The Illustration Grad’s To-Do List

Post-graduation.

Our professors and advisors warned us to think ahead and be prepared for it, but there was no time to. There were too many thumbnails to sketch, too many emails to read, too many content dummies to print out and bind, too much sleep to catch up on. It almost didn’t matter to us, sleep-deprived and over-caffeinated 3^rd year art students, what was going to be going on in our lives two years from now in the thing called the “real world.” Some of us knew what we would like to be doing after college, but most of us had yet to figure out what we liked to draw best. Besides, two years away was still too far away. If college so far taught us anything, it was that about 43 minutes is enough for everything to change anyway.

But now it’s happened. Suddenly, my student ID doesn’t let me into my home the studio building anymore, I must pay the full price for student-discount art supplies, and the only new email in my inbox is the automated ad from GradPhotos hassling me to purchase the overexposed photo of me holding my BFA degree.

That’s it, then. I’ve been pushed out of the nest! No more advisors, dorms, studio-mates always willing to give my drawing a good critique, no more free printing, or free access to centuries-old typographic specimens, no more anything. (Starting to think that maybe that’s why it cost $45K a year…)

So. We’ve been trained in design, typography, drawing, various analog and digital tools, and yet…

…what do we really do now?

I’ve been fortunate. I went almost immediately from graduation gown to first day here at Manning, and thus I had (thankfully) little time to wallow before I got things to draw, printers to use, and the company of creative people restored into my life again. Many of my peers have just as quickly begun internships and joined up with other creative agencies, or are working smaller interim jobs until they find their next step.

But what Manning and just about every other creative organization has in common is that none ask their artists and designers to be assembly line workers. They hire the artist for their skills, indisputably, but very important down the road is the artist’s “touch” that they have cultivated themselves. (A “style” is not quite the right word — illustrators can utilize different styles, but their “touch” — something inherent and underlying to the way they make images — is only their own). More than it’s human, it is also something unique to every artist — and for illustrators, a crucial part of their voice. Inherent and unique though it may be, it’s not quite DNA-inherent. Rather, it is a result of the combination of existing work we have been exposed to, our interests, idiosyncrasies, drawing habits, all that good irreplicable stuff.

I think the single most important thing that a young illustrator can do for themselves right now is keep drawing, thinking, and making, whether for a job or not. Unlike many fields, for artists, resting on laurels is not allowed (not too much, at least). Once we stop being inventive with our tools and curious with our minds and stop pushing our own boundaries, the work we produce stagnates, and becomes not only uninteresting and uninspired to view, but also unfulfilling to create. (During my senior year one of my professors, out of determination to simply unhook me from working digitally, made me spend half-a-semester drawing exclusively with a scraggly 2-foot stick he picked up outside, dipped in ink. And I had to do it in front of people.)

Needless to say, we didn’t pick the easiest major. And now we’ve been orphaned from all the professors, scraggly sticks, and helping hands that have guided the way so far. How do we continue that growth that began when we first decided we wanted to study illustration?

A lot of that will come from the work we do, right on the job.

Here at Manning, I am working with Patrick and Namkyu on everything from storyboards to websites to iPad children’s books. Not everything I will get to make will be something I’ve done before, or something I even thought I liked making (kind of like in school, actually!). Much of it is even more concerned with design, than image-making. But that aspect of illustration as a professional practice — the rigor of working on deadline to specifications outside your own — not only shapes the illustrator’s growth, but serves to define the nature of this kind of image-making itself.

For example, say I liked only ponies and watercolors, and I was left to my own devices to make some pictures. Naturally, I might take weeks happily indulging in watercolor paintings of ponies. But, if the client needs a Norse warrior riding a giant hot dog into space and it has to be done by the end of the week — and let’s say I had to do something like that every week — I would start to work differently. I would find different solutions to drawing people, environments, and objects, mark-making and inventiveness that I didn’t consider when I had infinite time and ponies; and the unfamiliar subject matter would demand efficiency in research and execution that the ponies did not.

Brb, taking a break from writing this to draw a Norse warrior on a hot dog now.

But, it will also mean a lot of self-direction.

I’ve kept a number of “pet” illustration projects around for years now, mostly comics and fiction-illustration — anything to keep me drawing and developing my own interests even while school was going on, and I can’t overstress its value. In the larger picture, while “working on deadline” is an influential experience, it may be a while before a young illustrator is in that kind of environment. Or, perhaps, even once they are, the illustrator may find there is not enough opportunity to experiment freely or explore their interests for personal enrichment.

Personal projects allow for exactly that, and they don’t have to be much different from what we’re so used to from school. A visiting alumnus of our art program, for instance, told us how he simply began to draw based on a simple premise: animals in suits, one a day for 100 days or so. Apparently the result was a hit. (Not that I would have expected otherwise!)

A few years in art school gave us all a hint as to what kinds of things we are interested in drawing. One of my classmates has a penchant for the grotesque, silly, and odd; I have a special attachment to war stories and sequential storytelling; another loves everything fantasy; yet another discovered he has his best hand with on-location drawing. So on and so forth. Now it’s time to grab that and roll with it!

(Before it completely changes in a few years.)

It will mean being extremely proactive.

While the design student’s curriculum revolved around preparing the student to enter a creative agency environment, the illustration student, it seems, was being prepared for something entirely different: indefinite wambling around. “There’s no shame in knowing how to pour a good mocha,” one of my illustration professors told us with a smile.

So, that is, to start actually getting gigs, it means pretty much the freelancer drill. Prior to joining up with Manning, I come from humble freelancing roots, both in web design and illustration — but never did I hear “pound the pavement” repeated so many times in the professors’ instructions to us from here on out. Nobody was going to be standing around to help.

Call art directors to introduce yourself.

Enter every illustration contest you can.

What’s that, you lost the contest and all that money? Enter the next one.

Print up 600 self-advertising postcards every month and spam newspapers with them.

Your website won’t save you; make physical portfolios.

And fly them to New York.

Basically, everything that would give a shy person a heart attack.

But, more simply, this just means making some new friends, which might not be as hard as it seems. Nearly every city, wherever we all are scattered to, has some kind of art society, graphic novelists’ club, guild of people that like drawing dogs, and the like. Chicago, where I am, even has an alumni society for graduates of my college — plenty of places to make connections. (And Manning is the first of them, in fact.)

And it will mean looking to our heroes.

Some months before graduation, one of our professors assigned us this: figure out who your heroes are. Not like, “John Kennedy” or “my mom,” but people (dead or alive) whose work and voices we can look to for creative nourishment. Our professor called this our “tribe” — people who think, work, or aspire to the same goals as we in our careers, to whom we can look for inspiration and “guidance.” We are, presumably, on a similar path as them, which they have trodden, and we have not.

Finding them has been a slow process, at least for me. My former classmates and I have inklings of what our voice and work in the illustration world will be, but hardly a concrete idea. And how are we to search for heroes when we do not know the “search criteria,” if you will?

Certainly, I found a few completely randomly — stumbling upon the work of fellow artists from a Slavic background whose politics-heavy roots inspire their thinking, following links online to discover an artist who has explored a subject that interests me, revisiting graphic novels, so on and so forth. As we meet more people and discover we not only like drawing ponies, we also really like drawing submarines, that list will change and expand more.

Hmmm.

The web devvy half of me really itches to start working on a website that is kind of like Pandora or last.fm, but for illustrators — it helps you find your tribe. You could join, log in, list a few people whose work you already admire, characteristics of your own work, media you want to experiment with, or your larger goals. The website, in turn, would match you up with other people who also are obsessed with drawing Little Red Riding Hood steampunk remixes, help you reach out to them, and direct you to galleries of artists who were alive 70 years ago who pioneered the genre. It would be great!

I wanted to write this post to share my two cents on the road ahead of me and my fellow creative industry debutants, but also to encourage those who are a few steps ahead of us (whoever might be reading) to know you can reach out to us, too. Even those of us that are happily employed are still facing some of the same questions about their ultimate artistic self-actualization. And, truly, there is nothing more encouraging than a story of your own out-of-college life, the name of a particularly friendly newspaper art director, the address of a good graphics library, or just an email to say hello.

That said, I should probably get back to work. These ponies aren’t going to draw themselves.