Have you ever felt like a liar when calling yourself the thing you really want to be? Are you already doing the thing — illustration — but still find it hard to own the label — illustrator? In this episode, I share my experience of deep imposter syndrome, and I explain what I believe is the reason. If you struggle with feelings of self-doubt and unworthiness in your art or career, this episode is for you.
Have you ever felt like a liar when calling yourself the thing you really want to be? Are you already doing the thing — illustration — but still find it hard to own the label — illustrator? In this episode, I share my experience of deep imposter syndrome, and I explain what I believe is the reason. If you struggle with feelings of self-doubt and unworthiness in your art or career, this episode is for you.
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IN THIS EPISODE
LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE
About Elizabeth Holmes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes
A Beginner's Guide to Illustration - https://www.format.com/online-portfolio-website/illustrator/guide
Association of Illustrators - https://theaoi.com
Society of Illustrators - https://societyillustrators.org
Island Illustrators (Vancouver Island) - https://www.islandillustrators.org
PODCAST TEAM/CREDITS
Julia Herrick, Script Editor
https://julesherrick.com
Mark Allan Falk, Audio/Video Engineer
http://markallanfalk.com
FIND ME ELSEWHERE
Hello. My name is Mr. Tom Froese and these are my thoughts on illustration. Welcome to Episode five. Today I want to talk about imposter syndrome. I know it's kind of a cliché for a podcaster in the creative space to talk about it, but as many of us know, it's real. It's hard and it sucks. I want to talk about how I've experienced it in my own life and share what I've learned from it.
Maybe you'll find something in my story that you personally relate to, and if that can make a difference in just one listener's life, then this episode will be worth it. So what is an imposter anyway? Isn't it someone who claims to be someone they're not like. Kind of like a wolf in sheep's clothing. Our culture is full of examples, both fictional and real, of people or creatures who mislead others by lying about who they were or what they were about.
On purpose for some kind of personal gain. Imposters. Are people gone bad who are up to no good. Take Elizabeth Holmes, for example. She started a fake biotech company called Theranos based entirely on a fake blood testing technology and defrauded her investors of billions of dollars. In 2015, her company was valued at $9 billion. And then by the next year, after being caught, Forbes revised its estimate of her net worth to zero.
Holmes had no viable product, only an impossible idea that sounded good and a lot of nerve. Not only was her technology complete bunk, she spoke with a fake voice like lower in tone than her her natural voice, just to sound more convincing as a powerful business leader. On top of that, she adopted a black turtleneck as her uniform, imitating actual tech innovator Steve Jobs.
She was eventually discovered for the fraud that she is, and today she's doing hard time. Fortune magazine subsequently named her one of the world's 19 most disappointing leaders. Now, I know that you listening to me right now would never could never do anything of this sort, at least not on purpose. But I do suspect that many of you somehow feel like a fraud.
Anyway, have you ever told someone that you were something that you wanted to be, but you weren't sure you were for real? Like you weren't sure that you could actually call yourself a thing. And so you felt like you were lying. I mean, specifically for us, have you ever told someone you were an illustrator? But kind of doubted the truth of your words even as they came out of your mouth?
Or maybe you go out and run from time to time for exercise to hesitate to call yourself a runner? Or are you a foodie who makes beautiful, delicious dinners for friends all the time? But you'd never call yourself a chef. What is the line you must pass to go from home, cook to chef or occasional jogger to full blown runner?
What is the difference between a hobbyist or a student and a professional illustrator as you're learning the art of illustration, as you're taking on skills and practicing techniques and eventually making pictures for real clients? At which point do you get to say, without any hesitation, I am an illustrator? In this episode, we're going to look at this very question because I think it's important.
Well, the question, what is an illustrator? Seems pretty easy to answer. It still seems that many people who do the verb, they illustrate struggle to own the noun. I have some ideas of what might be going on here based on my own experience. So please stick around and let's figure this out together. If you like what you hear in today's episode, you can support me by following me and reading and reviewing this podcast wherever you happen to be listening from.
If you're watching on YouTube, please like and subscribe. You can also support me on Patreon where you can get exclusive access to my live monthly drawing meetups called Draw with Me. Plus all the past meetups as replays. Join today at Patriot on Rt.com. Slash time froze. So when can you call yourself a nail illustrator who had asked this question and why would it even matter?
While we may ask this at any time in our careers, it seems to be most relevant as we transition from student to professional. This is a question of job readiness. Am I ready to illustrate at the professional level? Am I qualified to advertise myself to others as a professional illustrator? And this is to ask, can I provide illustration to paying clients and will they be satisfied with the results?
But I'm also addressing the question of what I call job identity. Can I call myself an illustrator? This is an almost existential question. Am I who or what I say I am? Do the things I say about myself? Line up with reality? Am I the real deal or am I an imposter? Am I a wannabe? Am I a try hard?
Am I just fooling everyone, including myself? Am I actually worthy to be paid for my art? So I think when we ask this question, can I call myself an illustrator? We can ask it in these two senses. The first is of job readiness, and the second is of job identity. Both are important for our sense of confidence. Having some certainty on the matter will give us more confidence as we enter into the creative market as professionals.
Where comes to the profession, there are no clear guidelines that we can use to say with black and white certainty that we are fully qualified illustrators. This is different from other professions, like engineers and doctors, for instance. For us, there are no governing bodies restricting the use of the word illustrator. As a professional designation, and there are no consequences for misusing and abusing the label.
So when the first sense, the sense of job readiness, what do we have to go by? What are the qualifications of a job ready professional illustrator? I don't know about you, but I always want to know where I stand relative to others. Not in a competitive sense, so much as an indication of what I can expect for myself and perhaps what others can expect from me.
This is actually not a bad thing to wonder. It's how we know where to target our efforts. For instance, if we're looking for our first clients, we should have an understanding of what kind of work we're ready for. It's not a question of being worthy or not, but of being ready. It's good to take risks and even bite off more than we can chew at times.
It's good to take on more than we think we're ready for. It's good to get in over our heads because it's in those pressure cooker situations that we really learn the fastest. There's something about just throwing ourselves into the fire and making it work, because if we don't, we'll get in big trouble. That can be very motivating and we just grow a lot in that pressure situation.
I've learned way more by saying yes to jobs that I wasn't ready for then, by just sticking with what I thought I was already good at. But we also need to know that we can do what we say we do. This is just a guess, but I don't imagine any of us want to live in constant fear of failure or worry that we've oversold ourselves and under-delivered.
We don't want to be on Fortune magazine's list of most disappointing people. Somehow we need to find a groove, which is somewhere between confidence and courage. We need to know that we're good at what we do, but we also know that we can be brave and take on new challenges things that are too difficult for us right now, knowing that our creativity will see us through now, on the question of confidence.
As an illustrator, I guarantee that eventually we do find our groove in terms of job readiness. There will come a time when you'll always be ready to take on the next challenge. I'm also happy to report that eventually it doesn't faze us to call ourselves illustrators. There does come a time when you've done what you do for long enough repeatedly to be more than comfortable owning the label.
The thing we do, the verb is so integrated with who we are that it seamlessly becomes the noun. And this, of course, leads to the second sense of the question, which has more to do with our identity. For people who wish to be illustrators, then now an illustrator is more than a job description, and it's more than a role.
That's why I call this job identity. There's something very personally significant for us to call ourselves by this name. Like all artists, we can't separate ourselves from our creativity. And when we do creative work, we pour ourselves into it. Now, as a professional, it has been important for me to learn how to separate myself from my work to a certain degree.
But to do this fully is impossible. And I think this is where we struggle the most with the confidence to own the label, to call ourselves illustrators, and to actually believe it. We see the work of our heroes and we hold them as a standard for the profession we're entering into ourselves. And we see that gap between what they do with their work looks and feels like or perhaps the clients they've worked for.
And when we see that the gap between where they are and where we are, it's easy to doubt that we're even remotely in the same space as it was writing for this episode. I put a little poll on Twitter asking, Have you ever had trouble using a job title such as illustrator, writer or designer to describe yourself because you're not sure if you're allowed?
Do you feel almost like an imposter using it compared to real pros in your area? And to this question 83% responded with yes, yes, they felt like impostors compared to the so-called real pros in their space. So if this poll is an indication of the greater illustration or even the greater creative community, that would mean over 4/5 of us have at one point struggled to identify with the thing that we do or want to be doing professionally.
That's a lot of imposter syndrome going around. We're going to get into some more concrete definitions of what it means to be an illustrator, perhaps more on the job readiness side of the question. But it's really this more existential element that I'm interested in exploring. Why is it that we struggle so much to own the label of what we do?
What's the difference between doing something as an activity and using that same thing more as a description of who we are? Isn't it enough to say that if you illustrate, you are an illustrator? To be honest, I think that in the most truest basic sense, this is really all there is to it. If you illustrate, you are an illustrator just in the same way you can call yourself a runner if you run on a regular basis, you don't need to enter races or have a coach or be an elite athlete sponsored by Nike.
People who do things can ascribe those things to themselves as part of their identity, but for some reason we have a hard time believing we are truly allowed to use such terms to describe ourselves. I want to impact this to understand it more so that we can cut through the doubts that stop us from becoming who we truly want to be or from doing what we know we can do.
I think there's a lot of power in owning a job identity because it empowers us to act as we want to be in a greater sense than what we are or can do in the moment. But there is also a danger in overly identifying with labels. It's possible to give them more importance than they deserve. And I think this is where we're at most risk of stunting our growth.
And more importantly, losing our joy in creativity. Imposter syndrome or believing we're somehow less than we truly are. More than anything steals our joy. And I think this is why this subject is important enough for me to write an entire episode about. I personally have experienced the joy sucking over attachment to the job identity, and I want to help as many as I can avoid this or at least navigate their way through it when it comes up.
I've had imposter syndrome so many times. It's almost too boring for me to talk about like just the other day. Before writing this episode, I had a pretty strong bout of it, which I don't really want to get into just yet because it's still kind of raw. But I do remember a time very early in my career as a graphic designer, which for me is the most emblematic of all my imposter syndrome experiences.
This came at a time when I was working as a graphic designer before I went to school to learn in a more formal setting. You can listen to episode four for the longer back story, but this was when I had just graduated from college for something totally unrelated to design. But in an almost miraculous turn of events, I ended up working as a full time graphic designer for a little startup company called Spring Tree Trampoline.
Now I know this is an illustration podcast and we're talking about the question of when we can call ourselves illustrators. But at this time, for me, the big dream was to become a graphic designer. But all the insights from this experience are the same for illustrators. It's universal. So if you're listening to this and you're aspiring maybe to be a writer or fine artist, it's all the same thing.
So at the time, I was living in Toronto and meeting a lot of new people and making lots of new friends. And it's crazy, but so many of them were either in school for some kind of creative job or they were already working in the creative industry. There was Blake, the book cover designer, and Tim the web designer, and Lisa the interior designer and my own future wife, Amanda, who was going to OCAD for graphic design.
I could name at least a dozen more people like this. You've already heard of Julia? If you've listened to episode one. Anyway, I remember just chatting with one of these folks in my new community. Let's call him Troy, and he asked, as one does, what what I did, you know, for a living. That's pretty basic question you ask people when you meet them.
And of course, the answer was that I was a graphic designer. But instead of pride and gratitude to get to say this about myself, after three years of desperately longing to be a designer like I actually was a designer, I felt only shame and embarrassment. As these words came out of my mouth, I felt like a liar. Troy was a professional, school educated designer, and I was a self-taught hack.
I felt like a fraud because I wasn't formally trained and because at the time I didn't like my work. One of my biggest fears in that moment was that he would ask for my business card or for my my website address, like my portfolio. I would have felt totally exposed for the hack that I am if Troy saw my actual work.
Come to think of it, I was actually so reluctant to take on the status of graphic designer that I chose instead to use the term graphics manager on my business card, which I. I personally designed the cards. It's so it's ironic that I, the designer, wouldn't call myself a designer. I didn't have the confidence to do that. So I called myself a graphics manager.
Meanwhile, I was, like I said, an actual salaried designer. I was responsible for a lot of actual graphic design stuff where I worked. I was in the process of helping this company rebrand, and I was designing websites and brochures. And I was even working on a national and international advertising campaign with their marketing lead in Australia. So what was going on here?
Like, why couldn't I have just felt great about calling myself a designer when that's actually what I was doing? Well, for me it was still very much a dream job and I found it hard to wake up and see that I was actually doing it. You know, I think this is the exact thing that podcaster Ira Glass has famously called the taste gap.
There is a gap between the kind of work that I wanted to be doing and the work that I was actually doing. The work that I loved, which inspired me, was so advanced compared to the work I was able to do myself at the time. Now, I don't think this feeling was totally wrong. It was true that I had a lot of growing to do and that I was very much somewhere in that taste gap for real.
And it was because of this awareness and by being part of such an intimidatingly inspiring community that I was ultimately compelled to go to art school. I rightly believed that by gaining more formal education and learning shoulder to shoulder with fellow aspiring designers, I would become more confident, of course. But there is another thing that sort of chipped away at my confidence at the time, which was the reality of my lucky break.
I got that job literally unqualified. I didn't go to school for it, and I had very limited experience. I knew that in order to become more confident as a designer, to become actually good, I needed to carve my own path. I knew that I would never know for certain that I actually had the chops to be a good designer unless I could make it on my own.
All of this is to say I wanted to get better at my dream job and that's a good thing. The problem wasn't that I wanted to get better than I was, but that I attach too much importance to the label itself. What should have mattered was that I was doing what I loved in getting to learn it on the job.
What I thought I was allowed to call myself shouldn't have mattered nearly as much. But at the same time, the label designer was important to me because eventually it would be the role that I saw it in the big, scary industry out there, beyond the comparative gloom of my current position where I had this lucky break. Now this story is about me transitioning from self-taught to professional designer or coming to a place of confidence in calling myself a designer.
But since this is an illustration podcast, you might be wondering if I had a similar experience transitioning from design over to illustration. Did I have the same kind of job identity crisis as I did before? I'd say Not really. Not at least in the same intensity. There was, of course, a period where I stumbled around exactly what to call myself because I didn't just jump from designer to illustrator overnight.
I played around with the labels a little bit like first I was a designer and then a designer and illustrator, and then I wasn't really sure what to call myself for a while, so I preferred the term commercial artist, which is fairly accurate but not as clear for clients who are looking for an illustrator. So today I've become much more comfortable with just calling myself an illustrator, but even now I'm constantly adding and changing the order of the roles I think I need to identify with like teacher, writer and more recently, podcaster.
The difference is, in the first instance, when I was becoming a designer, the intensity came with just entering into the great unknown world of design and profession or creativity for the first time. Illustration is very much a part of that world, so once I was in that world, I felt more comfortable navigating it as an insider. So when did I finally feel more free to call myself an illustrator?
Certainly when I landed my first agent, that was a clear signal to myself and to others that I had achieved some kind of status in the profession. But the work to get there was clearly a long game and a gradual process. The important thing is to just do the thing, build up the body of work and the true status of whatever label you seek will build up incrementally to your first clients.
You are more an illustrator than they are. And then to your next clients, you perhaps are even more of an illustrator than you were the last time. After one year or three years, five years, you keep becoming more of an illustrator than you used to be, and that does not negate your status as an illustrator. In the past, what will you be able to pinpoint exactly when you truly earn the right to call yourself an illustrator?
Probably not. Was it after having a student portfolio? Was it after having your first client? Or maybe your first three? When does a stream become a river? When does a hill become a mountain? Where is the line between beginner and professional? The only way of having any kind of answer is to know what known qualifications might exist for the illustration profession.
Are there any standard guidelines that we can go by while we're at it? What is the definition of an illustrator anyway? Like what does an illustrator do? Go ahead and try to answer that for yourself. In plain English. Like just pause the video, pause the podcast, and see if you can describe an illustrator in very simple, quick words.
It's really hard to say for sure, isn't it? If you didn't stumble a bit on your words just now and you just didn't say something like an illustrator is someone who illustrates then I think you're a genius. I can say for certain that I'm not a genius. So in researching for this episode, I had to look it up.
The best definition I could find was from an article called A Beginner's Guide to Illustration. It's actually worth a read. I leave a link in the show notes, but to quote the article, it says An illustrator is an artist who specializes in creating visual images through a combination of design, art and creative skills. In the most simplified terms.
An illustrator is someone who draws or creates images for magazines, books, advertisements, posters, birthday or greeting cards, medical material, and so much more. The simple meaning is it is an artist who makes the illustrations. I really like how straightforward this definition is, and I think they get right to the point without being too specific. I mean, there is a lot of wiggle room in the in in the description they offer an artist who creates visual images through design, art and creative skills that could apply to a lot of different people.
And while they list a few examples of contexts such as magazines, they don't go for an exhaustive list. But I think this open ended ness of illustration is part of our problem. On the one hand, we want there to be room for us in the illustration spectrum. But on the other hand, it's hard to see for sure what illustration is without getting philosophical.
Unlike other professions like doctors and engineers, there's no governing body regulating the use of the word illustrator. On the other hand, if you want to be a doctor, you have to qualify through the College of Physicians and Surgeons. If you want to be an engineer, you have to qualify through your regional regulating body for the professional engineering, whatever.
There are very clear and specific requirements that start with your education, but then also include what kind of job experience and specializations are required by its members. And of course, you have to pay your dues to hold a license. You can't practice the profession unless you're a paying, qualified member of your college or society. And that means you can't call yourself a doctor or an engineer without approval from these regulating bodies.
Now, I don't think anyone would disagree with having some protection around terms like doctor or engineer. They're strictly regulated for the health and safety of the public. If you don't have a doctor's license, you can't practice medicine. If you try, that literally makes you an imposter. Unless you're qualified as an engineer or maybe an architect, I wouldn't want you designing the bridges that I drive over.
But it's different for us as illustrators. If we were to market ourselves as illustrators without having the necessary qualifications. It's not like somebody is going to die. What's the worst that can happen from botching an illustration project? Maybe disappointing your client or a little bit of embarrassment? Or at worst you don't get paid. Whether we call ourselves Illustrator, whose line is less about a legal definition and more a matter of living up to the expectation of our clients.
It matters in terms of how we position ourselves in the marketplace, whether we're seeking employment or if we're clients of our own. We have to use the label as a simple way to tell others that we can do whatever it is they're looking for. Now, while there are no legal requirements to call oneself an illustrator, there are trade organizations like the Association of Illustration in the UK and the Society of Illustrators in the United States.
Or closer to home, where I live in B.C., there's the Island Society of Illustrators, which I just found out exists. So I thought it might be helpful to look at these organizations for their own way of defining what an illustrator is, or perhaps someone they would admit as a member of their society. When this give us some clear idea of what qualifies one to be an illustrator.
Well, in order to become a member of the AOI, all you have to do is pay for a membership. Seriously? That's it. I was able to go to their website and, like, add a professional membership to my shopping cart and proceed to the checkout. On the contrary, to become a member of the Society of Illustrators, you do have to be admitted by their membership committee in applying for membership through them.
You have to show them a portfolio of published work alongside a client list. They determine your worthiness as an illustrator, at least in terms of being a member of their society by judging your work and your client list. So on the one hand, the UI puts all the onus on you to qualify yourself as an illustrator. On the other hand, the Society of Illustrators holds most of the power to say whether you're in or not.
Now, while the SC wise approach may seem harsh or very exclusive, I think it does offer more for our purposes than the alloy, just in terms of giving us a sense of what it means to be a professional in this space. You have published work and a client list. You have a body of work that exists in the real world, which you made for real clients.
When you think about it, this is really just the ante definition of what it means to be a student. A student will also have a body of work, but it's not typically published or for real clients, you know, typically speaking. So we may conclude that there's only one real qualification for professional illustrators and that's having professional experience. Now, organizations like The Ally and the S.Y. turn out to exist more to support illustrators than to qualify them or to regulate the use of the term illustrator, especially to outsiders.
You know, most people, and this will include pretty much all our clients, will have no idea these organizations exist. So it turns out that in the transition from student to professional, there's no definitive standard of when that shift happens. It's kind of like trying to pinpoint the moment when we fall asleep. We weren't conscious of the exact moment between wakefulness and sleep.
We just wake up the next morning. The change happened, but we can't say exactly when. Now, for obvious reasons, as slippery as the definition of Illustrator might be, it's easier to talk about job readiness as an illustrator than about job identity. There's a lot of room within the definition of illustration to find your own place in it. That's quite different from like everyone else in the industry when it comes to forging our own identities, though, like both in the larger sense and in this more specific illustration sense, there's always a process of figuring things out rather than seeing this as a bad thing.
I think this is a necessary and even a good thing. It's part of our own self discovery. What do you like and dislike? What are you good at and not so good at? What did you think you wanted and how did that turn out? This is how we end up finding our true gifts. As you find yourself between definitions, whether you are between student and professional, or between one phase of your career and another, use this time to play around what it means for you to be an illustrator or whatever the label is that you're aspiring to next.
For me, the shame around calling myself a designer was the dark shadow of an innocent truth that I wasn't where I wanted to be, that I was more of an aspiring designer than a fully confident, experienced one. It's okay to know you're still learning and to want to be better than what you are now. But the dark shadow for me was the unhealthy attachment to the label.
I held that label so highly that I was certain that I was unworthy of it, whereas it was really just a literal job description. I definitely had confidence issues. Had I known then what I know now, I would understand that to say I was a designer was both a truth and a larger dream. I was a designer in the best way I could be at the time.
In fact, I was more of a designer than I could have dreamed possible, given my lack of experience. Given that I'd gone to school for something altogether different and spent my entire time longing to be a designer. And then, after graduating, in spite of my lack of training, I got a job as a designer. That's more than I could ever have wanted.
So if I could travel back in time, I would go and tell myself, Tom, you are a designer. You're doing it, own it. I would also encourage my younger self to be humble. You don't need to prove yourself to anyone, not even your friends or these people you're meeting who all seem so much further ahead than you. Be honest about your situation.
Be a beginner and be open to learning from others. You know, maybe if I was less worried about my self-image here, I would have been able to ask for more help. For more insights from the designers I was around. It was such a good opportunity. Instead, I believed I had to already know everything or come across as knowing my stuff just to justify the fact that I was working as a designer.
I felt almost secretive about what I did at my job because I wasn't confident about my work and I didn't want people to see it and find out how much of a hack I was. Thankfully, somewhere between these early days and going to art school, I did a lot of growing up. I came into my early twenties, extremely shy and lacking in confidence.
I had very low self-esteem and it was very self-conscious. I was constantly worried about what others thought about me, and in fact, I was convinced that others always thought poorly of me right off the bat. I just assumed that people saw something about me that was off and they wouldn't want to meet me. At a certain point, my older sister happened to send me a book whose title I've long since forgotten, but which had a life changing impact on me.
It helped me realize that we're so in our heads were so worried that our every flaw, real or imagined, is all others. See. When the fact is, most other people are too busy worrying about their own flaws to notice yours. What's more, people would love it if you reached out to them. Almost all of us are too shy.
Reach out, and yet we all want so badly to connect with others. I realized I could choose to believe that I did have something to offer and that others in fact want me around. From that point, I chose to believe that I had something to offer others rather than just wish I could have what others had. From that point, I became a lot less shy and I held my head higher and I made a lot more friends, and I made friends a lot more easily.
Of course, this is far bigger than being about what I do for a living. But my point here is that cared about what job identity I ascribed to myself. If I said I was a designer, nobody was questioning it but me. But even more important is that I needed to accept myself for being where I was at the time.
It was only pride and some kind of deep insecurity that prevented me from being able to say I am a designer and I am a beginner. At the same time, this is the same kind of dough that makes us settle for second best in so many other areas of life. For many of us today, to feel this imposter syndrome around getting to call ourselves illustrators is rooted in the fear that others won't think we're as good as we'd like to be in their eyes.
We worry that others won't accept us because we haven't yet accepted ourselves. This fear of judgment, perhaps our unrealistic comparison of ourselves to our heroes or to others whom we perceive to be further on and somehow more satisfied, is what can ruin our enjoyment of the very thing that was supposed to give us joy. Taking on a job identity, just like accepting our true identity as worthy, valid humans is ultimately a choice.
We can choose to take it on and aspire to something greater, all the while knowing we're doing our best at our current level. We can choose to believe that even as we're starting out, we have something to give and that giving our best is far more important than getting the approval of others. One is a gift to the world and ourselves, and the other something we just can never ask for or guarantee.
So I think we can wrap this one up. Today we talked about what it means to call oneself an illustrator, and I offered two different ways to ask this question. The first is in the sense of our job readiness. What does it mean to be a professional illustrator in the sense an illustrator is actively illustrating for clients of some kind?
This is an ongoing activity that builds on itself. There is no standard way to certify you as an illustrator. Ultimately, you have to make that call yourself. There may be a critical moment that you feel finally defines you as an illustrator. Like how? For me, it was getting an agent that gave me far more certainty on the issue.
More likely, though, it will be a gradual process that you'll only notice in hindsight where you feel more like an illustrator today than you were before. This, of course, is in the professional sense. Hopefully we'll all experience that kind of growth, but at the same time, the term illustrator is inclusive. As long as you're doing the thing. We also looked at today's question in terms of our job identity, where this label means more to us than just a job.
It's an expression of who we are. More deeply when experiencing doubt around this issue. If you feel like you're an imposter, let the questions sit with you. Don't let your doubt become a belief. A doubt can only take you down if you let it define you. If you take it as an unquestionable truth. But if you pose your doubt as a question, you can honestly ask, Am I an illustrator?
And then let that lead you to other questions like what does it mean to me to be an illustrator? Which of my heroes do I uphold as the standard? Who? Who do I look up to? And who am I inspired by? If we can ask these kinds of questions, we can better define for ourselves what it means to call ourselves illustrators.
And we can even start setting real goals to reach for ourselves. The danger is in comparing ourselves to our inspiration, rather than simply letting them inspire us and accepting ourselves for where we're at in the moment. So here, I'm encouraging you to sit with your doubts a little bit and let them lead you to real, meaningful answers about where you are and where you want to be in your illustration career.
I'd also like to give you a simple test a way to answer the question of whether you can call yourself an illustrator right now. So here's the test. Do you illustrate? If the answer is yes, then you're an illustrator. Do you illustrate as a hobby? But you haven't been paid yet. To illustrate as a professional, if the answer is yes, then you're still an illustrator.
Are you doing illustration in any way, shape or form? But you feel like a total hack and nothing you make is any good. Yeah. In your eyes. If the answer is yes. Well, actually, to me that sounds a lot like an illustrator. We shouldn't want what others have. We should want to become who we truly are. We should all want be good, even great.
But also understand the only way to get there is to do the hard work every day of doing the thing we love and not letting anything else stand in our way. It's possible to be what we want to be as long as we're doing it. It's possible to be an illustrator and a beginner at the same time. It's even possible to be a fully legitimate, experienced illustrator and feel like a hack your entire life.
It's not easy to shake our own high expectations of ourselves. Maybe it's not such a bad thing to want to be better than we are today. But at every step of the way, we need to give ourselves credit for all the hard work we're putting in every time we show up and do the work, we're becoming more of who we want to be.
All right. So that was a bit of a doozy of an episode, maybe a little longer than I intended, but there's so much in there that I really needed to say. And again, if we can just help one person be able to embrace who they are right now at the same time as aspiring to be even better, then this episode will have been worth it.
Now, before I let you go, it's time for a little thing I call listener mail where I read and respond to some of your comments that come in to me in response to previous episodes. Today's letter comes from ACR on YouTube. This is in response to episode three, where I expressed the opinion that the surest way to learn illustration is through a formal education.
So they wrote and basically disagreed with that statement. They said, I fundamental disagree. A lot of people that did go to art school complain about doing so many things they never used. And personally, I think it saves so much time to focus on a specific thing in illustration, for example, drawing people rather than learning everything and basically only using 10% in the end.
Now, S-R, I totally understand what you're saying, and I certainly felt this way coming out of my own design degree. I felt like my education as a designer was way too academic and perhaps too broad and not practical or focused enough. And, you know, I still agree with that feeling. So I agree with you on that in some sense.
But, you know, rather than responding myself further, I'm going to read another letter that came in from another listener to this same episode. And I think this addresses your skepticism as well as mine. And so I'm just going to read this comment here. He says, I really appreciate the topic and your insight. I'm one of those people who don't have access to a school that offers an illustration degree.
And at my age, I can't really afford to move to another city or country and start again. So I chose to do a visual art degree at a local university. It mainly focuses on painting and printmaking with a good level of flexibility. I'm still reading the quote here. My only complaint is that we're required to do a lot of theory units that involve a bunch of students from different degrees, and I found them to have very little relevance to visual art.
The criticism that degrees are not useful seems to be a trend online and on YouTube, with many motives behind such statements. However, I find that a school is a place for personal development rather than place for a job related training. I sure don't use the complex math I had to learn at school when I was young, but it contributed to me developing skills that were beyond my capabilities.
I was never a very logically minded kid when I was young, but now I am. Maybe he's not a kid anymore. But anyway, he goes on and I'm grateful for it. He's Grateful for the education he didn't want or expect, but did get. In the end, when I started to learn art, I didn't like collage. I knew nothing about it and I didn't like it.
But thanks to school, I now know it's an essential technique behind many illustration styles that I gravitate towards. And I'm grateful that I didn't just do only what I like when I didn't know enough to judge what I would actually like in the end. Knowledge and experiences are not meant to be directly useful. They contribute to your awareness, to how much you can make sense of and understand the world and how far you can develop into that intellectually.
We seem to want everything to be useful these days and regard anything not directly useful as pointless. Exploration is not that useful. You end up discarding 80 to 90% of experiments and failures. But it's essential if you want to discover anything new. All right. So thank you so much for taking the time to write that comment. It was pretty long.
I wanted to read the whole thing, though, because it is there's just so much in there. And I really think you make a good point about how, yes, a lot of our education gets thrown away. It's not directly useful, but it's by being exposed to new things that we wouldn't have otherwise. That opens our world up. It broadens our horizon.
And I just I just thought that was such a well-written, well-articulated little bit of insight there. And I wanted to include that. But I'm not seeing this as sort of contest against what the previous person said. I value critical comments when people challenge me on my opinions, and most of the things I will say on this podcast are my opinions or my own personal experience.
And so I really value your input as well to the previous commenter. I welcome your input, whether you agree with me or not. And honestly, I learned so much more when you go out of your way to challenge my ideas. So thank you so much for your comments. I love reading your comments. If you want to send me a commenter question, the easiest way is by leaving a comment on YouTube.
If you're a patron, you can always drop a comment or question on the Discord Server. You can also send me your questions by direct message on Instagram at Mr. Tom Froese. That's F R O E S E. All right. That's all for now. My name is Mr. Tom Froese, and those were my thoughts on illustration. You can find links to all my things at TomFroese.com, including my pages on YouTube channel and Skillshare classes.
Remember to read review like subscribe follow. Tell your friends and all those lovely things. Thank you for listening all the way to the end. I'll see you in the next one.