Do you want to be an illustrator? In this episode, I give you 5 things you need to do before lifting a pencil! Between your spark moment and actually becoming an illustrator, there is a big gap, something that is hard to imagine ever crossing at the start. This is one of the biggest obstacles in our way to just getting started. By listening to this episode, you will learn the five things you can do to get started, when even just finding the starting point seems impossible. These are the things you can do right now, which can help you gain more clarity about what to actually start learning any actual illustration skills.
Do you want to be an illustrator? In this episode, I give you 5 things you need to do before lifting a pencil! Between your spark moment and actually becoming an illustrator, there is a big gap, something that is hard to imagine ever crossing at the start. This is one of the biggest obstacles in our way to just getting started. By listening to this episode, you will learn the five things you can do to get started, when even just finding the starting point seems impossible. These are the things you can do right now, which can help you gain more clarity about what to actually start learning any actual illustration skills.
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SHOW LINKS AND REFERENCES
45 Markets of Illustrations (Article on Communication Arts)
The Creative Career Path (Kickstarter Project by Andy J. Pizza)
Kierkegaard on Why Anxiety Powers Creativity Rather Than Hindering It (Article on The Marginalia)
Unsung Heroes of Illustration (Playlist on Pete Beard’s YouTube Channel)
Logos, Flags and Eschuchons (Essay by Paul Rand)
INTRO
Hello, my name is Mr. Tom Froese, and these are my Thoughts on Illustration. Welcome to Episode 2 of podcast!
HOOK
Today we’re going to talk about 5 things you need to do to become an illustrator before even lifting a pencil. These are the things you can do right now, without any fancy gear or new skills, to help you get started on your illustration journey.
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If you like what you hear in today’s episode, you can support me by following me and rating 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 patreon.com/tomfroese
CONTENT
In the very beginning, when you discover illustration and say, I want to do that, it’s hard to know what to do from there. In the last episode (which you should definitely listen to first), I talked about that first spark moment, and how at that time we want it before we truly understand it, in the same way we can smell KFC well before we pass the restaurant. Our first job, I said, was to understand what “that” is, to look deeper into that initial desire, so we can let that desire lead us through the long, long road ahead.
In today’s episode, I want to talk about next steps. What can we do to really begin from there? Between your spark moment and actually becoming an illustrator, there is a big gap, something that is hard to imagine ever crossing at the start. Not knowing how to begin is one of the biggest obstacles in our way on our journey. I believe that, if we can just get past this inertia, we will be well on our way to bigger things.
What keeps us from just starting something? Once we know we want to become illustrators, what stops us from just picking up a pencil and starting to draw, or looking for an illustration program and start learning? I believe it’s the fear that we’re starting out on the wrong foot. That we’ll spend too much time going down the wrong path, and that we’ll have to start all over again anyway. Or maybe we are overwhelmed by all the possibilities ahead of us. There seems to be infinite possible things we could do to get started, and we know that if we just chose one, we could start getting somewhere, but again, we are paralyzed by the sheer possibility. In the words of philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, we experience the dizziness of freedom, “the dizzying effect of looking into the boundlessness of one's own possibilities”. [ref]
In spite of this, many of us will bravely venture forward anyway, perhaps scouring the web, buying magazines, or picking up books at the library or bookstore about illustration. This is definitely what I did, and I think it’s a good move. Better to just move forward and make some mistakes than to stay motionless at the inspiration station. In the last episode I told you about the time I had to design a robot mouse that could navigate its way through a maze, and it did this by moving forward, bumping into walls, and turning left or right to find the next opening. When we navigate the maze of becoming an illustrator, this is exactly what we have to do. Going down the wrong way is part of figuring out the right way.
But if you’re anything like me, rather than making me feel more like I’m on the inside, looking through design and illustration books (or watching videos on YouTube) can make me feel even more on the outside. It’s inspiring to see all the different illustration examples, to see all the different styles and ways illustration can be used. But we also come across words like clients, portfolios, briefs, budgets, marketing, pricing, and the like, and at the very beginning, these just don’t make sense to us. We’re not ready for them. Just as there are too many possibilities to fathom at the beginning, there are too many insider words and concepts that get in the way of truly beginning as beginners.
As a kid in Sunday school, and we would learn about how there is this big separation between us and God, and how Jesus bridges the gap. There was always this illustration of a chasm, sort of like the Grand Canyon, with a human figure on one edge, and just the word “God” on the other side. And of course, spanning the gap was a cross. The cross is how we get to God.
It’s an effective illustration. It gets the point across, and it’s memorable.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying an illustration career is god, and somehow there’s a saviour that bridges the gap that separates us, but there is a sort of parallel here. There is a gap between us, at the very beginning, on the one side, and actually getting started on the other. In one sense, the starting line isn’t where we are at the beginning—it’s over that seemingly un-jumpable chasm. There is a gap between your first spark of inspiration and taking those first actual steps to become an illustrator. I call this the Inspiration Gap. It’s not easy to get across if you don’t find a bridge.
Another image that comes to mind is in super mario brothers, when Mario has to jump over a chasm from one platform to the next. He’d either have to leap from block to block, separated by deadly gaps, making sure not to over or undershoot, to get to the other side. Or, worse, there’d be these moving planks, swinging from left to right, and you’d have to time your jumps just right to safely land on the plank and then get close enough to the other side to make the final jump without falling short. In the harder levels, like the boss ships at the end, the whole scene keeps moving forward and you have to do all this without getting stuck or pushed over an edge by the game itself.
That’s probably how a lot of us feel when we’re trying to figure this illustration career out, especially if you’re feeling like time is against you. At the tender age of 22, when I had my first spark moment, I already felt like a late bloomer, and that it was already too late. I know a lot of my over-30 listeners are laughing at young Tom right now. But I think we always feel like we’re not as ahead as we’d like to be, no matter how old or young we are.
Let’s just set the time limit mentality aside for now. Yes, time exists. It always has and it always will. Worrying about its passing is not going to make it stop. So take a deep breath and exhale, and let’s get onto the five steps that you can actually do right now, to get to the other side of the inspiration gap. These are the things I had to sort of stumble upon in my own journey, that hopefully by knowing, you can start doing more intentionally.
If getting to the starting point of actually learning illustration is on the other side of a dangerous chasm, I want these tips to help get you there safely.
These are things you should definitely do, but don’t cross them off your list—these are more like habits, things you should get used to doing regularly, from henceforth and forevermore. They’re definitely the most important things to do at the very beginning, but they never stop being necessary. Does that make sense?
Okay, let’s get on with the tips.
—
01 Find Inspiration
So the first thing you need to do is to find inspiration. Chances are you’ve probably already done this, and that’s what brought you here. We talked a lot about the initial spark of inspiration already, but now it’s time to be more intentional. Finding inspiration is so important because it’s going to give you the closest thing to a vision of your future that you can get. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like your future work is going to look anything like what you see in the very beginning (or at least it doesn’t have to), but without something to set your sights on, it’s going to be very hard to know where to go from here. Knowing what inspires you gives you something tangible to aspire to. It’s sort of like the picture on the box of a model or puzzle. You’ll be able to put the pieces of your illustration journey together with more purpose and direction.
There are two modes of finding inspiration, collecting and analyzing. In collecting mode, you are actively seeking out and gathering inspiration from various sources. In analyzing mode, you are looking more closely at what you’ve gathered. It doesn’t need to be as formalized as it sounds. You just go out to a place like Pinterest or head out to a library or book shop and look for examples of illustration you love, and then somehow start collecting it all in one place. Then, at a certain point, you can look deeper into the work that excites you the most. That’s what I mean by analyzing. What catches your eye the most? What makes you feel something different, something that hits you on a different level, almost the same way you might feel about a favourite new song?
I think Pinterest is the best place on the web to find inspiration. After this podcast, or even while listening, go to Pinterest and look up “illustration”, and then let yourself get lost in the inspiration that ensues. What images show up that catch your eye? Tap into one of these, pin it to a board called “Inspiration I Love”, and then keep going. Maybe set a timer for 15 or 30 minutes if it helps.
Later on, you can dig deeper by analyzing what you’ve collected. Is there a common thread to your collection? For instance, do a lot of the images seem to come from one era or decade, or is there a consistent colour palette that comes up? Do you tend to pin images that have lots of lettering in them, or characters that look a certain way?
The important thing here is to be curious. When something lights up your soul, ask why that is. Find out who made the image. Find out why the image was made — like where did it get used? Was it on a book cover, or a poster, or a package? Was it in a magazine or from a corporate website? These are all questions we’ll be digging deeper into in the next tips, but it all starts by finding inspiration on purpose.
Before moving onto the next tip, if you want to get inspired from offline sources, if you can, I recommend going to a bookshop or library and looking up books on the topic of illustration. I’m not going to give you any recommendations for titles to look for. Just get out there and see what you stumble into. You never know what you’re going to find, and that’s part of the adventure and excitement of the whole thing.
Personally, I have always loved going to thrift stores like Value Village and browsing old books or flipping through record covers. There’s a lot of crap to sift through but every now and again I find a really good gem, and I either buy the thing, or just snap a picture.
Another place to look for inspiration is in illustration annuals, like Communication Arts and 3x3 Magazine. These are two of the more reputable publications in the industry. If you want to see examples of the best work of today, according to industry professionals, juried illustration annuals are pretty much the gold standard. Oh, and a hot tip, don’t just look at illustration annuals — be sure to check out Design and Typography annuals as well, which will give you some big clues about how the illustration you like ends up getting used—and how you might want your own illustration to be used some day. We’ll get more into this in the third tip, Research the Contexts.
Now, just one extra little resource here that came up as I was writing this episode, go check out Unsung Heroes of Illustration on Pete Beard’s YouTube channel. Thanks to Lara Jackson for the tip (https://www.youtube.com/@petebeard/playlists)!
02 Find Your Heroes
The next thing you need to do is find your heroes. This is a logical next step after finding your illustration. Heroes are people you look up to as examples of some kind of ideal. We tend to think of firefighters and soldiers as heroes, since they exemplify bravery and selflessness and strength on a level we hope we ourselves could possess. Heroes are inspiring not because they are super-human, but because they show what’s possible for every human.
Where it comes to our illustration heroes, we look for qualities we admire, such as talent, creativity, the kind of work they’ve done, the level of success they’ve achieved, the awards they’ve won, and things like that. We admire our heroes for their style, for how their work makes us feel, for the way they can make us see the world differently, and sometimes we value them for being leaders and change-makers in our culture.
If you know me a little bit, you’ll know who my hero of all time is, and that’s the late American art director and graphic designer Paul Rand, who was mostly active from the 1950s thru 1990s. I can’t remember exactly when I discovered him, but I think it was during my time in art school, as I was researching for assignments in the library. I know that I saw his work around a lot before then, but I specifically remember doing some research on logos and branding, and I ran into an essay of his called Logos, Flags and Escutcheons, which was a short and spirited essay about the nature of logos.
I’m just going to read a clip from the essay for you:
‘“It reminds me of the Georgia chain gang,” quipped an IBM executive when he first eyed the striped logo … How many exemplary works have gone down the drain because of such pedestrian fault-finding? And how many good designs became bad designs as a consequence of mindless dabbling on the part of clients with little or no understanding of visual logic?’
I mean, come ON, right? Paul preaches hard. As inexperienced as a designer that I was at the time, I already deeply related to the experience of showing what I thought was good work to clients or bosses, only to have them squash it because they judged it too superficially.
What’s interesting for me is that Paul Rand became my hero because of his writing, not at first for his design. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I think I appreciate his design so much more because of his writing. And I don’t think it’s an accident that alongside my visual disciplines, I am also a writer. In fact, I often write in the same manner as Rand, reflecting from personal experience more than anything else. Oh, and by the way, if you know anything about Paul Rand, you’ll know that the title and cover art for this podcast is directly inspired by Paul Rand’s work.
What you can glean from this insight is that our heroes hit us in different and surprising ways, and often tell us a lot about ourselves. There is no right or wrong way to have a creative hero, and perhaps your hero isn’t an illustrator at all. Maybe they’re a visual artist or a philosopher that somehow deeply influences how you approach your own creative work. Paul Rand himself quotes a lot of philosophers in his writing.
So to find your heroes, it shouldn’t be something you feel the need to force. If you don’t feel strongly about anyone just yet, don’t worry about it. There could be someone already showing up in the background of your consciousness that you haven’t fully realized yet, and it’s just a matter of time before they become more obvious to you. But I’d say you probably already admire some artists that you could name today, just by doing a little bit of digging. Don’t dig too deep or reach too far. Look at what’s around you right now. What art did you dig up in your inspiration finding session? Which artists stood out to you most? Or which books did you love as a kid, which still capture your imagination? Do you remember who the illustrator is? Maybe now’s a good time to start learning more about the artist behind the art.
If you’re trying to pin down one or two heroes for yourself, try this. First, go out and find inspiration as per the previous tip. Next, go back and look through your collection for the images that speak most to your heart. Now, identify who the illustrator is, and create a new Pinterest board named after them. So I might make a board called Paul Rand. Now, when you make that board, Pinterest will no doubt call up more work by the same artist. So like the first tip, start collecting images by this artist, filling out your board to maybe 10-20 images.
This gives you a view of the artist’s work as a whole, and this can help you identify other important information, like what kind of illustrations did they make, and for which contexts. We’ll get more into that in the next tip, but this is where we start building a picture of our heroes and get to know their work and influence more. As you go, see if you can find out more biographical information about them. If they’re a more well known or historic illustrator, they might have a wikipedia page or a tribute website, or even a biographical book. If they’re less well-known, or newer on the scene (which is totally fine to have as a hero, by the way), go to their website or social media and see what you can learn about them.
Where did they go to school, or how did they learn to become an illustrator? How do they make their art? What is their process? What are their techniques? What principles or philosophies drive their work? Listen to how they talk about their work and even how they carry themselves in their tone. Do you relate to them? Are they someone you feel you could learn from and uphold as an example of how to be an illustrator in the world today? What do you admire most about them? Why do you feel a connection to them? These are just some things to think about.
Another great place to discover details like these is in podcast and YouTube video interviews. Look them up in Spotify or YouTube and see if anything comes up.
One last thought on this before I move on. In his writing, Marketing guru Seth Godin talks about mentors vs. heroes. In an ideal world we’d all have personal mentors who cared deeply and personally about us, who could guide us exactly in the way we think we need right now. But mentors rare, busy, and probably too expensive anyway. Instead, he encourages people to find HEROES, leaders to emulate, whom we can easily find online or in books. He reminds us not to use the ABSENCE of mentors as an EXCUSE for inaction. Rather, he suggests that the majority of us will have to MAKE DO with heroes, the people we may never meet, but who can still have a tremendous influence on our lives and work. The good news, is heroes like this are plentiful, and their work is accessible and free.
If you can get a mentor, then absolutely, get onto that. I’ve personally had a few mentors, and nothing compares to the influence of someone who knows you personally, but still, my most profound influence has come from my heroes — who are mostly, in one way or another, totally unaware that I exist.
The takeaway for this tip is to find an illustration hero, or some heroES, that you connect with at a deeper level than other artists. Be curious about them, learn about their work and their life. In the same way that I can say that it was Paul Rand’s WRITING that attracted me to him, you can ask yourself what it is about your heroes that attracts you to THEM. We can learn so much about illustration through the lives of our heroes. Also, it’s important to remember that heroes may be giants to us, but what makes heroes so relatable is that, just like a firefighter or soldier, they show that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.
03 Learn About the Markets
The next thing I would encourage you to do is to learn about the different illustration markets. As commercial illustrators, our work always ends up being used in a specific way and seen in a specific place, and this is determined by the market we are operating in.
Now, at this very early stage in your journey, you don’t need to decide which market you want to work in yet. I will just say that there is a relationship between an illustrator’s style and the markets they work in. So the kind of illustration you like probably exists within a specific market.
Similarly, the kind of illustration you would like to do will probably work best in a particular market as well. So what is a market? I like how illustrator and podcaster Andy J. Pizza puts it in his little booklet, The Creative Career Path: “A market is a corner of your industry where similar creatives make money doing similar types of jobs.”
So let’s unpack this a bit. What does Andy mean by “a corner of your INDUSTRY”? Well in his booklet he walks you through the different steps to forge your own creative career, and the first step is knowing your industry, such as film, music, or illustration, and then the second step is to choose your market.
Well, it’s safe to say that our industry here is Illustration, so we can move right the second step. But again, I want to say that for the very beginner, we are not choosing our market yet. For the very beginner, it’s just too early! It’s just that it’s important to know what the markets are so we can start to notice them more.
Knowing what the different markets are is important because this gives us a sense of the different, specific ways in which illustration can be used. Over time, we can start to get a sense of how OUR particular way of illustrating could be used. When we know how our illustration can be USED, then we know Where there will be DEMAND for it!
I really love how Andy describes markets, so I’m going to read a little bit more from his booklet: “Think of your industry as a river and the markets as little villages set up on fertile soil along the river. Finding which market your gifts fit into is a powerful way to establish a foundation for your creative career. What you don’t want to do is try to make the river come to you. These little villages are set up along the river … for a reason: there is a consistent, predictable, established demand for this type of work.” The idea here is that you can’t be too fringy where it comes to finding a market for your commercial art. You should know where the non-fringy villages are, and start to get a picture of what they’re about so you can know if that’s where you want to set up shop yourself.
You might like super fringy illustration that ends up on places like DeviantArt for instance, but you have to ask, is there a market for that? If so, then great, and if not, it may take some extra digging to find the markets that will work best for you.
Examples of Illustration markets include Editorial, Advertising, Retail, Corporate, Publishing, Kids Books, Comics, and Licensing. There are lots more, but the idea here is that you can start to get a picture of the actual products and places where illustrations end up, and even start to envision what the illustrations themselves might look like.
If you want to learn more about the illustration markets, there is an EXTENSIVE listing on the CommunicationArts website, called 45 Markets of Illustration. I will leave a link in the show notes for podcast listeners and video description for YouTube viewers. [https://www.commarts.com/columns/45-markets-of-illustration]. Keep in mind what constitutes a market is not an industry-wide standard. You will find a lot of overlap where it comes to Industries, Markets and a third category we haven’t touched on yet, which is Niches.
Another way to start learning about the markets is of course going back to your inspiration collection, and especially the work of your heroes, and learning what markets they worked in. There’s a good chance that their work tends to fall into just a few specific markets. So when you’re looking at a particular illustration, be sure to find out where that illustration ended up. Was it in a book? On a package? In an advertisement? From there, can you identify the market in which it exists? On the flip side, can you identify any markets in which their work is completely absent?
For instance, my work tends to end up in a handful of places, like picture books, advertising, and editorial contexts, but never in comics or graphic novels. These generally reflect my own tastes and preferences, and also tend to be more appropriate homes for my style of illustration.
So did I choose my markets on purpose, or did the markets choose me? I’d say it’s been a bit of both. At first I was happy to illustrate for any market. It didn’t matter, as long as I got to illustrate, or do something like illustration, as much as I could. But as I started getting more of a sense of what I liked, both through observing my heroes and understanding what I enjoyed making most myself, I started to identify markets that resonated most with me. A huge one was editorial because I loved how conceptual a lot of the work I admired was, and these happened to be for editorial publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. I also gravitated toward the licensing market, which includes things like Greeting Cards and Prints, because I always loved the idea of having my work exist in physical space. Specifically I really loved working in letterpress printing, which is more of a niche area of the greeting card market, if you will.
Of course, a huge dream I had always had, even before I was an illustrator, was to do kids books as well. All of these markets—editorial, licensing and children’s books, were in some sense chosen by me. And this helped me cater my portfolio toward these kinds of clients. At the same time, some projects came to me from unexpected markets, such as advertising, which I hadn’t really thought a lot about at first, but which I ended up really enjoying, and now consider one of my main streams of work.
Having a sense of what the markets were in my early days helped me envision what kind of illustration I wanted to do and were I wanted it to be seen. Knowing the different markets for you will give you possible targets to lock in later, as you gain more clarity about your own strengths as an illustrator.
04 Discover the Tools and Techniques
The next thing you need to do if you want to be an illustrator is learn about the different tools and techniques illustrators use to make their art. While you can use almost anything to create an illustration—such as found objects or even photography, maybe you should try learning something more conventional at first.
In my style class, I teach how a style is very much informed by the tools and techniques used to make it. I also teach how most illustration can be traced back to four traditional art-making techniques, and these include Drawing, Painting, Collage and Printmaking. Even digital illustration tools, like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Procreate, are designed to emulate various these physical techniques. For instance, you can DRAW in Procreate using the apple pencil; you can Paint in Procreate or Photoshop using various digital BRUSHES, and in Photoshop and Illustrator, you can create work that is very much based on older printing and printmaking paradigms.
Now, at this point in time, you don’t really need to worry about learning how to actually DO all the different techniques. You will soon, but as you’re just getting started, looking for information and inspiration about what to do next, it helps to start learning ABOUT them.
As you go through your inspiration, especially the work of your heroes, it’s time to start asking HOW the work was made. What specific tools and techniques do THEY use. What processes do they use to create different effects or styles? If they are from a bygone era, it could be very interesting to learn how they created their illustrations without the help of digital devices. For instance, have you ever looked at certain old children’s picture books, such as Petunia by Roger DuVoisin, and wondered how or why the images look the way they do? Why are there so few colours, and why do some of the colours look so flat and separate from one another? These were clearly not just painted out on a sheet of paper. There was some kind of mechanical process necessary to create the resulting illustration in the printed book. Be curious about things like this and do what you can to find out how they work. By doing this you can learn so much about the technical side of illustration, which in turn can inspire you to try new techniques and even influence your style down the road. You start to realize that illustration is more than just drawing or painting; it’s often a more technical process than you might have fist thought. This can help explain why maybe some of the things you’ve tried to Draw or Illustrate so far don’t quite look “professional” or finished like the work of your heroes.
OF course, Illustration is so much more than the tools we use to make them. We definitely need to learn how to have good ideas, and learn the elements and principles of design, but the tools are ultimately how these “higher order” things become embodied.
Personally, I think many of us come into illustration because we love the art supplies and gear! I remember as a kid in the 1980s having a book about illustration in our house. I remember loving just looking at the pictures of the different tubes of paints and easels and knives. I also remember my favourite page in Richard Scarry’s Big Book of Words, in which the author illustrated all kinds of interesting looking KIT. Kids love art supplies, and when we illustrators go into an art store, WE are like KIDS in a candy shop.
As you learn about the tools and techniques used by illustrators, take notes on which ones you seem to be most attracted to. Which tools and techniques do you you think you’d want to work with first? While you should try your hand in all of them, knowing which ones you like most can give you a strong clue of which ones to experiment with first.
05 Keep a Journal
My last tip for what to do at the very beginning is to keep a journal. Go out and buy a notebook or sketchbook and commit to writing about your journey regularly. Pick a time in the day, maybe during breakfast or just before you go to bed, and write for just 5 minutes. It could be a stream of thought, or a list of things on your mind. Maybe write one thing you learned today, and one thing you’d like to try tomorrow. If that doesn’t work, write a shopping list. Just show up each day and write.
I’ve been doing this almost for as long as I’ve been able to write. I don’t always write about illustration specifically, but I just like to have a place to write down my thoughts. Now I admit, writing has always come easy for me, but I can tell you that being able to express my thoughts to myself in writing has been a lifesaver. In the previous episode I told you how I experienced a period of extreme depression in my 20s, and it was through journaling that I was able to see my thoughts in a more objective way and think more clearly, and even begin to solve some of my own problems. When you can name the root problem, you can start to solve it. Or, as GI Joe would say, Knowing is half the battle. My habit of writing has been a key way to understand myself, both in what’s been wrong, but also in what’s been right. Sometimes I would write lists of gratitude or little prayers, that helped me see things more positively. But just as important, writing has helped me know what I want, and by being able to name my desires, I was able to pursue them with more purpose.
Journaling doesn’t have to be a big deal. It just needs to be something you do regularly. Whenever you start to feel anxious about not knowing where you want to go or what you want to do next, you have a place to work that out. Ask yourself, what is it that is bothering you, or what are you impatient about, or what questions are you wondering right now?
Of course, journaling is not just for working out your struggles. Whenever you feel overwhelmed by excitement about the possibilities, or when you discover an important clue to what you’d like to do next, it’s good to write those things down too. Journals are for dreaming!
Speaking of dreams, I think that there’s power in declaring your dreams out loud and in writing. It’s not magic. When you write what you want down, or say it out loud, you literally call your dreams into physical existence. The ink on your page, or the sound of your words reverberating through your body and bouncing back into your ears off the walls gives your desires a little bit more body than they would have had they stayed in your head. I know this is a little bit poetic, but every tiny thing we can do to push our dreams closer to reality is something.
When I think of all the journals I’ve written since my early 20s (I have 2 or 3 bankers boxes full of them at this point), I know that there’s no way I’m going to read them again. But the most important thing is not that I recorded them for my future self, but just in the act of writing out my dreams, my thoughts, my struggles, failures, and successes, I was able to put extra focus on my pursuit. When we write our intentions onto the page, or speak our intentions out into the air, things happen.
In my personal journalling life, I have journal entries from even further back, from almost 20 years ago, when I first started getting a sense that I wanted to pursue more art in my life. Imagine, my journey to being a commercial illustrator today started over two decades ago, and much of that started by being recorded in red pen on lined paper in a dollar store notebook. Yes, the journey can be very long and winding, but if you don’t start taking steps now, you’ll never get far.
CONCLUSION
Alright, those were my five tips for what to do when you’re at the very beginning, or rather, before even knowing how to begin the journey towards becoming an illustrator.
These tips are all things you can do right now, before even lifting a pencil, and in fact, I highly recommend that you start doing these as soon as you can. These are really about getting to know yourself more and what you want, and the more you know these things, the more direction and sense of purpose you’ll have moving forward.
So to reiterate really quickly, the tips were:
1 Find Your Inspiration - which means to intentionally seek out work that makes your heart sing. Doing this helps you create a picture of the kind of illustration you love, and therefore would probably want to try yourself in someway later on.
2 Find your heroes - which means to single out maybe 2 or 3 illustrators that really do it for you. These are artists whose work you love, and, perhaps, who inspire you in other ways, perhaps through their writing or their life stories. Knowing who we look up to gives us a vision of the kind of illustrators we’d like to be ourselves.
3 Learn about the markets - which means to find out where different kinds of illustration exists in the commercial market. This gives us a sense of where certain kinds of illustration can live, and where we might want to fit in ourselves. Knowing the markets we’d like to work in will give us more focus as we move forward in our education as illustrators.
4 Discover the tools and techniques - which means to learn about how the illustrations we love are actually made, from a technical standpoint. The way an illustration looks is very much determined by the tools an artist chooses and the skills they have in using them. At this early stage, simply knowing the tools can inspire us to want to try them ourselves, and can give us clues about which ones we’d like to start with.
And finally,
5 Keep a journal — which means to have a dedicated book where you can dream and scheme about becoming an illustrator. Every great journey starts with a dream, and a great way of helping those dreams come true is by writing them down. Every artist keeps a journal, and you, my friend — You are an artist.
Hopefully these tips will be your guide as you start filling in the Inspiration gap, the gap between that spark of inspiration that got you excited about illustration and creativity at first, and your first actual steps toward becoming a skilled commercial illustrator later on.
OUTRO
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 Patreon, YouTube Channel and Skillshare classes. Remember to rate and review, like, subscribe, follow, tell your friends, all those lovely things. Thank you for listening all the way to the end. I’ll see you in the next one.