Today we’re going to talk about how to loosen up in our art. I know a lot of us struggle to have a sense of freshness and energy in our work, especially as we develop a piece from looser sketch to the more finished piece. What often happens is that a sketch starts off feeling loose and promises something better than what we end up with. It’s very common to find that we like our sketches more than the final illustration. Why is that? And how, if at all, can we achieve the same loose feeling of our sketches in our final art? In this episode, I’m going to share my own story of how I wrestled with this question — of having a more spontaneous feeling to my work versus something more planned out — and why, over time, for ME my work has seemed to head more in the scripted, planned out direction — and why I’m okay with that. At the same time, I still try to build in as much looseness as I can, and at the end of the episode I’ll share some tips on how to do that.
Today we’re going to talk about how to loosen up in our art. I know a lot of us struggle to have a sense of freshness and energy in our work, especially as we develop a piece from looser sketch to the more finished piece. What often happens is that a sketch starts off feeling loose and promises something better than what we end up with. It’s very common to find that we like our sketches more than the final illustration. Why is that? And how, if at all, can we achieve the same loose feeling of our sketches in our final art?
In this episode, I’m going to share my own story of how I wrestled with this question — of having a more spontaneous feeling to my work versus something more planned out — and why, over time, for ME my work has seemed to head more in the scripted, planned out direction — and why I’m okay with that. At the same time, I still try to build in as much looseness as I can, and at the end of the episode I’ll share some tips on how to do that.
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IN THIS EPISODE
Chapter 1: To be (Scripted) or Not to be (Scripted)?
Chapter 2: How to Loosen Up in Your Art
LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE
My first professional illustration job - Tidings Magazine (link to Issuu — https://issuu.com/ukings/docs/tidings2008summer)
PODCAST TEAM/CREDITS
Julia Herrick, Script Editor
https://julesherrick.com
Mark Allan Falk, Audio/Video Engineer
https://linktr.ee/semiathletic
All Music, including Theme Song and Cues by Mark Allan Falk.
FIND ME ELSEWHERE
Episode 9
How to Loosen Up in Your Art
INTRO
Hello, my name is Mr. Tom Froese, and these are my thoughts on illustration. This is a bi-weekly podcast about showing up and growing up as an illustrator. Welcome to Episode 9.
[transition/silence]
OPENER
So today we’re going to talk about how to loosen up in our art. I know a lot of us struggle to have a sense of freshness and energy in our work, especially as we develop a piece from looser sketch to the more finished piece. What often happens is that a sketch starts off feeling loose and promises something better than what we end up with. It’s very common to find that we like our sketches more than the final illustration. Why is that? And how, if at all, can we achieve the same loose feeling of our sketches in our final art?
This episode is going to be a bit on the longer side, but there was a lot to explore here, so I’m just going to get right into it and hope to see you on the other side. Along the way, I’m going to share my own story of how I wrestled with this question — of having a more spontaneous feeling to my work versus something more planned out — and why, over time, for ME my work has seemed to head more in the scripted, planned out direction — AND WHY I’m okay with that. At the same time, I still try to build in as much looseness as I can, and at the end of the episode I’ll share some tips on how to do that.
We’ll get into all of this, right after these messages.
MARK INTRO. - just an official announcement to introduce you/your music, special to this episode.
[play full theme music here?]
Do you hear that? … What’s is that delightful sound? … Oh, it’s my new theme music by Mark Allan Falk. Mark also happens to be my video and audio editor too. When I started this podcast, I wanted to keep it bare bones so I could just focus on getting good content out there. I believe that content should be good enough to listen to without any fancy music or edits. I want to focus on my writing and vocal delivery, rather than trying to be all vibey. But of course, I know how powerful music can be and connect listeners more to the podcast. So when Mark offered to write some music for the show, I was totally game. And I think he really came through, with something that complements my low key style, without drowning me out. It’s gentle, it’s rich and it’s easy to like. You did a great job, Mark! Thank you so much.
Now this is just a plug for Mark — he didn’t ask me to say this, but — Mark’s main love is music, and his band is called Semi Athletic. You should check him out. He has a beautiful song called Smoke Alarms, with an equally beautiful music video. You can find Mark’s info, including a link to Smoke Alarms, in the show notes.
[transition/silence]
HOW TO SUPPORT
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, and let me know in the comments about how this episode helped you today. You can also support me on Patreon, where you can get exclusive access to my live monthly drawing meetups and more. Join today at patreon.com/tomfroese
[transition/silence]
CONTENT
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Chapter 1: I’m Just a Scripted Kinda Guy
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alt.
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Chapter 1: To be (Scripted) or Not To Be (Scripted)
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Today, I want to explore the idea of working more loosely in our art.
This idea was inspired by recent attempts by myself at sounding less scripted here on the podcast. For me, it’s really hard to deliver a cohesive, well thought-out episode without a script.
The benefit of a script, of course, is that it keeps me on track, and I get to think about everything I want to talk about in advance, and it guarantees that I will remember to talk about all of it.
The disadvantage of a script is that it is less spontaneous and conversational, and this somehow becomes less interesting to listen to. When you are speaking off the cuff, others can tell, and they can come along with you on your journey of figuring out what you’re actually thinking about and trying to say. In this way it’s a more communal experience.
The disadvantage of going off-script, of course, is that it’s inevitable that you will go off track, and lose your train of thought, and have to find your way back to your point. (It’s inevitable for me, at least.) In my case, I often go completely blank and forget what my point was. I either have to stop the tape, listen to what I was saying and come back into it, or I have to try to guess where I was and pick back up as best as I can. All of this ends up being harder to piece together, later, in the editing process.
My experience has taught me that it usually takes longer to both record and edit an UNSCRIPTED episode, and in the worst cases, I have to re-record the whole thing — this actually happened a few episodes ago.
For me, going off script usually compounds to many more hours of recording and editing than had I just fully scripted the whole thing up front. In a scripted situation, I spend most of my time writing and refining, but recording takes no more than an hour and a half per episode. Editing a scripted episode goes much faster because all my takes are linear and follow the script. My editor is able to go by the script to know how to piece together the best takes.
The parallel for you illustrators is that this is a lot like trying to have a looser, more gestural style of illustration. Gestural might not be the right word … Maybe it’s something more like making the piece LOOK spontaneous and CAPTURING a sort of DIRECT FROM THE HAND QUALITY in the LINEWORK or brush strokes.
There’s a reason people like improvisation in music and comedy. It’s because there’s an element of risk that it could all go wrong. Will they make a mistake? What if they do? How will they get themselves back in the flow? There is something about this feeling of spontaneity that adds to our enjoyment of a performance or work of art. We like to think of the artist as someone who creates from pure intuition or from the heart. And I think that’s because we pick up something that FEELS intuitive and from the heart OURSELVES, as we view or listen or watch a piece unfurl before us. What I’m trying to say is that an artist makes their work LOOK as though it were made in this super unscripted way, and even if the creative process to get there was much more intentional and calculated, it does’t FEEL that way. We experience a feeling of looseness REGARDLESS of how loose the actual process of making the work was.
What I’m thinking is that there must be some kind of trick, or secret, at work here. Like maybe other artists have a way of making their work LOOK loose in spite of having a more rigorous, and even formulaic process. When I look at the work of the artists I admire, I see a consistency and freedom that seems almost paradoxical. How does the artist achieve this level of consistency AND spontaneity in their work? How is the chaotic contained? How is lightning captured in a bottle?
I can tell you that in my own illustration work, I’ve developed a sort of compromise. It’s a system I’ve had to devise in an attempt to capture lightning in a bottle.
I want my art to have this loose, creative feeling to it. I want it to feel unrestrained. This is what I gravitate toward so much in the work of my heroes, whether it’s the expressive inky strokes of Ben Shahn, the stream of consciousness lines of Saul Steinberg, or the stylized realism of Miroslav Sasek. It’s certainly in the collagey style I have been so inspired by in the work of Paul Rand. There is a sense of both play and mastery.
My early work as an illustrator was much more improvisational than my work is today. My first commissioned illustrations were a lot like Paul Rand’s collage style, combining janky, abstracted shapes, cut-out textures, and inky lines and hand-written bits made with a nib pen. I would often work with only a very loose sketch, and go right into the finished piece in Photoshop. I enjoyed just clicking out my shapes using a mouse, which gave me less control than I have now, with my iPad Apple Pencil. This resulted in a much less scripted, more wild feeling in my final art.
Now, I’m going to get into some nitty gritty details about my illustration process here, because I want to take you on my journey from being more loose and unscripted to more controlled in my work over time. I want to describe how I’ve had to go in this direction in order to survive and even thrive as a commercial artist.
So let’s go way back to my art school days, to my very first commissioned illustration project, which was a cover and some inside illustrations for a local magazine. Like I said, my early illustrations were made in this more Paul Rand-inspired collage style, which I went about making in a more improvised way. (If you want to see the illustrations, I’ll link to them in the show notes.) Now it should be noted, I had developed this technique as part of my daily drawing practice, quite outside of anything I was doing in school. One of my instructors, Kate, who also ran a design studio, discovered my work and thought I’d be a good fit for the job. She became my first art director.
Now, since this was my first time illustrating, and because I had no education in commercial illustration (I was actually on track to becoming a designer), I really had no idea of how to sketch toward an illustration. But Kate was able to work with the pieces I cobbled together and give me the feedback I needed to steer me in the right direction. Come to think of it, she actually gave me a very loose sketch of her own as a starting point, which looking back was a pretty big help.
But somehow, without any real world experience illustrating, and without much of what I would consider a proper sketching process, we got to a pretty successful result. I can actually say I still really like this piece. That’s pretty rare for most of my past work!
Anyway, how did all of this come together? How did I know what to do in the end? Well it really was something I figured out along the way. I think working in a more collage type style lent itself well to this kind of process.
And I think another reason this piece worked out was that, not really having an established style yet, I was very OPEN to not knowing how things would end up. I was a bit naive about the possibility of it really not working out at all. Of course, I was also super hungry to succeed in my first real world job, so I willingly put up with a lot of back and forth between myself and my art director to get the piece where it needed to be. This is in stark contrast to my process now, where there’s much less back and forth required to get a sketch approved and a final illustration out the door and paid for. I have a much more streamlined process today.
Anyway, there was a lot of back and forth, but ultimately, Kate was very encouraging and positive about my work along the way, and she was able to guide me toward a result that was worthy of this small but nicely designed magazine. To her credit, she was able to give me the CRITICAL feedback I needed to make a solid set of illustrations AND the more POSITIVE, ENCOURAGING feedback I needed to feel FREE to do my thing. I was able to\ work in my own way, from my own intuitive sensibilities, and that is how this work achieved a balance of concept and freedom, chaos and order. I’m not saying it was the best piece ever, but it truly was the gateway drug for me as an illustrator; it was the piece that made me an illustrator at first, and it was the forge in which my early style and technique was minted. I used this style for a long time before it started to evolve into what I am now more known for. And I will be honest — I am very nostalgic about my old style and process. In many ways, I wish I could have kept it growing and that my style today was as improvisational and free-flowing as it was then.
[pause]
Contrast my old process with the one I use now: today I don’t even touch photoshop until I have a solid sketch that has been approved by my client. And once the client signs off on the sketch, there’s no going back. The final will follow the sketch like a builder follows a blueprint. This is how my clients know what to expect; this is how I keep a project on track; this is how I avoid re-dos of final art, where going back to the drawing board can be expensive and take a lot of extra time.
What I’m talking about here are the tradeoffs between following a script and being more improvisational. There are a lot of similarities between my experience of writing and performing an episode of this podcast, and sketching and executing a finished illustration for a client.
I spend a lot more time up front in the sketches to make sure the idea and the representation of that idea is clear, and then that gives me more confidence to execute it in my style, using predictable qualities like colour, texture, and quality of line and shape. For me, coming up with the ideas and giving shape to them in a sketch is the hardest part. Once I have a signed-off sketch, the process of taking it all the way to the finished piece is relatively easy. There’s always some problem solving to do, and there’s often small surprises that don’t work out exactly as planned, but this is something I work out on my own. Once I present a finished piece to my client, aside from the pleasure of seeing a sketch come to life with all the stylistic accoutrements, there’s not much to be surprised by.
In the interest of being efficient and not wasting my client’s time, and not making it as likely that I will have to spend a lot of time in re-do’s at the finished stage of my work, I have prioritized predictability. I am not a live performer. I am not a improvisational jazz musician. I am not a comedian on stage, riffing off my internalized repertoire of bits in response to the room I find myself in at the moment.
But could you imagine if a comedian delivered their jokes from a script, like reading off of a prompter on stage or from notes in their hand? That is a classic wet blanket move. We want to see the comedian pace across the stage, look at the audience, pick on someone in the front row … we want to see how they handle a heckler. We enjoy a display of quick wit and presence of mind.
So we’re back on the track of what I was saying many words ago, about there being a trick of some kind to have the APPEARANCE of spontaneity without it being so unscripted or unplanned that it will in all likelihood bomb. I asked, “how does the artist achieve a sense of both consistency and spontaneity in their work?”
Well do you think a jazz ensemble arrives on a stage without any plan whatsoever? Do a bunch of strangers who happen to have the requisite instruments just start jamming without any sense of their chemistry or without having a deep and expansive repertoire to work with?
Does a comedian stand on stage and just start riffing, making up material on the spot?
In the most rare of situations, yes, these things are possible. But perhaps 99% of all performers and artists come with a plan, especially to a major performance or an important piece of work. While there’s a place for practicing going unscripted for every type of artist, where it comes to paid gigs, netflix specials, ticketed concerts, and most commercial illustration projects, we all have a process that involves moving from early ideas, to full concepts, to final executions. And those who do this for a living have to know they can rely on this process over and over again.
We prioritize PREDICTABILITY over pure SPONTANEITY. Of course, we hope that the magic happens. We hope that we create something utterly unexpected in spite of our best attempts to plan. But this is like the perfect high an addict chases all their life and rarely obtains. It’s possible to be CREATIVE MAGIC JUNKIES.
When we chase perfection, in whatever form our “highs” take, we risk being run down. And by perfection, here, I mean the perfection of a completely magical, spontaneous work of art that lands in all the right places. It is what illustrator Christoph Niemann describes as GREAT. The best we — and our clients — can expect for ourselves, most of the time, is just GOOD. And that, he says, is enough to not go insane — or broke! And, how do we do this reliably and consistently — Niemann calls this our craft. To have a craft is to have a focused set of capabilities that we can use on demand to solve specific kinds of problems. A fine carpenter has skill in using a specific set of tools and a limited range of materials (i.e. WOOD), and they are able to produce objects, that are suited to the task at hand. Their craft is woodwork, and it can be more specific, such as heritage house restorations, or fine cabinetmaking. A craft brewer has a skill in turning various raw ingredients like grains and hops, through a process of cooking, combining and fermenting, to produce a range of delicious, well-balanced beers. As an illustrator, what is YOUR craft? What is your focused set of tools and materials, and how do you make it all come together, in your own unique but somewhat predictable way?
And turning back to my story, What happened to my own craft as an illustrator? Why did I move from a more spontaneous, improvised style (that I admittedly feel nostalgic for) toward something more predictable — and arguably less enjoyable to make? Is the cost of being predictable too great? Did my work take a turn for the worst? Should I have kept going with my more improvisational style? What changes did I make, and why?
A few things happened, and I will do my best to explain them very briefly — I could probably write a whole book about it, but, first, as I became busier as an illustrator, as I was getting an increasing flow of client work, I was hitting a bottleneck in my process, and I felt the need to make things more efficient. A big part of my process at the time was making all my textures and linework, and lettering as well, using physical media, that I would scan into photoshop. I relied a lot on a certain level of unpredictability in these scanned in bits … I intentionally wanted them to have a sort of improvised feeling to them. And to achieve this, I would sometimes spend hours or days chasing the perfect marks. I would try various brush styles and fill up pages and pages of high quality artist’s paper and scan these in and try one after the other in my compositions until something clicked. While this wasn’t the case EVERY time, when things didn’t work out in the first few tries, it would be very frustrating. I would very much lose the sense of joy in the process. And I think in my worst moments, not being able to come up with the right mark for the art really made me feel like a big hack. I started to believe I had no real artistic skill as an illustrator — in a way, I was really just a curator of accidents. So this lack of control over this particular aspect of my process over time grew into a pain point for me, rather than the essence of my style that I loved so much in the beginning.
To put it more clearly, the thing that was the core quality of my original style become my core pain point.
This pain point expressed itself in other ways as well. As more and more work came, I was getting more complex projects. One such project was an illustrated sticker book called Stickyscapes New York. The piece had two giant fold out panoramic scenes of Manhattan and about 100 stickers of various people and things to stick over these scenes. It was a really fun project to be a part of, but it truly broke my technique; I had to think of other ways of working in order to make all the parts of this complex project come together on time and without taking ALL of my time. So I started to experiment more with digital brushes and using a stylus. And because I was working with a publishing client, I also had to show sketches that were fairly consistent with how I would execute them later on.
In the end, this project worked out, and it was even shortlisted for the AOI World Illustration Awards. On top of that, it was published in multiple languages — including french and Korean, and Chinese as well. So I can be very happy about that. But when I look at the work it really does have an overly-janky quality to it that at least to me betrays my undeveloped craft at the time. For instance, there is a leopard missing an ear — and somehow they never caught or corrected that!
Now, obviously, the work WORKED. It was approved and published by the client, and I got paid. But, well, first, I don’t think it would have been possible at all unless I pivoted away from the “physical media only” constraint that I held so dearly as the anchor of my style at the time. But more to my point, it was still a very hard project, and it was this project, and others like it, that over time pushed me to develop a style that was easier to keep consistent regardless of the complexity of a given project.
Over the years, I have tried to develop my craft to a point where I have more control. For instance, I’m more intentional and precise about my shapes, and I have a more predictable repertoire of stylistic qualities across my work such as colour and textures. In this, I have aimed for a balance of consistency and CONFIDENCE. I want my work to feel spontaneous in the sense that I make bold decisions in terms of concept and design. Part of this comes from daring to be very simple. I think it’s easy to conflate complexity and artistic skill. My characters and buildings, for instance, are often very simplified to the point of being almost child-like. They are certainly not realistic in any way. But I offset this simplicity in the composition; perhaps I exaggerate proportions or have the limbs of my characters bend in unlikely ways, in order to convey a mood or idea. I prioritize the symbolic meaning of my forms over their technical wizardry. And I suppose I hope that, AT LEAST SOME OF THE TIME, by allowing myself to express ideas with LESS, there CAN be moments of surprise and even genius — just by daring to restrain myself.
OK. So where am I going here with all this navel gazing?! I’m building a case here for being scripted, and even for embracing being scripted. I know that my work has taken a turn for being less IMPROVISED, and the cost has been that it DOES feel stiffer sometimes. But I do also see that I allow for looseness and liveliness to come into my work in other ways, such as in how I allow myself to be playful and simple in my execution. And in a sort of paradoxical way, as I have become more skilled in using my digital tools, I have learned how to produce more spontaneous results that resemble some of the physical media textures and details of my earlier style.
And in this podcast, I am doing something similar. As I am embracing my need to be scripted, because I have seen what happens when I try to NOT be scripted, I am getting better at making it SEEM less scripted. I am getting better, for instance, at reading what I wrote in a more natural, conversational way. And I make a conscious decision to leave in some of my errors and slip ups, so it feels more realistic in that way. I try not to over edit myself IN THE PERFORMANCE. And this is very similar to what I try to do with my illustration style. For example, when I do my lettering, I use digital brushes that have very predictable qualities to them. This is kind of the point of digital creation tools — that we can rely on them to do what we expect. And one of the things I do with my lettering is use the eraser to cut off the ragged terminals of the strokes to refine them a bit. But as I use the eraser to make these changes, I leave traces of what I erased behind, as a sort of clue to my process. Maybe this adds a bit of handmade, improvisational charm to the piece. I leave in the accidental, or rather, I choose not to sterilize the piece completely. A little bit of grit is okay — and even an improvement.
So turning back to my podcast and struggling to make it sound less scripted, if you listen back to my first few episodes, you will hopefully hear a difference in my performance. My first two episodes (EP 0 and 1) were markedly stiff and very obviously read from a script. One critical commenter remarked that I sounded like a robot and like I was speaking to an audience of two year olds. I actually didn’t mind the feedback at all, and it truly encouraged me to find a way to loosen up a bit.
So I am on this trajectory of trying to deliver my content here in a more natural way. Now, I can only deliver a script so “naturally” — but if the script itself isn’t written well, or in a way that I actually talk, it’s going to be hard for my performance to come across as natural at all. So to this point, not only am I trying perform my script as though I’m speaking from the heart, I’m also writing in the way that I actually speak. I’m writing in filler words like SO and WELL, because, WELL, this is what it’s like to actually listen to someone speaking. And in my best moments, I am able to write my scripts from the heart, with as few edits as possible anyway. The writing you hear me speak from — this very thing I’m saying right now — is really the way I would love to be able to talk on a camera, and I think this is how I would sound if I just could keep track of my thoughts a little better when I hit record.
[pause]
I’m writing naturally and spontaneously. I’m not planning my words at all right now. [well, actually, I did have to go in and make a few changes here to make it flow better, but my first draft was pretty fast and loose]. The only real difference between writing a script and speaking live, for me, is that I’m able to think at my own pace when I’m writing. I’m a slow thinker but a normal-speed reader. By scripting first, I have my thoughts laid out and ready to use, sort of like a chef prepares all the separate ingredients before their shift begins.
And so the secret, or the trick, I imagine some professional artists use in delivering their work is in having some kind of a CRAFT and some kind of a REPERTOIRE. A comedian writes their bits ahead of time and performs them from memory on the stage, whilst allowing the energy of the room to modulate it and make it seem fresh. A chef works from a recipe in their head using a predictable set of ingredients to prepare a signature dish; they use a little bit of artistic flair, perhaps, to drizzle a sauce on the plate in just the right way. But the item is already on the menu. The patrons of the restaurant are depending on tasting whatever the chef has become known for. The magic isn’t in the highly risky act of pure improvisation; it’s in how the chef prepares the separate ingredients ahead of time and then can perform their well-practiced recipe at the highest possible level of craft. This is what I would mean by capturing lighting in a bottle.
As a PODCASTER, my lightning is in my thoughts and words. My bottle is in where I write them down at first. As an ILLUSTRATOR, my lightning is in my repertoire of style and technique, which are choices I made in the past, but which somehow allow me to make new, as-yet-unknown work in the future. My bottle is in my decision to stick within these constraints, and to resist the temptation to reinvent myself every single time I come to the drawing board.
When I’m working on a project, my lightning is in my ideas, and my sketches are the bottle. When it comes time to execute my ideas later on, in my finished style, that lightning is safely there, in the sketches.
Lightning is the creativity that we all possess, or how we apply our unique creativity to specific problems. A bottle is something that constrains and contains. We need constraints. And for each of us, that bottle — our constraints — look different. We all have lightning, and we all let it out in different ways.
Some of us are able to present in a way that truly is more like unbounded lightning. Some folks can truly shoot from the hip — they’re great at improvising and working without a script. But most of us — and I definitely include myself here — need to really let that lighting out in a more contained way — and how that ultimately finds its way to other people is a matter of our CRAFT. It’s okay to work from a script, and for many of us, it’s HIGHLY recommended! But it’s also so important to make work that moves others, that has room in it for error and some kind of surprise. So in this sense, the challenge to us more scripted types is to find a way to do this — without losing the ability to say what we really want to say every time.
A good communicator can make themselves understood to their audiences while also holding their attention. If you’re delivering a speech, that means probably not reading directly off of the page so obviously, but it doesn’t mean you don’t WRITE a speech in the first place.
Each performer, each artist, each illustrator — all of us, if we have something to say, we must all find our own way of crafting our message and delivering it to others in the most reliable, interesting way. Sometimes this means we’re going to risk sounding scripted, and sometimes we’ll go too far the other way, and be far too interesting without being understood, but ultimately, as we practice, we’ll find our balance. We’ll find just what shape our bottles are and how much lighting we can fit in them.
[transition/silence]
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Chapter 2: How to Loosen Up in Our Work
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What does it mean to loosen up in our art?
To loosen up doesn’t mean to be messy, or not necessarily. When I talk about speaking off the cuff on my podcast, I don’t mean rambling on incoherently. While that is certainly a risk, the goal is to sound more natural and comfortable. Perhaps the best word for it is confidence. When we hear someone gifted at speaking on a podcast, without a script, we hear someone who is confident speaking from the heart and does not second guess themselves. We are comfortable listening to them because they seem comfortable with themselves. And as we get to know this speaker, we see that they are consistent in being who they are. We begin to trust them because they always seem to be speaking from the heart, honestly, and authentically. When we hear someone who is too scripted, or too controlled, or too restrained, perhaps we subconsciously feel like they are hiding something. We trust them less. And so we are less willing to go on whatever journey they are trying to take us on.
We are drawn to confident people because they make us comfortable. We know they are comfortable with who they are, so we feel also comfortable with who we are. And it is the same with art. Art that is loose, that is not overly controlled, makes us feel comfortable. When art is confidently crafted, we are able to come along for the story, or enter into whatever the scene or idea is. We are looking at the art but we are not aware of the surface of things. There is something more transcendent pulling us into it. That is the looseness we probably all strive for in our work. It doesn’t matter if the work is super crisp vector art like Olimpia Zagnoli’s, or super loose, sketchy art like Jillian Tamaki’s.
To loosen up means to be confident in our delivery, and that enables others to lose themselves in the work. To loosen up, in a way, is to be able to lose ourselves as we MAKE the art, and that is what makes it possible for others to lose THEMSELVES in it also.
So the question is, how can we loosen up in our OWN work? How can we lose ourselves in the process? If loosening up means being more confident, can we will ourselves to be more confident? What if we try so hard to be confident that we just make a big mess of things? What happens if our confidence, real or feigned, overshoots our craft?
Like absolutely everything in life, where it comes to loosening up and making work that exudes confidence, there is no magic bullet. There is no technique we can use with 100% certainty that it will yield the results we desire.
The best we can hope for is to understand what LOOSE means for each of us, and then to bring everything we know and can do together in the most balanced way possible.
In Chapter 1, I explained how for me it is better that I speak from a fully written script. In this sense, I have no hope of having a fully natural, loose style of delivering my ideas in this podcast format! But what I lose in a purely natural, authentically unscripted manner of speaking, I gain in the ability to speak coherently and say exactly what I mean to say. And you, the listener, benefit from the effort. I believe you will get far more value from your time with my podcast if I can be consistent and coherent — you will get more value from this far more than any attempt I might have of being fast and loose here.
If the ultimate goal of looseness is a sense of confidence, I am going to be the most CONFIDENT when I feel PREPARED when it comes time to hit record. I rely on a front-heavy process of writing and scripting to get to this point. And this means there is a hard limit on how natural and off-the-script I can ever hope to sound! And I have to just accept this. I have to accept that there will be a tradeoff.
And this is very much the same in my art. Loose to me means finding a way to leave something open ended in my work, on purpose. There has to be something I leave uncontrolled. I must let certain things stay where they land, even though there may be something quirky or incomplete about them. But this is exactly what my otherwise over-scripted approach to creative work needs. I mentioned already that I leave some traces behind when I erase bits of my lettering. But sometimes even in my sketches, I will draw things out of proportion, or I’ll include a detail that doesn’t really matter or belong, or I’ll be very precise about most of the main part of the image but then be loosey goosey with the details, like how I draw grass or trees.
To be loose in my work means to have a dialogue between intention and accident. I must achieve the intended goals of the work while accepting certain accidents that happen along the way. And it is only through experience that I learn what accidents are acceptable and which are distracting.
I would say that, in the very beginning, it is better to be tight and controlled — to learn how to do a thing right — than to be loose and free, in the same way it is better to learn the rules before you can truly know how to break them.
Learn how to use your tools. Learn how to draw in the right way. Learn how to create symbols that mean something clearly before you try to mash them up to create new meanings. We learn the basics of our language before we learn how to use metaphor. A child understands a story only at face value, in a literal way. But then we mature and understand the allegory or the hidden meanings behind the story.
To loosen up in YOUR work means to know what your larger intentions are, and to achieve that first and foremost, and then to find ways to leave something open-ended in it.
For me, what I notice in my own work is that I have a tendency to want to close every shape, literally and metaphorically. I want to fill in every space. I want to square off every terminal on my lettering. And if I do this too much, I am trying to control everything, to the point where the image becomes too rigid.
This tendency to be totalitarian in my art extends to my ideas as well. It’s possible to want to make our meaning so blatantly clear that there is no room for interpretation or play. The best art leaves room for interpretation. There is always something left to the imagination, and that is how the audience becomes a part of the art, not just a passive bystander. It’s the tendency we might have to explain a joke rather than to just let it sit there and let others figure it out, however long that might take — and at the risk that it might not get figured out at all!
Ultimately, how you define loose, really defines on your style and technique, and what your artistic goals are. It depends on so many little tiny variables. I’m not here to tell you exactly what you should do, because I don’t know what your specifics are. What loose means is relative to each artist, and it is a dialogue each artist has with themselves, within a project and over their careers. It is a push and pull, an overshooting and then a course correction. It’s a dance. We may never find perfection here, but if we can leave room in our art for imperfection, perhaps we will achieve something close to the confidence we are looking for. Confidence means being comfortable with the imperfections, knowing that something good is happening in spite of them—maybe even because of them. To be loose is not just a stylistic result in our illustrations, but a mindset. It’s grace. It’s forgiveness. It’s self acceptance. It’s allowing ourselves to create in the best way we can in the moment, and having faith that we will get better as we go along. As long as we’re pushing ourselves to master our craft, while at the same time allowing ourselves to be a little bit imperfect as we go, we will find what loose means for us.
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So to wrap a bow on this, I’ll leave you with some quick tips about how to stay loose in your art, keeping in mind that loose might look very different from person to person.
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01 So the first tip is to find out what loose looks like for you. You might be really good at creating work in a more direct, less rehearsed way — or you might be more like me, needing more planning to get what you need to say out before ‘performing’ your final execution.
02 Understand that, for most client-based projects, we need to show our clients a sketch before we can move onto the finished artwork. Usually that sketch will have more of a loose feeling to it, and it’s possible that we’ll like it more than the finished piece. Just understand that this is just the nature of sketches and finished pieces! Hopefully this will take some pressure off to feel 100% satisfied with the final execution. We can have more realistic expectations about how things will turn out. I had to come to terms with this as I took on more complex projects and had to plan things out more up front.
03 If you do have a more improvised style, be prepared to have more takes. Just like I had to make a lot of inky marks and textures, sometimes for days, until I found the right one, it might take you many tries to get to the right result if you’re relying a lot on natural spontaneity in your style. The same goes for sharing work with clients — the less predictable your final illustrations are compared to your sketches, the greater the likelihood that your client will ask for more changes.
04 Write in a FEELING of spontaneity, even if it’s not actually spontaneous. Just like I have to write my podcasts in a way that sounds like I’m speaking, you can sketch toward an illustration in a way that feels more like you’re drawing from the heart. The only difference is that you get a chance to see what comes out first and make sure it’s coherent! Avoid over-editing your sketch, just making the changes you need to make the work mean what you intend. Try to appreciate some of the quirky things that you draw out in the sketch. Maybe a hand is too big for the body, or maybe you leave in a detail that doesn’t really reinforce the concept but adds a bit of wonder to the piece.
05 Finally, allow yourself to leave in some imperfection, even in the final. Leave some loose ends on purpose. Leave traces of your process. One way I do this in my own work is by not erasing everything perfectly when refining my hand lettering. In my podcast, I allow myself to say filler words like, YOU KNOW and WELL, just as I would if I were speaking off the cuff even though I’m actually not.
As a bonus tip, i’ll just say that knowing how to apply all of the above, is going to take some practice. You really can’t know for sure how much is too much looseness, and how much is too much tightness, until you know what your full range is. This just takes time to practice and figure out, but eventually, you do find what your sweet spot is.
Alrilght, that’s all I’ve got.
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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.
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THANK YOU
[As mentioned] The music for this podcast was written and performed by Mark Allan Falk - [again] you can find links to his music in the show notes or go directly to his linktree at LINKTR.EE/SEMIATHLETIC
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.