My favourite cuisine is Japanese. I like simple clothing – mainly jeans, t-shirts, and cardigans. I don’t like suits. I have a cat, but I prefer dogs. I like winter, but I prefer summer.
No one ever asks me how I came to these conclusions, or why. When it comes to food, clothes, or pets, no one thinks too hard about it. We like what we like, and don’t like what we don’t like. But when it comes to art, one of the most-asked questions seems to be, “how do I find my style?”
We seem to fret a lot about our art style. Will my style get me noticed? What styles are publishers looking for? Should I stick with one style or do I show all the styles I can do? And sure, while ‘style’ can be engineered, what can’t be is the authenticity behind it.
I can attend a job interview for a corporate accounting firm. I can wear the expensive suit, the nice shoes, the stylish tie. I can gel my hair, sport a leather briefcase, I can even open Microsft Excel and show some examples of how I crunch numbers. I can do all of this, maybe once, or twice, or even 20 times, but I can’t keep it up. If I get the job at the accounting firm, I have to pretend that suits and briefcases are my style, every day. Not only is that expensive (gee, think of the money I’d have to spend on suits), but it’s emotionally draining. It’s emotionally draining because, quite simply, it’s inauthentic.
Just ‘be authentic’
Whenever I hear advice that reads, ‘be authentic’, I cringe. Authenticity is precisely the opposite of curation and intention. It requires so little effort, but it’s also so difficult to attain. Why? Because authenticity requires courage.
Authenticity takes the courage to look inwards, to think about ourselves, without the influence of others, and determine what we genuinely like and dislike. To realise and be comfortable with the fact that we won’t fit in everywhere, but that there is a place for us, somewhere. It’s only until we unlock this within ourselves that the question of ‘what should my style be’ disappears because it’s replaced with a statement: this is who I am, this is the work that I make. If it’s the sort of work that a publisher decides to duplicate 10,000 times in a book, then that’s a bonus. If not, at least you’re making work that matters to you. After all, that’s what it means to be a true artist, and if it’s truly authentic, it’ll be one of the most rewarding ways you can spend some time.
Who won the 1976 Olympic Summer Games gold medal for trapshooting? Or the 1984 Nobel Prize for Physics. What about the 1999 Caldecott Medal? Don’t know? Neither do I. I’d hazard a guess that the only people who remember are the people that won them. Which makes me think, what are awards for?
Awards are everywhere. Every industry has them. You could be Real Estate Agent of the Year, Accountant of the Year, Plumber of the Year, Advertising Agency of the Year, Pinot Noir of the Year, the list goes on. It’s not that humans are fickle; we simply like feedback. We want to be noticed. To know that we matter. We invented awards because, well, we like to be seen.
But we don’t care if someone else is seen, especially when they aren’t ‘competition’. It’s probably why I don’t know who won the 2010 Australian Open Tennis, or the 1982 Academy Award for Best Film Score. All we care is that we’re seen, not someone else.
Social media uses likes and follows. They’re a type of award doled out by companies like Facebook to encourage you to keep going. To tell you that, “yes, you’re doing it right, you understand the algorithm.” What it really means is that “you’re helping us generate ad revenue. Thanks.”
But making art has to be different. Telling stories need an authenticity that isn’t driven by the judging panel’s criteria. It has to come from within. Recognition is nice, sure, but not at the cost of telling the best stories; of working out, for yourself, how you exist in this world.
Imagine being on a beach, alone, on a perfect evening. The sun is slowly sinking into the horizon, tinting the sky all shades of orange and rose. The sea in front of you is still – a vast mirror reflecting the beauty and glory of this moment—our tiny place in space and time. The salt hangs thick in the air. Occasionally, you hear the soft flap of a seagull’s wings as it flies overhead.
What if you couldn’t take a photo or a video of it? What if you couldn’t post it, location-tagged, to 7 billion people, live? In this highly connected world, every moment is now an opportunity to perform. A chance to ‘share the amazing experience we’re having with our loved ones.’
The desire to be seen
Humans perform all the time. We behave differently in different social situations depending on who we’re with and where we are. But it used to be constrained to that: different locations or different social groups. With social media, that scoping mechanism is gone. Now, if I try to make something new for dinner and nail it? It’s a chance to perform. If I travel to a remote place and find that beautiful sunset, it’s a chance to perform. Any experience I have could be ‘fuel for my feed’.
First, we make the social media,
then the social media makes us.
I have to wonder if this ‘chance’ is changing the way I behave. Did I try making that risky meal for dinner because it would give me something to post if I nailed it? Did I travel to the end of the earth so I could take and share that photo? Is my sketchbook filled with what sketchbooks should be filled with: ways to help me think? Or is my sketchbook now an artefact of heavily curated ‘final illustrations’ – page after page of other chances to perform? Am I using art in the way it is intended – to truly explore what I think and feel? Or am I being influenced to spend my time producing a social media moment that will get me a few more likes? I know some restaurants who are designing their menu to increase their chances of people taking photos of the food they serve and therefore growing patronage. If they’re doing it, why would a person be so different?
What drives art?
I consider myself lucky. I grew up in a time when connection was the exception, not the norm. I remember drawing because I wanted to; just because I felt like it. I know what it feels like to make something ‘just because’. Just for me. I know that when I get that feeling, I produce work that matters.
But not everyone grew up in that world, and it makes me wonder whether the opportunity to perform is taking precedence over the work we create. Instead of looking inwards and using art as art has always been used – to help us make sense of this crazy world and our tiny place in it – are we playing by the rules of the algorithm and letting it drive us to its goal – more eyeballs and higher-priced advertising.
People often tell me that it’s easy for me to prioritise my illustration work because I’m getting paid and published. If they were getting published or getting paid, they say, they’d be able to prioritise it, too.
But what people don’t realise is that I’m only getting paid now because I prioritised it before – when I wasn’t getting paid. I spent nights, on the couch after a really long day at work, sketching out weird characters like Eric (who turned into my first picture book and a CBCA Notable book). Those ‘thankless nights’ had to happen first. The period of time where friends and family were bewildered at what I was doing, “What’s the point of this drawing that you’re doing? No one is paying you. What a waste of time. Shouldn’t you be doing more useful things?”
And that’s the problem with things that give us, and us alone, pleasure. Things like meditation, or hobbies like flower-arranging or painting miniatures, have different intrinsic value to each of us. No one else can understand it, but they’re always happy to offer their not-so-helpful opinion.
Back then, messing around with watercolour was just an enjoyable way to spend my evening. I found a hobby I enjoyed. And if the publishing deals dried up today, it wouldn’t change a thing. I’d still be drawing, painting, and writing, just for me, like I did before.
If we don’t know where we’re going, how do we know when we’ve arrived? So often we set out with a vision of what an artwork is going to be. It’s the whole reason we start it. We begin with the end in mind, and we work towards it. But maybe that’s setting us up for disappointment. What if we don’t get there? Or worse, what if we *can’t* get there with the skills we’ve got right now? As artists, so often our expectations lay just out of reach of our ability. That’s what makes it an infinite game. And while, in some ways, that’s what makes our art a life-long pursuit, it can also be terrifying along the way.
Maybe there’s another way.
Maybe, sometimes, we need to fling something at a canvas with no intention or plan, just to see what happens; respond to what’s right in front us, instead of what’s in our mind’s eye.
I don’t know where I’m going. A combination of watercolour paints and some left over tea from my morning pot.
It might not get us to where we thought we were going. It might be really uncomfortable to feel that we’re flying blind. But maybe ‘no destination’ is exactly what we need to take the pressure off. If not all the time, just once in a while.
Responding to what ended up on the page, I made some decisions I never would have made had I tried to plan it all beforehand. It’s even given me ideas for some new work.
On almost a weekly basis, I’m asked for advice from budding authors and illustrators on how to ‘get noticed’ by publishers. They often describe all the things that they’re doing which reads like a laundry list of someone who has read all the ‘advice’ from others about how to ‘break-in’ to publishing. They say they’re attending conferences, listening to other authors and illustrators on podcasts, researching publishers, understanding who’s who in the industry. What’s most curious about these lists that I often get is that ‘writing and drawing’ is always one of the last activities on it, if it’s there at all.
I don’t know if that’s just because it’s so obvious that people feel it’s not worth mentioning upfront, but my fear is that people are spending far too much time ‘getting noticed’ by doing all the things that aren’t making the work.
As someone who never set out to be a children’s author/illustrator (but it happened anyway), my only advice is this: write and draw. Every story you write and every picture you draw is another entry in the big publishing lottery. It’s another chance to learn who you are, what you’ve got to say, and how you want to say it. I’ve been to a few publishing conferences now and you know who I never see there? The people who I aspire to be: Bruce Whatley, Ann James, Jackie French, Shaun Tan, Stephen Michael King, Leigh Hobbes, Anna Walker, the list goes on.
What are they doing instead? They’re spending their time making art. Image after image, story after story. Followers don’t matter. Schmoozing doesn’t matter. All that matters is prioritising the work. If we spend more time prioritizing the work, the work gets better. If the work gets better, eventually it’ll be so good it can’t be ignored.
In Denmark, they don’t need a law that says you must wear a helmet when you ride a bicycle. Everyone in Denmark knows this so they give cyclists a bit of extra room. Drivers slow down to pass a cyclist when they see one. They know what’s needed to keep people safe and continue letting the culture thrive so laws don’t have to.
When everyone knows the rules, it’s a culture. When it’s in the culture, you don’t need laws because it’s ‘just what everybody does’. The problem with ‘just what everybody does’ is that it’s hard to change because a lot of people need to agree. “Just what everybody does” is the sort of thing that kept slaves in slavery, women from voting, and poor people poor – it keeps things the same as they always were.
In art, artists are ‘supposed to struggle’ financially and emotionally, it’s the way things have always been. It’s just what all artists do.
Lawyers are the ones who change laws, but people, people can change culture. If artists are supposed to struggle, but don’t want to, we don’t need to convince lawmakers to make the change for us. All we need to do is change what’s normal. When enough of us are doing it, it becomes the culture.
The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is the tallest building in the world – 163 floors, 800m tall. Setting out to build the tallest building in the world sounds hard. There’s so much that could go wrong because it’s never been done before.
But before the Burj Khalifa, there was Tapei 101 – 508 metres, 101 floors. At the time, that had also never been done before. And before Tapei 101 there was the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur with 88 floors, also uniquely innovative for its time.
If you go back far enough, you end up with a neolithic, underground single-story dwelling – the type found in the Orkney Islands in Scotland. There was a point in history when even that had never been done before. There was so much that could’ve gone wrong.
But bit-by-bit, time-after-time, there was a human who thought it should be done. That it could be done. And while it’s taken us about 12,000 years, we’ve gone from a sub-zero dwelling underground to the 163rd floor of the Burj Khalifa. Floor-by-floor, bit-by-bit, year-by-year.
Building the tallest building in the world sounds hard, but if all we need to do is add another floor – a 164th one – perhaps that’s doable. Becoming an artist also sounds hard. Maybe you’ve never done it before. There’s so much that could go wrong. But bit-by-bit, drawing-by-drawing. Start a level 0, and work your way up. Just like we humans always have. Anything is possible.
We all have bad days at work. I used to have a lot of them. Long hours, hostile colleagues, the type of stress that makes you want to pull your hair out. At the end of days like this, I looked back on them and struggled to feel as though I had accomplished anything at all.
On days like this, I used to think the best thing I could do to recover from it all was to heat a ready-made meal, fire up the TV and lose myself in another episode of my favourite familiar sitcom. On days like this, the last thing I felt like doing is coming home and getting the watercolours out or writing the next page of a manuscript.
But here’s the thing…
I found that if I got to the end of a day and I hadn’t done just one thing for myself, I felt even worse. If I hadn’t chipped away at a poem, or added another 300 half-arsed words to my latest story, or at least drawn a few doodles, the feeling of wading through mud only increased.
In the same way that people who drink coffee ‘need one’ to kickstart the day, or someone practising mindfulness or meditation doesn’t feel ‘normal’ until they’ve had their 5-minutes of presence, art-making became that one thing for me. Maybe that ‘one thing a day’ can be making something. Anything. Progress.
I believe in this idea so much that I’m sharing my home-studio broadcasting setup for any other illustrators or creative people who think they can also try to do something for these communities. So here it is, warts and all.
Being clear on goals
Because I don’t work digitally, sharing my work and giving audiences a real insight into my process can be hard. So, to begin, it was important for me to be very clear on the goals of my live-in-studio broadcasts for regional and remote schools in Australia.
Goal: Give kids, teachers, and parents a *real* look at what a day in my studio looks like
I’ve seen plenty of tutorials and other artists doing similar things online, but it’s always quite performative. They only ever show the work. Not the artist, or the space, and for me, that’s one of the most important and revealing aspects for the audience.
Show the work – It’s important that people can see what’s happening – what I’m working on and how I’m achieving the results. For that, I invested in a dedicated overhead camera called a document camera. It was $99 online.
Show the artist – Most artists hide themselves, but, to be honest, I make some pretty funny faces when I draw. Sometimes I’m really concentrating, other times I’m laughing at my own creations. No matter what, I’m always having fun. To show *me* as I’m working, I use the webcam from my laptop.
Show the space – Most people assume I’m working from some dedicated studio with beautiful lighting, white walls and succulents everywhere. Nope. It’s a spare room in my house. It’s mainly controlled, artifical lighting and, well, there’s stuff everywhere. For this, I use my mobile as a roaming camera to show people the chaos in which I create.
Free Streaming software called OBS (Open Broadcast Software). This is the engine room and it’s what allows me to do Picture-in-Picture as well as switch easily between Picture-in-Picture and Roaming camera views quickly and easily. If you’re working digitally you can also do a picture-in-picture screen-share (instead of using the overhead camera). OBS is free and easy to use (and REALLY powerful if you want it to be).
YouTube (or Twitch).YouTube allows live streaming at different privacy levels and is probably the most accessible across schools, so that’s why I choose this. Once I’m all set up on my end, I can send a school a link at a scheduled time and we’re on!
You can make it as complicated or as simple as you want, this is just what I’ve found to be the best mix, for me. In its simplest form, you can use a webcam and YouTube and cut out OBS all together.
How it works
The end result on YouTube looks something like this above. You can see which device each feed is coming from, and this is all put together by OBS in real-time. I leave my YouTube feed ‘unlisted’ which means only people with a link can access it.
LiveDroid is a piece of software that I’ve installed on my phone that turns my mobile camera into a roaming camera so people can see how messy my space really is. I then connect this to OBS through my wi-fi (instructions online).
Setting up my feed in OBS
OBS is amazing for running a multi-cam setup. I have 2 ‘scenes’ set up in OBS.
The first scene is my picture-in-picture scene. This ‘scene’ is composed of 2 ‘sources’ (i.e camera feeds). I keep my ‘illustrator cam’ in the bottom corner so viewers can watch me and all my weird faces that I make as I’m making art. My overhead cam takes up the larger portion of the screen so viewers can get the best picture I can make for them for the artwork.
The second scene is my ‘movable cam’ scene which is just one camera (my mobile). When I’m streaming, I can easily switch between ‘scenes’ to change which camera the viewers see. So, I can be illustrating away in the first scene and switch to ‘movable cam’ to give viewers a closer look at something, then switch right back.
Sending my stream to YouTube
Once I’ve got OBS configured, I’m ready to ‘send to YouTube’. First things first, I open YouTube and create a “Live Stream”. I followed these instructions to get it set up.
Once the stream is set up in YouTube I get a ‘stream key’ that I put into my OBS software and hit the ‘start streaming’ button. This connects my OBS feed with my YouTube link and voila, I’m streaming, just like this. (Beware, it’s boring, it’s just a short sample of my latest stream where it’s taking me forever to mix a blue).
Questions
Revealing the real process of making art is something I truly believe in. In a world where our ‘social media’ has turned it all into a performance, people really don’t understand the mess, chaos and, most importantly, time it takes to make things (yep, that’s 3-minutes of me mixing a colour and I’m not even done yet).
I’m always happy to help enable illustrators amp up their digital presence. If anyone reading this has any questions or needs help, we can always set up a Skype/Zoom chat and I can talk you through some solutions. Just reach out via Twitter or Email.
