In today’s episode we'll look at why making "good" work isn't the best goal to have. We'll look at more helpful ways to judge whether our work is WORKING or not. This will help you become better at critiquing your own work, and being more objective about it. Also: what self-taught illustrators miss out on by not going to art school; why open briefs are a nightmare for me, and what happened when a hamburger restaurant asked me to make "some wall art" for them.
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In today’s episode we'll look at why making "good" work isn't the best goal to have. We'll look at more helpful ways to judge whether our work is WORKING or not. This will help you become better at critiquing your own work, and being more objective about it. Also: what self-taught illustrators miss out on by not going to art school; why open briefs are a nightmare for me, and what happened when a hamburger restaurant asked me to make "some wall art" for them.
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IN THIS EPISODE
LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE
Other Podcast Episodes on This Topic
The Creative Pep Talk Podcast - https://www.creativepeptalk.com/episodes/391
The Illustrators Guide - https://youtube.com/shorts/oOrjBUOh8cw?feature=share
Have a peekaboo at my hamburger restaurant art - https://www.instagram.com/p/CoSzJRWr6wV/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
PODCAST TEAM/CREDITS
Julia Herrick, Script Editor
https://julesherrick.com
Mark Allan Falk, Audio/Video Engineer
http://markallanfalk.com
FIND ME ELSEWHERE
INTRO
Hello, my name is Mr. Tom Froese, and these are my thoughts on illustration. Welcome to Episode 6.
HOOK
Today I’m going to begin a two part series inspired by a little question you might have asked yourself before. “How do I know if my illustrations are any good?”
Well, What if I told you that you shouldn’t be trying to make good work at all? What if good isn’t even the point — and if it isn’t, what is?
In today’s episode I’ll tell you why I don’t think making good work is the point, and I’ll give you a more helpful question to ask instead. It’s going to help you judge your artwork more fairly, and I think it might even help you blast past a lot of self-doubt and perfectionism in your work moving forward.
But of course, part of becoming better at judging our own work is actually learning what others really think about it. The trick is in finding the right people who can give you the right kind of feedback at the right time. Feedback is so important no matter where you are as an illustrator. I was going to tuck my thoughts on feedback into this episode, but it got way to long, and I think it deserves its own episode. So that’s what we’ll continue with in Episode 7.
Alright, let’s get into it.
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CONTENT
So have you ever wondered if your work is good enough? How do you know if you’re illustrations are really all that good?
This question came up in a conversation I had last year, with one of my coaching clients. Let’s call her Heather. Heather was a newer illustrator, self taught, but already getting some professional assignments. In our calls she wanted me to coach her through the process of a specific project, illustrating a cover of a magazine. I very much related to her experience. Here she was, doing an actual paid gig, and a pretty cool one too, and instead of loving every minute of it, it brought to surface a lot of doubt about her abilities as an artist
This is what Heather said to me.
“My biggest problem is knowing how to critique my own work, and understand if I’m doing it well. How can I know if it’s worth people looking at it? How do you know if you’re good enough? I’ve had some people tell me my work is great, and then others would tell me that, because I haven’t had a proper art school education and can’t draw in a traditional way, I’m no good. Simply put, I don’t know how to see if I’m good enough.”
Can you relate? I know I can. I think this illustrator hit the nail on the head in how she worded the question. Really, how do you know if you’re critiquing your own work in the right way? How can we become better judges of our own work? Especially when you’re not formally trained as an artist or illustrator, how can you even begin to understand if your work really measures up in the professional sense?
As we’ve already talked about in previous episodes, especially EP’s 3 and 4, being self taught does come with a lot of extra challenges. One of them is simply not knowing what we’re missing out on. What are they learning in all those mysterious art school classrooms? We wonder if THEY know something we don’t. We fear that they can spot all the faults in OUR work, which we aren’t educated enough to perceive. It’s like they all get X Ray vision goggles; they can see right through us.
Well, I do want to assure anyone who’s self taught (and I know there’s a lot of you listening right now) that there are many different paths into becoming an illustrator. Anyone who tells you you’re no good simply on the basis of not being art school trained, well, let’s just say such they don’t really deserve your attention.
But it’s also true that, as a self-taught illustrator, there really is one thing you are almost 100% missing out on, and that’s the opportunity to gain feedback on your work. *** Especially as you’re learning illustration, it’s going to be far more difficult to find someone to give you meaningful feedback when you need it most. Even if you do get feedback from friends or maybe from a crit group of some kind, there’s likely to be a disconnect between their critiques and the intention or PURPOSE of your work.
What I mean is that, well, let’s say you’re in art school and your teacher gives you an illustration assignment. The assignment will be designed to teach you something in particular, or to have you work out a handful of learning objectives. If you’re assigned an editorial illustration project, the teacher might want to see how you come up with ideas that relate well to the story, and how YOU use artistic techniques and stylistic choices to communicate that idea. I’m just being hypothetical here. But my point is that your teacher will have specific things they’re looking for, and they will be able to give you precise feedback about how you’re hitting on those things. On the other hand, if you create an illustration by yourself and share it with some friends or followers, it’s possible they won’t know the context and therefore wouldn’t be able to give you very targeted feedback. In fact you might not even have any objectives associated with your work in the first place, which would make it hard for anyone, yourself included, to truly understand if you’re doing it “well”.
And this is really where the problem IS when we ask,“How do I know if my illustration is any good?”. The question comes without any clear idea of what good means.
Sure, in one sense we know “good” when we see it. It’s got something to do with being well made, or making us feel a certain way. When we describe someone’s work as good, we understand that it’s above average in some way, or that it’s doing something really meaningful. But ultimately, I think, when we say something’s good, we’re really just saying we like it. It’s a very subjective word. Now, I’m not against saying an artist is good, or that their art is good, but again, it’s almost always more of a reflection of how I feel about the work than about something more objective.
DOES THE ILLUSTRATION WORK AS INTENDED
Rather than asking if an illustration is good, I think a much more helpful question to ask is “does the illustration work as intended?”.
Now, as I was writing for this episode, I came across two separate podcasters who recently brought up this exact same issue. One of them was James Hughes of the Illustrators Guide podcast, and the other was Andy J. Pizza. They both said what I was going to say, which is that rather than asking if our illustration work is good, we should be asking if our illustration WORKS. As James pointed out, all illustrations have a purpose; they have to DO something. Whether you’re making work for practice or for a client, you need to know what the purpose is. That’s the only way you’re going to know if your work is anything close to what we might call “good.”
Now, at first I was kind of discouraged and felt like these guys kind of stole my thunder. I mean this was supposed to be MY topic. But I think we all have a unique perspective to bring, and so I still think it’s worthwhile for me to share my own thoughts here. But the reason I mention this little bit of information is that I think there’s something in the air right now. The fact that at least three of us are talking about this subject, to me, means that we’re seeing it come up in our own circles. The question of “how can we know if our work is good?” is high up on the pain point register right now.
So my own take on the topic really is in this two-pronged question: Does the illustration work as intended. There’s the one prong, which is about purpose or function — does the illustration WORK — and then there’s the second prong, which is about intention — does the illustration work as INTENDED.
SET UP THE INTENTION
And this brings me to my first way to deal with this question of whether our work is good or not: When trying to know how our illustration stacks up, we need to set up the INTENTION. What does the work need to do? What is the purpose? What’s the point?
If there’s anything I’m glad to have picked up from my days as a designer, it’s my problem solving approach to image making. As my hero Paul Rand wrote, “Design is a problem-solving activity.” That means we’re hired to design things that do actually do something; we’re not just making pretty pictures. I believe that good design always starts with a clear brief, and the process to get there will only be as smooth as that brief is clear.
But more importantly, without a problem to solve, it’s hard to even know where to start. I use this same problem solving approach in my illustration work. If there is no problem to solve, I cannot illustrate in any meaningful way. Sure, I can draw a thing, but no matter how great it might come across to others, I will never feel good about it until I can see it serving some kind of a purpose, filling a need, solving a problem.
One of the hardest projects in recent memory for me was in making some wall art for a local, independent hamburger restaurant. There wasn’t much else to the brief other than they liked my work and wanted me to make some art for them as a local artist. Other than that it seemed pretty wide open. Now, I don’t know about you, but open briefs are a nightmare for me. I need to have a problem to solve. When all I have is infinite possibility, I get very lost and very stuck.
That being said, I love when my work ends up in physical spaces, so I really wanted to do this project. But I had to really push the client to create some more clear objectives around it. I could have felt bad, like I was just making things more difficult for my busy client rather than drawing the damn pictures, but I know from experience that this step really saves a lot of time later on. It took a lot of back and forth but over a few weeks we figured out what would make sense in their restaurants. Without going into the nitty gritty details I will just say that it took a long time just to get to a place where I understood what the work was supposed to do, and therefore what my job truly was.
Because I’m a NUT, I have a hard time believing in my art unless I fully understand the purpose. This can make it really hard for me to push through open ended projects like this.
The only way I could get to the finish line here was to work with my client to define some kind of problem to solve — we needed to set up as clear of an intention for the work as possible. That involved pushing them to set some specific goals for the art and identify ways in which I could uniquely help them get there. Clients don’t always have a clear purpose for hiring us —sometimes people just want to work with an illustrator or artist who makes work that they love. It can be more of an emotional decision than a logical one. People don’t always think there needs to be a big reason for everything where it comes to art, right?
But I always make sure I give them an opportunity to define what they want and WHY as much as possible. This is of course helpful for ME, to give ME something to sink my creative teeth into, but it’s also always an illuminating exercise for my CLIENTS as well. They get a chance to really know what they want, and that gives them a way to really participate in the creative work, which will ultimately help them connect more to it. This also saves us a LOT of back and forth later in the process where changing one’s mind can be more expensive and frustrating for everyone.
Like I said, whenever I’m wrapping my mind around a new project, it’s often really hard for me to envision whatever I make actually mattering. It’s hard to believe that my images will be truly meaningful to others. It was no different with this burger joint — but now when I see the work I made up on theirs walls, I can honestly say I’m happy with it.
I can be happy with it because I know that it’s doing what it was supposed to do. And it makes me SMILE because my work is kind of goofy and silly. I kind of just enjoy the fact that it EXISTS, and I know that even though it doesn’t have a super important purpose, the purpose it does have is being fulfilled. Here are my illustrations of odd body characters sitting on giant beer glasses holding giant burgers, because that’s kind of what I do best, and that’s why I got called in on the job. And now there are families and friends eating hamburgers in the company of my googly eyed characters. For them it’s just part of the scenery of the restaurant. For me, I get a kick out of imagining what people think about when they see it. I hope it makes them feel silly.
You know, even if the art fell short in my client’s eyes, I might still see the work as a success. My purpose, the thing thing I want to do with my art overall, is that I want it to make people smile. If I can make a few customers smile in their minds as they enjoy a delicious hamburger, then my work has fulfilled its grand purpose.
So as we shift from the question “Is my work any good?” to “Does it work as intended?”, the first thing we need to do is set up the intention in the first place. If you’re a student, of course, these objectives should be built into your assignments by your teachers. Otherwise, it’s hard for them to give you any feedback at all, right?
For self-taught illustrators, that means, since you’re actually your own teacher, you’re going to have to find or set up these objectives yourself. This is just one of the many challenges we have if we go this route.
Now, if you’re working for clients, this set of objectives is what we call the brief. Briefs can be really long and complicated or short and simple, but they must always state what the purpose of the illustration is. What does it need to do and why. And from here you will learn where it will need to go, such as on the cover of a magazine, or as an art print in a hamburger restaurant. You know, sometimes we forget about the really basic stuff like dimensions and file formats, and these are also things you need to lay down in in the brief, before you actually start trying to come up with ideas.
Learn as much as you can about what the client needs, right down to the obvious technical stuff, and all this can give you more of a sense of what your work needs to do. Lastly, it never hurts to ask the client why they came to YOU, and to have them identify the work of yours, which attracted them to you in the first place. Chances are they want the work we do for THEM to do something similar to what we did for SOMEONE ELSE. In my case, with the Burger restaurant, I learned during the briefing stage that they loved the way I illustrated people and wanted me to do something similar for them. Knowing that was really helpful later on.
So in the briefing stage we work out what the INTENTION of the work is, and that will help us know what to make in the first place. It gives us a clear starting point. But once we make it, we still have to ask, does it work? So how do we know? How can we tell if the work is really WORKING? Of course, we can compare what we make against the objectives in the class assignment or project brief, but even here we’re still going to wonder how others see it. We might be totally blind to its flaws, right? This is where outside FEEDBACK comes in — but this is where I’m going to have to leave you all hanging for now This topic is too big for me to fit here, so sadly we’re going to have to wait until the next episode to talk about it.
CONCLUSION
Meanwhile, this is what I want you to walk away with today. It’s pretty simple: instead of wondering if your work is any good, start asking “does your work WORK as intended.” What is the purpose of what you’re trying to do, and is that purpose being fulfilled. What is it supposed to do, and how can you get it to do that, given everything you know and have on hand to work with in this moment.
I didn’t mention this yet but I think there’s one more really important piece of advice that I can give you here, if you’ll take it. So for all this talk about setting up the intention or purpose in the brief, there’s still the question of how to actually make the work. Like, sure, we can be expert brief writers and super garbage illustrators, right? I think a lot of our doubts in this area come from worrying that we aren’t skilled enough, or that our style isn’t unique enough. It’s not about the brief or the client at all — it’s all on us to make the work good, and because we don’t see ourselves as good enough at X, Y or Z, we’re not going to feel very confident about what we make.
I think we can all relate to this experience — where we start off on a project, super excited to have the opportunity, like when my coaching client, Heather, got that magazine cover commission. That must have been super exciting, right? Illustrating a cover is kind of a dream job. But as the reality of how hard that is for a new illustrator sets in, it kind of starts to feel like a nightmare. We start super excited about this new opportunity. It’s going to be a great portfolio piece, we think! But then when it’s done, we’re so unhappy with it that we’d rather burn it to ashes.
But I want to encourage you to see it in a different way. The work you made, you did your best, given everything you had in that moment. I understand that sometimes we make work that doesn’t really seem that good to us. And to give ourselves some credit, sometimes we’re right. The work isn’t that good. We’re actually not that off in our judgment. But we have to accept that making bad work is just part of learning to make so-called good work. I know I’m now using the G word, but you know what I mean.
When we set up a brief, when we set up the intention for a project, we have to set constraints. Of course, the most important part of a brief is the statement of intention or purpose: we need to know what the art is supposed to do and why. But then we have to state all the constraints: what do we have to work with? That includes things like dimensions, time, budget, colours, and stuff like that, but … what about YOUR constraints? What do you have to work with? How much time can you afford to spend on it? What are your strengths and weaknesses? What tools and techniques are you best at, and which ones are you best avoiding? What subjects are you great or not so great at drawing? As you’re working on whatever you’re working on, consider what your constraints are — we all have limits. While sometimes we wish we were better at illustrating in a certain way, we have to make do with what we’ve got in the moment. And don’t mistake acknowledging your limits for making excuses or being lazy. Creativity is not about having every resource and being good at everything all the time— that’s called magic, and only lazy wizards would use magic to solve all their problems. Creativity is not the absence of limits but in how we work within them.
What I’m trying to say is that as we strive to be better than we are today (which is a noble pursuit) we should also find a way to work with what we have in this moment, to the best of our abilities. And I’m also saying we need to extend a lot of grace to ourselves as we do this, because as we reflect on our work, we might be tempted to see only our mistakes.
If anything, every time you make an illustration, you’re getting better. You’re gaining new experience. You’re learning from your mistakes. Maybe you’re even learning new tricks. We’re always in progress.
I know I sound like a dad right now, but as long as we see everything as a learning experience, every illustration we make, even if it fails, is working as intended.
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.
THANK YOU
This podcast was written and performed without the aid of artificial intelligence. Adobe Podcast AI was used to improve the sound, and I used Lensa, an AI based photo app, to make me look more handsome in the YouTube thumbnail photo. Today’s episode was produced by me, Mr. Tom Froese. Special thanks to my script editor Julia Herrick and to my audio/video engineer, Mark Allan Falk.