapse.

But, the thing is, I’ve never been asked for my certificate of art-making by any publisher, ever. It turns out we don’t need credentials for many jobs, really, especially creative work.

I don’t have a fine arts degree. I never went to an Illustration College or Art School. I still feel a sense of guilt about this. Imposter syndrome is real, for sure. I’ve pondered long and hard about whether I should attend art school in retrospect, just to get those credentials – that piece of paper that won’t necessarily improve my professional career options but may calm the angst I feel when I think about the legitimacy of the work I make and the platform on which I now work.

Reflecting upon my own journey to becoming a professional artist, the one thing it comes back to, at it’s most basic, is that I made the work I wanted to make, and then I told people about it. Yes, there’s an argument for the effect of strengths and talents, good timing, and all the privilege and luck that goes into being the sort of personality that sees opportunities instead of barriers. In the end, it wasn’t the credential I needed (no publisher has ever asked for me degree), it was the ability to overcome, or at least accept, fear.

Maybe that’s the only thing we need to learn as artists? Overcoming the fear of being judged for our work, the fear of failing against expectations (our own and others), the fear of being found out as a pretender. No credential or certificate will give us that. The only thing that does is practice. We just have to make the work, over and over again. Yes, it is scary. Almost debilitatingly so. But no one will die if we get it wrong, and we (and our world) stand to benefit immensely if we’re generous enough to give it a go, and we get it right sometimes.

A purist will tell you that unless you start and finish a painting outdoors, then you can’t call it a Plein Air painting. A purist will tell you that oil paints are the only true medium. A purist will tell you that using anything but lightfast pigments makes your work less legitimate; even worse, that digital painting isn’t ‘real painting’.

The thing with pure is that pure always changes. Right now, the purists turn their nose up at acrylic artists because ‘it’s not the real thing.’ Back in Turner’s day, you never had the real thing unless your assistant spent hours on end grinding your pigments on location for you. Does that mean that oil painters who use tube-paints today are any less pure or legitimate?

Art and technology co-exist. It will continue to do so forever. That doesn’t make an artist’s work today any less ‘pure’ than yesterday’s artist, or any purer than tomorrow’s. What matters is that artist’s are making work they want to make. Work that matters to them. The medium is, in so many ways, impure, no matter when and how you look at it.

The poppy, diverse colour palette of She-Ra (2020) makes for some really interesting combinations. While each character has their own signature, together, they work harmoniously, even borrowing very closely from one another. Here are just a few character breakdowns; Glimmer’s is just divine.

She-Ra

Bow

Glimmer

Sea Hawk

Perfuma

Mermista

Entrapta

All characters

Being ‘discovered’ needs two things: something to be discovered (i.e. making your work), and a way for it to be found (i.e. marketing your work). So much of modern marketing advice tells you to refine your audience, know who you’re talking to, understand your customer. But maybe there’s another way?

Jason Roberts’ concept of the luck surface area gives us a nice formula. The gist is that you increase your chances of getting lucky by doing what you love and telling people about it. It sounds deceptively simple, and it is, but it’s often easy to overlook when you’re simply just ‘trying to get noticed’.

If you’re making work and not sharing it, the probability of being ‘found’ is greatly diminished. Likewise, if you’ve only made one or two pieces and you’re sharing it like mad, the probability that the narrow range of one or two pieces will connect with the right person is also small.

A better approach then is to make as much work as you can, for yourself, and then yell about it from the rooftops while you continue making it. It may seem like a scatter-gun approach, and in some ways it is, you don’t necessarily know who will see it, and what they will like about it. But by increasing your luck surface area, and being open-minded about the opportunities that will inevitably come from it, you’ll be doing all you can. The rest is up to chance.

Social media gets the blame for the idea of the ‘curated self’ – the process of selectively sharing the bits of ourselves that we want other people to know while we hide the bits we don’t want others to know. Most of us don’t share selfies when we’re at home with the flu, but we reserve selfies for moments when we’re on holiday, or in front of a famous monument, times when we believe we’re looking our best. Some of us prefer not to be ‘selfie-people’, which, in itself, is a form of curation.

This phenomenon of the curated self has been around long before social media. Humans have always curated themselves. Whether that’s dampening our opinions in front of a group of people who disagree with us, or wearing certain clothes to ‘fit in’. Each choice we make in the way we present ourselves in public is a version of the curated self; it forms our reputation.

And, just as a daily look in the bathroom mirror teaches us about how we physically change – a new wrinkle or a sprouting hair that wasn’t there yesterday signals that we’re getting older – so too does the record of our digital selves. With every post, share, like, or love, we’re signalling to others what sort of person we are, and in the process, signalling to ourselves, too.

So what do we see when we look back at ourselves online? Our social feeds present back to us a version of ourselves, just like a mirror does. It tells us what we liked or didn’t like, and when. We see what we thought constitutes ‘looking our best’, and often, what we valued most at a particular time. We search it and reflect on it just as we interrogate our image in a mirror, searching for confirmation about who we think we are and checking it for surprises. But, unlike a physical mirror, the online mirror only reflects the stuff we want it to. There are no ‘overnight pimples’ in our social fields because we often don’t post the sorrow or hardship we face but didn’t want to share with anyone.

So perhaps ‘the curated self for others’ isn’t just a social media problem. Maybe it’s about the risk of curating ourselves for ourselves, every day. What effect does that have on us in the future? If I build an online reputation for being an artist, will I come to believe I am one? Is the opposite true? It seems that first, we shape our reputation, then our reputation may well shape us.

Luck, by definition, is random. As we hurtle through space on this tiny blue ball, a million and one moments are happening every second. Each one of those moments is a chance – a chance for something to go right, or a chance for something to go wrong.

Consider being one of the 2,208 people who scored a ticket for the maiden (and only) voyage of the Titanic. The chances of getting on board that ship – considering that the population of England at the time was approximately 33,561,235 – was pretty small. Were those 2,208 people lucky? Well, it depends.

Being onboard the Titanic *before* it sunk would’ve been considered very fortunate. After it sunk? Probably less fortunate. But what if you happened to be one of the 705 people who survived? Were they lucky, unlucky, then lucky again?

Perhaps luck, in itself, isn’t that rare. Perhaps whether we’re lucky or not isn’t about the event or random occurrence itself, but how we decide to look at it. The story we tell, in hindsight, when we piece together the fragments of our lives.

Whenever anyone begins an art journey, the overwhelming advice from an expert in a medium is to “buy the best art supplies you can afford”. I’ve never found that very helpful. A pencil, paper, and eraser can cost anything from a few dollars to $50. Should a beginner spend $50 to try drawing? The answer is almost always no.

Creativity thrives under constrained conditions, constraints like time, space, skills or, yes, money. For anybody wanting to try art, there is no right or wrong when it comes to money. I know artists who produce amazingly moving work from materials they found at the dump ($0). I know other artists who have spent thousands of dollars to make a single sculpture that fits in the palm of my hand. And yes, while there are slight variations in the costs associated with starting in a particular medium over another (e.g. sculpting in pure bronze will set you back a bit more than drawing an apple with a pencil), the amount of money you spend is far less important than how you feel while you’re making it, and when you’ve finished.

Art, after all, isn’t really about the product, or the materials, it’s about the space you create for yourself to be brave enough to try to work out what you think about the world, and how you think about it. Taking the first step in that journey, with any medium, is the best place to start. Only when you begin will you learn, for yourself, what’s next, and how much you want to spend to get there.

In tennis or golf, the crowd is disciplined to be quiet while the athletes are performing. Between shots or rallies, the umpire (or the little guys that hold the quiet signs at the golf) are in control. They help to give the athletes focus.

But artists working alone in their studios (or in my case, the ‘spare room’ in my house) don’t have an umpire. There’s no person holding up a sign to tell others to quieten down, or go away, or stop inviting us out to social occasions that we’d rather not attend but feel obliged to anyway. Artists need to find their own focus. Control their own environment. Remove distractions so that they can hit that winning shot. We need to make our own quiet because no one else is going to do it for us.

Ideas are a dime-a-dozen. Before I started making picture books, I sat on the couch in front of the TV, and while I was watching a show, I’d have ideas. Heaps of ideas, actually. It felt pretty good. At the time, having those ideas was enough. I remember thinking, “Sure, I could draw it if I wanted to, but why bother, I’ve already had the idea.”

Then, I read Art and Fear and realised that it wasn’t that I couldn’t be bothered drawing the idea, it was that I was scared of trying to make the idea (and failing at it) that was preventing me from taking that first step.

And you know what? That first step was hard. Turns out that having the idea is the easy bit. Confronting the fear, poor drawing skills from years of no practice, difficult brushwork, and crumby colouring skills was the tough bit. It still is, six years later.

At first, I started slowly. I had an idea, and then I’d try executing it. But it was never as good as what I could see in my head so I’d give up. Then, I’d wait a week or two, or until I forgot about how crap my last attempt was, and I’d try again.

The second attempt was better, but it was still out of my reach. What I saw in my head wasn’t hitting the page as I wanted it to. After all, I hadn’t drawn anything since high-school. I gave myself a break. I tried again.

After a few weeks, I had a mass of drawings. And while each individual drawing looked just as dodgy as I remembered, a trend emerged. Over the weeks, things had improved. Not everything, just small things. But it was enough. There was enough in those few weeks of drawings to make me want to keep seeing an upward trend. Six years later, the drawings are much better, but so are my skills. The problem, of course, is that my expectations have moved forward also. And that’s the thing with art; your expectations will always be slightly ahead of your ability. If it weren’t that way, we’d stop trying.