One of the most consistent pieces of advice I find myself giving to emerging illustrators over the years has been, “don’t draw for someone else. Draw what you enjoy. Make what you find interesting. Do it for yourself.” I still stand by that as the best advice, especially when starting out. But, there’s also something to be said for evolving an art practice using external influences.

Responding to a brief, engaging with commissions, and collaborating with others (authors, publishers etc) push me out of my comfort zone much further than if I were making up my own work. No matter how much we want to tell ourselves that we can push ourselves to do something ‘different than usual’, our unconscious biases will always be at play in the background (that’s what makes them unconscious).

Rosie the Rhinoceros (Jimmy Barnes) and Herman Crab (Peter Helliar) strike me as my two most recent examples where this is true. It’s also part of the reason why I love illustrating another’s text. There is no way that if I was working on my own, characters and illustrations I’ve invented in response to the text for Rosie the Rhinoceros and Herman Crab would have emerged. I needed that external influence – those prompts, those relationships – to produce the work I did for those two books.

Because of the external influence of another’s text, I painted things I’ve never painted before. Because of that, the work I’ve done since then has grown in variation, maturity, and confidence. I used to think that being in publishing was all about amplifying one’s own work. Now, it’s just another tool in the belt of how to become a better visual storyteller. It sits alongside my personal work, in harmony not competition, and both the personal and commercial work is getting better for it.

Sometimes, for some ideas, now is not the right time, but it’s not always obvious. Sometimes, we’re not in the right headspace, or our lives are full of things that need more attention. Sometimes, we don’t have the artistic skill to execute what we can see in our minds. Sometimes, we don’t have the right people to collaborate with at the time. Sometimes, now is not the right time.

For some ideas, just like a good sourdough, time is an ingredient. Even though it can feel like we’re slacking off, or being lazy, or just not ‘pushing on’. The difficult bit is interrogating where our inaction comes from. Is it fear? Self doubt? I’m not good enough? No one will like this? I can’t afford to take the risk? Or, does our inaction simply come because the world, or ourselves, aren’t ready for it yet.

Being patient can feel very much like procrastination or fear, but the sources are different. And, ‘waiting’ for something feels like we’re not doing anything. But, as Auguste Rodin (the sculptor of The Thinker) so wisely said, Patience is a form of action.

I remember feeling very excited when I found my first book, Row Row Row Your Boat, in an actual bookshop, on an actual shelf, next to other actual books by actual authors and illustrators I admired. You would think that this would provide the motivation to do another one, and another one, and another one. But, I’ve come to realise that, for me, the motivation has never really been about the ‘legitimacy’ of being published, it’s been about creating physical art – stuff that I can touch and feel – as a ‘breadcrumb trail’ of my evolution as an illustrator, a storyteller, and a human.

Something gets lost in the digitisation

I find that, in the digitisation of my art (via hi-res scanning), something is lost. The texture, the staining, the pencil marks, they all feel different to me when I see it printed on a the same shiny pages within a commercially produced children’s book.

Don’t get me wrong, I get used to it, and I still love my books. But when I open one of my originals from the archive, the feeling is different. The feeling I get from seeing the original is one of scarcity, of preciousness. An internal voice says, “this is the only version of this in the whole world, and it’s right here.” The relationship to the work has an intimacy that I don’t get from one of 10,000 copies sitting in a warehouse somewhere.

Why does any of this matter? Because, in my view, it’s important for artists to be clear on their motivation and where they derive satisfaction. If all we care about is being ‘validated’ through the commercialisation of our work, then what do we do if/when it’s not commercialised? If, however, what we care about is finding out who we become through each and every piece we create, then it no longer matters if someone buys the work. All that matters is that we keep making it.

An art practice is a funny thing. We’d like to think there are rules, processes, or certain ways of doing things; things that are more likely to lead to success and/or failure. But, for every one bit of advice, there’s another contrary piece of equal value.

Take, for example, imposing constraints. I’ve written before about how I find constraints very useful. By imposing constraints, it can free us up to think and work within them. In a world of limitless art subjects, constraining ourselves can help us develop in a particular way. Or, like my studio space; it’s small. But it’s small size allows me to think cleverly about the space – to prioritise ruthlessly. It’s often priority that leads to progress.

Or is it?

On the weekend, I did something rare (for me) – I played with a new type of art material. I had previously constrained myself to watercolour. The theory was that the focus on just one medium meant I could push my ability to use it in ways that people before me had not.

But, in that pursuit for purity, I found myself in situations where I simply could not produce what my brain could I imagine. The frustration grew to the point where I dismantled the one constraint I’ve been living with for years.

In the process of learning about this new medium by playing around with it in my studio (I was painting swatches of the colours), I accidentally squeezed out too much green. So, instead of wasting it by letting it dry on the palette, I picked up a scrap bit of paper and painted a giant green swatch.

That giant (too bright) green swatch became a background for this image. In my mind, it was cute, but nothing exceptional (although I learned a lot about the new medium by painting this).

When I shared this image on Instagram in the last week, a publisher reached out – “Hey Matt, I think there’s a story here.”

There was?

And, sure enough, that prompt led to a new story idea which I’m developing as I write this journal entry. Will this story about an avocado be politically important? World-changing? A significant contribution to my body of work and my identity as an artist? Probably not. But, had I not decided to break one of the constraints imposed upon myself, that painting would never have happened. It’s an image I would never have produced had I constrained myself to watercolour.

Constraints are useful, but then, so is stepping outside of the boundaries we have sometimes to try something new. Like most things with art, there are not rights and wrongs, only what works. The act of art-making is, at its core, an act of discovering who we are and so, don’t we owe it to ourselves, sometimes, to break our own rules to meet a version of ourselves we haven’t met before?

Occassionally, I get people asking me for some advice about how to become a children’s book illustrator. Everyone knows it’s competitive, and they know it’s hard to ‘break in’ – most simply don’t know where to start. I find myself giving one piece of advice: more often than not, a book illustrator’s folio, amongst other things, should show your ability to pair words and images, together.

Now, I know those two things – words and images – can stand apart and still satisfy. Just like wine and food: you don’t need food to enjoy wine. But, a cleverly selected food/wine pairing amplifies both of them – it tells you a lot more about the food and wine individually when you eat them together.

Words and images work the same way. And, if one is in the business of illustrating children’s books, or, in other words, visual storytelling, 90% of the work we do includes words – so why wouldn’t a portfolio show them together?

When you pair words with illustrations, a few things happen:

1. You can tell dramatically different stories (contrasting gentle text with energetic illustrations, for example, provide a very striking mood).
2. You showcase your ‘voice’; or, in other words, how you think. For me, that’s mostly humour and movement.

Take, for example, the words below, from my book with Jackie French, Koala Bare:

“Who wants blue or yellow fur? Grey is the colour I prefer.”

Now, for context, we know the main character is a Koala, and that he’s angry that people keep calling him a bear.

There’s nothing in that text that says that the images need to be in a toy store, that the blue and yellow fur is about toy teddy bears, or that the main character is even that angry. He has a preference for grey, but it’s not a demand. Yet, by pairing these curious and quite ‘plain’ words with an image that shows shattered glass, teddy bears strewn all over, we find ourselves laughing a lot more.

This image could easily have been something else. Maybe the koala is looking sad upon a photo of some bears and he’s missing spending time with other koalas? Maybe he’s in a hairdresser and the barber is styling him right next to a few other bears who are getting blue and yellow perms?

None of these are right or wrong ideas, they’re simply trying to make the point that the way someone interprets a text can be a powerful vehicle of communication to a portfolio viewer.

It’s an easy exercise for any current or future book illustrator to try. Pick a text (preferably the raw text, without illustrations so you’re not influenced), and see how you might illustrate it, naturally. Do this enough times and, perhaps, like me, you’ll struggle to be able to draw an image without the additional playfulness of words. You might also find your begin to see your voice emerge – and that’s exciting!

I see things that others cannot. No, it’s not dead people. But, for the length of my professional life, the number one feedback I get goes something like this, “Matt, you need to take people on the journey. You skip from A to G and others can’t do that. You need to step them through your thinking, from A, to B, C, all the way to G.”

When I was younger, I thought it was an opinion. But, as I’ve grown, I’ve come to recognise it as a pattern. I’m not here to toot my own horn but sometimes facing up to those patterns is what helps us grow so I need to admit it – I see things that others cannot.

One of the things I’ve grown comfortable with telling myself is that I’m an artist and storyteller. I know how to tell a good story. I don’t mean the technical aspects because I don’t think that way (you know, 3-act structure, climax, conflict, etc). I mean, I can just tell someone a story.

Maybe it’s because my teenage years were spent engrossed in cinema and film (I was never a reader), but my default way of telling stories, I’ve realised, is through drawing them. I’ve tried to write them, and whenever I seek feedback its… underwhelming. People don’t seem to be able to get where I’m going with it. It’s too wordy, too didactic, too… unpolished.

But, every time I tell a story with some visuals, people are there for it. I get glowing and overwhelmingly positive engagement (and book contracts) when the stories I tell come with the visuals.

The advice you hear online is to ‘start with the manuscript’ and now I realise I’ve been fighting that advice for years. I keep trying to pump out manuscripts but they never land. A storyboard though? That’s when I get the reactions I’m looking for – when the person who engages with the work says, “I can see what you can see now. I couldn’t see that before.”

This reaction happens when I illuminate someone else’s text, too. The story the writer thinks they’ve told is still there, but the feedback I get is that I’ve added new threads of narrative, or ‘expanded the market’ or ‘expanded the scope’ of the work.

I’m not here to spend time congratulating myself, I’m here to acknowledge that there is not one way to ‘write’ stories and it’s taken me ages to have the confidence to change my practice to a way that suits me, not the way I hear it’s ‘supposed to work’ from others.

As someone who never read a lot of books growing up, writing stories (refining specificity of words, intellectualising it all etc) is not my sweet spot. I can work on it, but I don’t have the natural rhythyms and structure of children’s literature in my brain that make it a natural strength. Maybe it’s because of my love of and long relationship with cinema but what I know is that I think in images and I can see how the meaning of words can change when they’re sitting alongside an image. The job for someone like me is to be OK with that, and then show people what I can see – one thumbnail at a time.

It’s simple, but profound – if you have an idea, just make it. Sure, it almost always won’t meet the expectations you had set for yourself; things never seem to come out as good as you can see them in your head. But, if all they do is swirl around your head as ideas, things get worse, not better. We build a list of all the things we haven’t done, not all the things we’ve accomplished.

Finishing is important. If you have an idea, and you make it, you’ll learn something. And if you learn something, you’ll find another idea, and another, and eventually, if you make enough of your ideas, you might even find yourself improving – or, at the very least, iterating toward something you can be proud of. And, regardless of if anyone pays for anything you make, isn’t the idea that we had fun along the way? After all, yesterday’s work is the best we can do, which means tomorrow’s will be better.

I’ve heard writers and artists talk about this a lot – art as therapy – just something they have no choice but to do. They seem to be able to prioritise art-making even in-front of the cooking, cleaning, and care-giving, a lot of the time. I’ve never really had that, until this week.

In our day-to-day lives, it’s easy to make the art-making the secondary thing; the thing we do after the cleaning, the chores, the house maintenance, the care-giving. We snatch at ‘the moments in between’ to progress ideas or use art to help us think through some of the things that we find ourselves pondering. That may be questions like “What does it mean to own something?” or “What if the world was really ‘every man for himself’ and no one did anything for anyone?” or “Why is our immediate response to fear people and things that are new to us?” These questions aren’t made up, they’re my questions (and only a few of them).

In the ‘in-between’ moments, those questions are never answered, they are pondered. We feel as though we’re making progress, and we are, to some extent, but it’s not the therapy the soul needs to really understand what we think and feel about those questions.

This is my last week in the May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust residency and now that art-making has been at the centre of things for almost four weeks, I’ve seen the difference. The flood gates opened this week and I’ve made actual soul-seeking progress in trying to process some of these questions.

It’s as if I’ve carved raw clay from the Earth and now, when I come back home, the job is to take that and shape it into something for others because hacking the clay from the earth has already satisfied the soul.

This experience is a good reminder to try and hold on to some of this – that art is defaulted to secondary when we’re surrounded by ‘normal’ life, but how might one re-frame things so that it doesn’t stay that way? What if, as Mary Oliver has so wisely said, “Giving your employer your second best attempt of the day?”

I’ll admit it – most of the time, I take the ability to draw and visualise ideas for granted. Even though I use it daily to help communicate ideas and feelings, either through my professional consulting work or my work in children’s literature. It’s become such an automatic way of getting through life that, most of the time, it’s not magical; it’s necessary.

But, this week, through the kindness and generosity of the May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust, I ran a rare (for me) workshop with children and their parents. In that workshop of about 50 people, there were two young children who, when it came to the drawing part of the workshop, did not want to participate. I was heartbroken. If they had a shell, they would’ve crawled into it.

And I get it, the world can be scary sometimes. I’m a bit like those children when it comes to complex finance – I couldn’t think of an activity less suited to my natural strengths. But what I realised in that moment is that participation isn’t about knowledge, it’s about power, so I flipped the script.

“What about, instead of you drawing something, you make me draw anything!” I said, “Anything at all – a two-headed monster drinking coke, a space machine flying underwater, a giraffe eating ice-cream… anything!”

I saw the dynamic shift immediately but could never have predicted the response. She thought long and hard about what she would really like me to draw and then:

“How about that fire extinguisher?” she said.

Yep, a fire extinguisher.

“Sure,” I said, but you have to help me.” Suddenly, as if a switch went off in this child, we had active participation and collaboration. She ended up pointing out all the features of the fire extinguisher that I had missed; she ended up teaching me how to draw. She had power over me and her environment, making her feel increasingly comfortable and in control.

Another child who followed along with me as I taught her how to draw a penguin could be heard charging around the library at the end, asking someone for a laminator.

My heart sang.

Every time I experience this, I say, “I should do more of this. I should spend more time with children, building their confidence (and their parents’ confidence in their own child).” These are probably not life-changing moments for anyone but me, but they are profound. These moments provide me with an energy from my drawing that I don’t get when I draw in my day job or when I’m drawing for a book, alone in my studio.

Like most people who are balancing work (the stuff that pays) and art (the stuff that doesn’t pay), prioritising is difficult. There are only so many hours in a day, and I know that being ‘too busy’ isn’t an excuse; it’s a choice. I know it’s up to me to decide whether that experience I had is worth repeating and how often, and I can control it, but sometimes weighing everything up is a bit like making good sourdough; time is a non-negotiable ingredient, and using it in this way – with patience and curiosity – isn’t the same as wasting it.

This piece was written ‘offline’ during my May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust Creative Time Fellowship. It’s an incredible program for any author or illustrator working in children’s literature in Australia.

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It’s easy to make stuff for others. To assess the market (or landscape), identify the need, then make something to address that need. What’s that you say? Publishers are looking for more stories about the changing nature of masculinity and children’s identity? Great. Here’s a story for that.

That’s one way of making stuff.

The other way of making stuff is to look inwards – assess your internal fears, anxieties, and interests, and then make something to address that need. Solve your own problem. For me, one of those is dealing with the existential issues around human’s perceived separation from nature.

The first way of making stuff is likely to be more profitable; maybe you’ll get published, maybe someone will pay you for the answer you’ve provided to their need. It’s much less likely that someone will pay you for the second way – solving a problem for yourself that no one else but you asked for.

Money is one way of measuring success. It has a fast, sharp, dopamine hit. It feels like you’ve achieved something. The money and contract is a quantitative representation of that ‘success’. But, learning more about who you are in this world, and what you want to become? That doesn’t make it to a profit/loss statement or a balance sheet. For that work, we need a different set of measurements; measurements that are more complex than a number in a table cell. And, there are no standards for this sort of measurement. It’s different for everyone. No one can give the answer to you but yourself – but that’s also what makes it far more valuable than money or status. It’s about playing the infinite game, not the finite one.