Module 1 / Lesson 2: Hone your skills
Hone your skills
Now that you’ve figured out what you love and what makes you, you, it’s time to hone those skills. No matter what you do as an illustrator, may it be digital illustration, collage, gouache, mixed-media…you need to be the best you can be at it. You need to relentlessly work on your craft, no matter what it is. There are many ways to keep you excited about your work and also ways to keep yourself accountable. We’re going to explore these now. Let’s go!
You can listen to the lesson…(give it a second to load)
Or you can read it!
Practice makes perfect
There’s no secret about it, the more you work, the better your work will be. Time spent painting, drawing, collaging isn’t time lost, even if you don’t like what you’re doing. That’s another thing to remember, you won’t always like what you do daily, but that’s ok, because if you keep going and persevere, you will get the results you want. Practice does really make perfect and the more time you spend working on your craft, the better you will become at it. It’s not about accessing a kind of perfection though, not in the traditional sense anyway. It’s more about you creating work you can be proud of, work that feels good and looks good (to you). So, in a nutshell, you need to spend a lot of time creating. Paint, draw, collage, photograph, edit… Do the work and enjoy the process greatly.
Do more personal projects
One of the best ways you can progress your own work (in a way that client work cannot) is by doing personal projects. Personal projects are awesome because they allow you to do exactly what you want AND they very probably will get you client work in the long run. It’s a win-win situation. Personal projects will also keep you sane, happy and busy when client work is quiet. As an illustrator, whatever you create and share could be seen by the right pair of eyes and get you a job. Oh, I almost forgot the best thing about sharing your personal work…people could see it and want to license it too! This basically is like working in advance on your down time and creating work to be licensed later on. How great is that? You’re not getting paid to do personal projects, but you might get a nice lump of money if a client wants to license some of that personal work. (They don’t care how or when you did it, and they will actually prefer licensing something original that they haven’t seen anywhere before). Ok, now that you’re convinced of the power of personal projects, let me give you some ideas…
Examples of cool personal projects:
Instagram Challenges: A few weeks ago, I had the idea of challenging myself and create patterns for a whole month, using only gouache (which I never used to paint with). I came up with a list of 30 prompts, one for each day, and decided to open the Pattern Challenge to my followers on Instagram. For a whole month, over 100 people took part and created patterns - daily or not - which they shared online. Over 5000 patterns were created by the community. It was amazing to see everyone’s creativity be sparked. At the end of the pattern challenge, people were left inspired, excited about the work they had produced and the visibility the challenge offered them (I shared my favourite patterns daily so that other people could discover new talented illustrators). So, you could create your own illustration challenge (it doesn’t have to be patterns) or join an existing one on Instagram…I promise you will love it! Other challenges that I love on Instagram: Our Planet Week, Powerful Women Week… Follow your favourite illustrators online to see when they host challenges.
Zines & Magazines: I recently launched a magazine called Spellbound which I created, edited and illustrated… It was and still is an amazing personal project to work on. It makes me happy, pushes me to be better at my work and always re-assess what I love. It’s my way of putting my vision and values out there and it’s helped me grow my community as well. All in all, making a magazine is a lot of work but it will bring a lot of good things your way, if that is what you’re passionate about!
Another example comes from one of my favourite illustrators. The amazing Bijou Karman has been making zines in her own time, as personal projects. Those little zines are wonderful and allow her to express herself freely. She’s also been exploring different mediums. She grows her community by sharing and selling those zines, but she’s also showing her current (and future) clients what she can do…(which is basically anything, she’s amazing!).
Sketchbooks: Here is a more traditional personal project. Get yourself a beautiful sketchbook and “force” yourself to paint or draw in it daily. You could give yourself a theme for the sketchbook or keep it very free and spontaneous. Make sure you don’t tear pages off if you don’t like them… Just accept whatever you’ve done and keep going. Fill your sketchbook till the end and start a new one! Keep going. A few weeks later, you could go back to look at them and find great ideas in there. It’s important to let your mind do its thing freely and sketchbooks are great for this.
Greeting Cards: As an illustrator, you’re lucky that you can sell your work, with or without clients. All you need are customers (and those customers could be the people following you online. Only 50 or 100 followers could be enough to launch a little online shop!). Anyway, my point is, you can create work to put on a lot of different things. Illustrations go on greeting cards, notepads, prints, mugs, keychains… The list is as long as your imagination! I’ve always particularly loved greeting cards… I guess I’m a sucker for snail mail. Also, a lot of my dream clients when I was starting up were stationery businesses, so I knew that by creating greeting cards and sharing them online, I would get some attention. So, if you fancy it, create your own little collection of greeting cards and sell them online! You could do this on your own website if you use Squarespace, Wordpress or Wix, I believe, but there are plenty of other places you could sell goods online.
Keep yourself accountable
Keeping yourself on track is essential. I would say that your biggest incentive is to be able to make a living doing what you love. Right? But you have to make sure you put a system in place so that you’re always doing the work, and not only when clients pay you to do so. Most of the time, you won’t have anyone checking on you to see if you’ve filled your sketchbook or sent those illustrations to print. Always remember WHY you’re doing what you’re doing, and maybe even write it down so you can often be reminded of what this is all for. I never want you to feel discouraged and aimless… You are doing great things, no matter what others say, and you need to keep at it. In the creative field, we are all playing the long game, and that’s the beauty of it. Enjoy the process, keep yourself accountable and produce work you love.
My favourite tools
For painting & drawing: Seawhite Brighton paper and sketchbooks, Daler Rowney brushes, Frisk drawing ink, Daler Rowney Designer’s Gouache Professional
For computer work & editing: Microsoft Surface Studio, Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign (Creative Cloud)
For storing: Samsung T5 hard drive, Synology
For scanning: Canon Scan Lide 400 or newer
For printing at home: Canon Pixma iP8750 or newer
For photography: Canon EOS Mark II or newer
For mockups & fonts: Creative Market.