When I’m at the beach, it doesn’t take me very long to re-discover how little I need to restore my energy and focus. These occasional reminders are important to have semi-regularly. Apparently, according to some research, a 1-week break could be as beneficial to ‘resetting’ ourselves from our daily work and lives as a break any longer than that. In other words, shorter breaks more often seem like a better path to restoration.

It takes no longer than a week, then, to realise how simple life could be and how much of the complexity that exists in our daily lives is a choice. Beyond food and water, all I seem to need to be at peace is sunlight, a warm rock, and someone to listen.

Occasionally, we eat out at a restaurant and, occasionally, it’s one of those open kitchen restaurants where there’s no wall between us (the diners) and the chefs – we’ve got a full view of all our food being prepared as we order.

One thing I always notice about these kitchens is that despite the number of stoves and ovens they’ve got running, there’s not a single oven mitt in the whole place. Yet, at home, we’ve got draws overflowing with them.

Chefs use tea towels instead of oven mitts because the tea towel has more than one use – cleaning up spills, drying surfaces and hands, making sure other surfaces don’t burn. As an oven mitt, a tea towel is also more versatile because it can be shaped into whatever shape it needs to be to wrap around specialty pots/pan handles and it can accommodate any size or shape of hand.

Art supplies are a bit like oven mitts. Each art store dangles a ‘special’ or ‘deal’ in front of an artist saying, ‘what you really need now is this specialty tool’. But, perhaps, like in kitchens, what we need is to go for a constrained set of tools that can be used in different ways.

If you want to see The Pyramids in Giza you need to do a lot of work before that. Researching and planning flights, booking hotels, maybe learning a few basics of the language so when you arrive you can successfully negotiate with cab drivers or tour operators to get there. Then you need to travel there – that’s an 18-hour flight from Australia. You need to work through airports, traffic, hoteliers, street-vendors and huge cultural differences if you want to see the pyramids.

But, then you arrive, and they are glorious.

Then, shortly after that feeling wears off, you realise that you can’t stay there forever. You’ll need to go home soon.

Any amazing experience doesn’t just happen. Whether it’s visiting The Pyramids in Giza or making your next big art project. Both of these ‘dreams’ sit on a horizon (the pyramids are just a bit more ‘concrete’ than an artistic idea). You can’t just sit on the couch and wait for a flash of divinity to transport you to the pyramids anymore than you can wait for it to produce your ambitious art project.

The promise of the future experience – the feeling we’ll get when we get there – gives us the motivation to do the work to get there. The more work we do to make it happen, the bigger the feeling we get. And, when that experience arrives? Well, it doesn’t last long, but it’s unlike anything else. We take that feeling back home with us and use it as fuel to do the work to reach our next destination; our next ambitious project.

I remember what it was like to be in the presence of the pyramids, and to finish that ambitious art project, and that’s what keeps me motivated to wade through the work to arrive at the next one.

There’s good forgetting and bad forgetting. Bad forgetting is when I can’t remember where I put my keys or glasses. It’s when I can’t remember which shade of green I used for a character that I now need to re-draw for an entire picture book. It’s when I miss my nephew’s birthday. It’s when I can’t find the exact brush I need when I’m mid-wash and only have a limited time before I miss the chance to correct it. Bad forgetting is the type of forgetting that needs structure and routine to guard against.

Good forgetting is entirely different. Good forgetting is when I can’t quite remember how upset I was when grandma died. Or the searing pain when I busted my knee. It’s when I forget I that I couldn’t draw that particular scene many months ago so I try again, and this time, I can do it. It’s when I don’t remember I’ve read a poem, until after I’ve read it a second time, so I get to experience it more than once at different times of my life.

We often associate the idea of forgetfulness with something negative. We talk about it as if it’s a failure and we wish to be less forgetful. But forgetting is useful, it’s an evolutionary advantage.

I wonder what else is like that?

In every piece of digital marketing advice you’ll ever read they’ll say the same thing – you should be tracking your visitor numbers so you know what’s resonating with your audience and what’s not. I used to do this, now I don’t.

The problem with ‘analytics’ is that once you know what’s resonating with your audience and what’s not, you change what you make. Suddenly, your work becomes guided by ‘the analytics worm’ and you find yourself making stuff for someone else instead of yourself.

Then, the algorithm changes.

Once you see the analytics worm take a dive, panic sets in, “what if I lose my audience?” We try to make more work to rescue the worm but it’s gone underground, descending into the depths of low visitor/like numbers, never to return.

One response is to scratch around the internet for advice on what the ‘new algorithm’ wants and then start ‘making content’ to serve that in the hope you’ll revive your dead worm. The other response is to turn off analytics and make the work you want to make. It may not revive the worm, but it’ll feed your soul. I know which one I prefer.

It may be easy to think, “I’m just drawing for kids, we should keep politics out of it.” But how does one do that when every artistic act – of inclusion or omission – is a political one?

One question I get asked a lot is ‘how long does it take for you to make a picture book?’ I understand why people want to know, but I can’t help but think it’s the wrong question with what is likely to be an unhelpful answer.

I know that I can knock out a fairly competent editorial spot illustration in about an hour. A storyboard for a 32-page picture book will take me a weekend. A picture book spread averages out at about 2 hours, give or take the complexity of the scene. The final art takes about 4 hours per spread.

Now that I’ve said that, another artist reading will have one of two responses. The first response is “Wow, that’s so much faster than I can do it, I’m so slow”. The second response is, “Wow, that’s really slow, I’m heaps faster than that.”

Does the comparison matter?

But, there’s a lot that goes unsaid in the response to the question. Do you mean elapsed time (which includes waiting for paint to dry?), or do you mean active time (the time I spend actually putting brush and pencil to paper?) By the way, which mediums are we talking about? Pencil? Watercolour? Oil? Acrylic? Mixed media? Which ones do you use? Which ones do I use? They all have an inherent relationship with time.

If I gave a response to ‘how long does it take to make a picture book’ that was twice as long, or half as long, what difference would it make?

Humans tend to equate effort with quality (i.e. The Effort Bias). People will tend to value a drawing more if I said I spent 12 months on it as opposed to 12 minutes. So, knowing this, I could make another artist think whatever I wanted them to think by answering the question of ‘how long does it take to make a drawing’ in whichever way suited my self-interest. Maybe Bruce Whateley’s “Ruben” took just as much time as “Eric the Postie”. Does that make one better or worse?

Things aren’t slow, we just imagine them to fast.

Whilst it helps our meagre human brains to think about things in time, effort, and quality, there’s often very little relationship between those things when it comes to art-making – especially when we’re trying to use those things to compare ourselves to others. Some of us need to labour over a drawing for 12 months. Some of us get the ‘divine inspiration’ and a drawing falls out on to the page in a matter of minutes.

A better approach might be to focus on the most authentic work we can make for ourselves, regardless of how long it takes. Instead of ‘how long does it take?’ maybe a better question is ‘why did you make it?’ or ‘what did you learn from it?’ If the work we make is about helping us learn more about ourselves – sometimes some lessons take longer than others and that’s OK.

I’ve heard the ‘draw everyday’ mantra so often and from so many people that I feel guilty if I go to bed one day without putting pencil to paper. The idea is that the more often you draw, the better you become at drawing.

The problem with this thinking is that it assumes that the drawing is the end goal; that I want to make better drawings. It assumes that if I don’t draw everyday (which I don’t), I’m not as good as I could be, that I’m not living up to my ‘potential.’ That just makes me feel even worse.

What this advice seems to fail to recognise is that I’m not motivated by the drawing, I’m motivated to draw because of what drawing does to me.

Drawing (and making art in general), teaches me about myself. It reveals what I’m scared of, what I enjoy, what makes me laugh and cry. It shows me, clearer than anything else, what my weaknesses are and what I’m good at.

All aboard

When I say that drawing shows me my weaknesses, I don’t mean ‘I struggle drawing feet’. I mean I discover that I can be impatient because I hate how long it takes for watercolour to dry. That I frustrate easily when I fail time and again to get a simple curve right. That I don’t value my own opinion enough or that I lack confidence because I find that I go seeking validation from anyone that’ll give me 30 seconds of their attention. Drawing has revealed those things to me and, because of drawing, I’ve been able to work on them in other parts of my life so I can be a better partner, son, colleague, and friend.

The more your draw, the more you learn… about yourself

In fact, even this observation alone has come from drawing more regularly than I normally do. I still won’t draw everyday – the lessons I learn about myself from drawing need time to proof and settle in other parts of my life, anyway. But, perhaps there are others who need to re-contextualise why drawing is important to them. Sure, the ‘craft’ of it is one thing, (and yes, I should practice drawing more feet), but possibly discovering those automatic parts of oneself could be more motivating over the long run.

I find the act of drawing much more difficult than the act of writing. Maybe it’s because writing, especially on the computer, has a constrained set of marks (just 26 in fact, plus punctuation), so all I need to do is put those together in various ways until I’m happy with them. It’s easy to change those 26 marks at any time and iterate them towards something I like more. I never find myself too attached to any combination of words at any time. (This might also be because I hold myself to a lower standard of craft with words but that’s a whole other thought).

Drawing is different. With drawing, the number of marks is, quite literally, infinite. The effort required to produce a mistake, only to correct it repeatedly, through the millions of possible variations, is orders of magnitude more difficult for me to get something I’m happy with than when I make marks with words.

Because of the effort required with drawing, I’m a little more resistant to throwing things out that I don’t particularly like even though they’re ‘finished’. I say things to myself like, ‘it’s good enough’ or ‘no one but me cares or will notice’. But, if even I’m not moved by the work I produce, why would I expect others to be moved by it?

The reality is, not every drawing is a keeper. In fact, most of them are fishing for the bait that needs to be found to catch the bigger fish. And, as any fisher would know, there’s nothing quite like catching the fish you’ve been looking for, especially if it’s taken much longer or much more effort than you expected.

The story I tell about my journey into illustration goes something like this: I was burned out looking at computer screens in my job as a software designer. My wife bought me a student watercolour kit for Christmas one year as a way to ‘disconnect’. It worked. I loved it. I loved playing once again with physical stuff – water, pigment, time, and gravity. Not only did I love it but it unlocked and entirely new career and feeling of purpose in my life beyond my ‘day job.’

That’s a lot. It’s a powerful story, that’s why I tell it.

But I’ve just spent a weekend sketching and drawing digitally. I have to say, I loved that, too. It’s different, sure. And it doesn’t get me away from the computer – that’s true, too. I can’t deny it though, it’s been fun.

The problem with accepting this is that it feels like it’s challenging my origin story. In fact, I’ve avoided exploring digital illustration work for a long time because of this. My story, as much as I loved it, may have been holding me back.

And now, just because I’m enjoying new things, it doesn’t make that origin story less legitimate, the story remains the same, it’s just a new chapter I’m writing for it – and it’s a good one because I’m really looking forward to what’s coming next even though I don’t know what it will be.

It made me wonder whether others are trapped by their stories?