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.

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.