In this episode, I talk about the very beginning of our journey into becoming illustrators, the moment we discover illustration and say to ourselves, “I want to do that.” This is what Lisa Congdon calls the “spark moment”. I will tell you the story of my own spark moment, which has an unlikely beginning and takes a very long and meandering path to get where I am today. By listening to this episode, you will be able to identify your own spark moment and to learn how to let that pull you forward toward your goal of becoming an illustrator. You should know what you want.
In this episode, I talk about the very beginning of our journey into becoming illustrators, the moment we discover illustration and say to ourselves, “I want to do that.” This is what Lisa Congdon calls the “spark moment”. I will tell you the story of my own spark moment, which has an unlikely beginning and takes a very long and meandering path to get where I am today. By listening to this episode, you will be able to identify your own spark moment and to learn how to let that pull you forward toward your goal of becoming an illustrator. You should know what you want.
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Find Your Artistic Voice by Lisa Congdon - https://amzn.to/3FcBOnV
Hello, my name is Mr. Tom Froese, and these are my Thoughts On Illustration. Welcome to the very first episode of the podcast!
Today’s episode is all about being at the very beginning of a creative journey. Like many of you, I’m at the very beginning of a new one myself. It’s been my dream to have a podcast for 7 years, and now, finally, here we are. Like starting my first podcast, starting out in illustration was also a long time in coming. I’m actually kind of an expert in long, slow starts. So if you’re feeling like it’s taking you a long time to get where you want be, you’re in the right place.
If you like what you hear in today’s epsiode, 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
In her book, Find Your Artistic Voice, artist Lisa Congdon describes this moment we all must have at the beginning of our journeys, when we see something that inspires us in a unique way, and we say, I want to do that!
Lisa calls this the Spark moment. I always just refer to it as the moment we say I want to do that! If you’re listening to this podcast, I’m just gonna assume that the thing you want to do is illustration. The good news is that you have already taken the very first step towards becoming an illustrator. It’s that spark that sets off everything else that needs to happen.
Congratulations on beginning your journey!
So you might ask, what do I do next? The instinct might be to find a class to learn illustration, buy some books on the topic, or to start buying art supplies and illustration gear. While those are all great, if you’re anything like me, you’re probably more likely to feel stuck right at the start, paralyzed by the sense of infinitude before you. Maybe you see too many options and it’s hard to choose, or maybe you have no idea what your options even are. Both are more or less the same thing. You are at the very beginning, and you don’t even know what you don’t know.
I encourage you, like I encourage all my students, to look deeper into that statement, I want to do that. What is that, really. Like what do you really WANT? When you start to think about it more, chances are it’s not as clear as it might be.
It’s okay not to know yet. The fact that you are aware of it means you’re already one step closer. Now you know what you don’t yet know — what you really want.
At the start, we just don’t have enough information yet to say for sure. Sometimes we have more of a gut feeling about what we want, but we can’t explain it. There’s probably no other way to begin, really. When we first hear about something, or rather, when we first become cognizant of wanting something, it is abstract and irrational. The desire comes before we truly understand its object.
Take hunger for instance. When I was a kid, we’d drive by a KFC on our way to and from church. I would be able to smell that delicious Kentucky Fried Chicken smell well before seeing that giant rotating bucket sign they used to have out front. I’m actually salivating right now just thinking about that smell. Before seeing the food itself, before even passing the building it was coming from, I knew I wanted to eat whatever was making that smell. I had the desire without needing a rationale or an explanation. I’m sure if you talked to a scientist they’d say there’s something we can detect in the smell and we are biologically engineered to crave it. I’m no scientist, but I can tell you right now that I want to sink my teeth into a delicious kentucky fried drumstick, even though it’s 9 in the morning and I’m still full from breakfast.
All of this is to say, we probably want something well before we fully understand what that thing is, let alone know why we want it at all. Desire comes before understanding.
I’d bet that even if I never saw chicken in my life, I’d still want whatever that smell was coming from.
Wanting to be an illustrator at first is a lot like smelling KFC wafting through the air before you even see the restaurant. You’re getting close to the source but you have a ways to go before you can see it. Knowing you want to be an illustrator starts from seeing something that excites your eyes, even before you fully understand what that thing is or what it’s called or what you want to do with it.
This is a lot like having that first spark moment I mentioned. Do you remember what your spark moment was? Do you remember the moment when you realized there’s this thing called illustration and said, “I want to do that”?
For some of us, this spark is super clear to us from the start. For others, it’s something we can sense but it’s still just around the corner. Sometimes the spark happens in a single instance. For me, it’s been a series of moments, or discoveries, like stones that I jump from, one to the next, as what I truly want becomes clearer over time. (I mean, if we really think about where our creative stories started, they probably go back right to the womb.) So when you’re looking for your spark moment, it may take some time to piece together all the little pieces from your life that got you here today. Identifying your spark is a great exercise to understand yourself more as a creative, and to pinpoint your motivation. Later on in your journey, you can always look back on this spark as your guiding principle, to remind you why you started on this adventure in the first place.
I’ve decided that my starting point, my spark moment, started in 2001, when I was in college for computer engineering.
Yes — before I decided I wanted to be an illustrator, I thought I wanted to be a computer engineer! That’s a whole other story, but I suppose it’s worth adding here that it’s possible to find your way into illustration, or any other dream career, even if you’ve already started in a different direction.
But back to my spark moment:
I remember walking into my first class at 8:05 in the morning, on a sunny September day. The classroom was huge, flooded with harsh fluorescent light, and filled with what felt like hundreds of strangers. There was a blackboard at the front, spanning the entire length of the classroom. There was something about the vibe in that room that filled me with the dreadful realization that I didn’t want to be there. I said to myself, “This is the wrong place. I don’t want to be here.”
So you might be wondering, how is this my spark moment?
Well, in spite of how negatively I reacted to being where I was, I knew I had to stick with it. My spark moment comes later, but it wouldn’t have come unless I made the decision to go to this school to take this program and stick with it. To my credit of all the things I could have been doing, I knew this was the most productive and promising for who and where I was at the time. Being 3 years out of high school already, I felt like the clock was ticking. Many of my friends were already well into their degree programs, and some were even settled into their careers and starting families.
So I stuck with the program, and in fact, I stuck with it all the way to the end. That was THREE years of my life. Now, of course, the fact that I have a 3 year diploma in Computer Engineering Technology is really just the side-story here. But this period in my life became the soil for a dream that has grown into a beautiful reality for me.
So here’s where my real spark moment starts: within the first week of the program, I met a guy named Julius, and we became fast friends. I didn’t really hit it off with many others at the time, so Julius and I ended up spending a lot of time together. I think we bonded over the fact that we were a bit more creative and quirky than everyone else. We would goof off during lectures, making silly drawings in the margins of our notebooks instead of listening to lectures about Ohms Law. Julius ended up quitting the program after the first year to become a goldsmith, and ultimately, he moved to Germany and I never heard from him again. But before that, he sent me off on a life long journey of becoming an illustrator, and I’m pretty sure he’ll never even know about it.
One day, Julius was like, “Tom, you’ve got to come see this.” So I followed him to a part of the campus I’d never been to before. I remember walking through the halls of this mysterious place, and it was such a different feeling from the bland, beige vibe of the technology department. It was more colourful. There were student design projects up on the walls. I could see inside classrooms, where students were sitting at drafting tables instead of workstations; and instead of notebooks, they had sketchbooks. They had piercings, and band tee shirts, and, well, they looked like the kind of people I wanted be friends with. They looked like my friends from back home. It seems superficial to say that, but you really do want to be in an atmosphere were you feel like you’re on the same page as everyone else.
My point here is that I found this magical place at my college campus, where I was actually interested in what was up on the walls, and what the students were doing—and the students themselves looked like people I wanted to be around. And of course, I realized that this place was the Design Wing of the campus, and I realized for the first time that there was this thing called Graphic Design, and that this could be my actual job. What the HECK was I doing in computer engineering?
This was the moment that sent me on the path that I am still on today. For the first time, I saw a way I could be creative for a living. I learned that it was called Design, and said, “I want to do that.”
Of course, this moment—this spark—was only the beginning. I had so much to learn. I didn’t know everything there was to know, but the whiff of design got me salivating. And in case you missed it, I still had yet to discover actual Illustration as a career option. There were many spark moments in my life, but this was the one that started the whole chain reaction.
That was in 2001, and today it’s 2022. I was 21, and now I am 42. So if you do some quick math, that was exactly half my life ago. It’s been a LONG journey. I can tell you that those 3 years at Humber College in the north part of Toronto were some of the hardest years of my life. I was deeply depressed. I was lonely. I remember being so sad and existentially distressed at one point that I was lying, face down on the floor of my apartment screaming through tears about the meaninglessness of life. I didn’t care that the people downstairs could hear me. I was so deeply in a fog of hopelessness and meaninglessness, and nothing felt more real to me than my raw despair.
Thankfully I haven’t had an episode quite that bad since. But I think it was also just a time in my life when I was contending with the reality of growing up. There was a lot of change. I was living in a new city. I was away from my friends. My parents recently divorced and we had to all move out of the home I grew up in and lived in for my entire life. The future seemed uncertain, and kind of bleak, given that I was in a program that I hated. I felt trapped.
But in all this darkness there was one glimmer of light. Even though I felt trapped in my current program, I had discovered something I truly loved, and I had a name for it. I had found my spark.
I wanted to become a designer. I wanted to be creative for a living. And I knew I had it in me. I had this strong feeling about this, that I was meant to do it. This was one of the strongest, most irrational desires I’ve ever felt in my life. It was like the KFC aroma on overdrive, and like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, it lifted me off my feet, and pulled me along in the air toward its source.
Maybe you would have just switched programs right away. In some ways I wish that’s what I did. But I think it’s both a strength and a weakness of mine that I don’t just jump into things. I am highly skeptical of my own intentions, and that is why even though I knew what I wanted, I didn’t just jump out of my current program into Design. I had to think about it. I had to know for sure I wasn’t just being a flake. I think a part of this came from the fact that I did pretty poorly in high school, and in fact, I had failed my senior level art class. It was something of a miracle that I pulled myself together and even got into the computer engineering program in the first place. I went to night school to complete my high school requirements to get into the program, and once I was in it, I made honour roll, and even got a scholarship that lasted the whole way through. Not knowing the future, I had a lot of reason to stick with my program. I no had real proof that jumping over to design would work out for me at all. From the outside looking in, I would have seemed foolish to throw that all away. In fact, I had close friends and mentors who discouraged me from switching over. I trusted them and I trusted my instinct to stick it out and wait.
Staying in the computer engineering program gave me a chance to figure out what I wanted on the creative side while still building up a stable career. I think it was a responsible, sensible thing to do, in hind-sight. Sometimes I wonder how far I could have come if I just called it right away, as soon as I discovered design, to change my program. How much further along could I have been? It wasn’t until I was 26 that I actually went to art school. I’m sure I would have done alright, but I also know that I did what sat well with my conscience, and I trusted the counsel of those around me – those who knew me best.
It may seem crazy to endure 3 years of what I consider now to be the hardest, loneliest effort in my life —just sticking with my program. But the whole time I was holding my true desire, my dream – my spark – ahead of me. I used every second of my spare time to grow in my creativity. I gave up watching TV so I could spend more time being creative. I started to keep a sketchbook. I learned how to draw. I started taking drawing and design classes on the side. I made everything about design. If there was a school assignment, regardless of the class or subject, I tried to turn it into a design assignment. If there was an art competition at the school, I would enter it. In fact I won a prize for a sculpture, and I even won a contest to design the cover of the school planner that students get at the beginning of the year.
There were lots of little things like this that started to happen in my life. I was just doing a lot of things I wanted to do, without needing to know exactly how they all added up or whether they were the exact right things. The important thing is that I was doing what I could, and more importantly, I wasn’t just stuck in dreaming but not doing mode. I was living and breathing what I wanted in whatever way I could.
Later on, after graduating from art school and having worked as a designer for a few years, my desires shifted toward illustration. And just like the last time, I felt stuck and impatient to get there. But I didn’t just jump into illustrating, whatever that would have meant. I let my spark —now my desire to become an illustrator—guide me forward from where I was, at which point everything I did became about illustration. This focus helped me continue being productive in my current work, while also steering it, little by little, more toward illustration, until one day I found myself doing mostly illustration. It became easier to say no to opportunities that looked good to me as a designer but not so much as an illustrator.
I know this is a long and meandering story, but I hope you see the core thing, holding it all together. It was me, knowing what I want, and showing up in whatever way I could to get it.
At first, I didn’t have a plan: all I had was a desire. I knew what I wanted, and the more I tried to define that, the more questions I had, and it was in pursuing the answers that I discovered so much about design, and ultimately illustration, and how it fit into my story. I learned so much about myself and was becoming more of who I am today, and more of who I will be tomorrow.
At first, you start by knowing WHAT you want to do. The question of how to get there, or what to do next, will not always be clear. At first, you just have to pinpoint your desire, to learn its name, and then, from there follow where it leads. Show up in whatever way you can.
Of course, showing up is more than just sitting down and doing the things. Indeed, you can’t really know what things you should be doing without some kind of a plan. And in this podcast, over time, I hope to help define what coming up with a plan even looks like. But there is value in doing whatever you can, even if it’s blindly. We are all born blind, but thankfully, most of us don’t stay that way. Just show up, and do whatever you know you can today.
If you’re here, still listening to my words, then you probably have at least one desire, which is to be an illustrator. I don’t know where you are at in terms of getting there. Maybe you’re at the very beginning, perhaps where I was on that sunny September morning half my life ago. Or maybe you’re deep in a different creative career and want to pivot over to illustration. Wherever you are, you’ve given your desire a name. Now it’s time to start asking where you want to take it.
So, today, I will ask you one more time, what is your spark moment? What is the thing that made you say, I want to do that? What did you see that made you excited about illustration? What is it about illustration that has captured your imagination?
And here’s another question: what gives you the crazy idea that you even have what it takes? What gives you the feeling that illustration is the right path for you? I am asking these questions not to send you spinning into doubts, but to get you to tap more deeply into whatever this feeling is for you. We all start off completely unqualified — I would be embarrassed to show you what my art looked like in my early days. But interestingly, I had a very strong hunch that I just had it in me. We all start off with this sort of drunken, delusional belief, without any proof at all, that we’re gonna make it. But that’s precisely what I’m talking about when it comes to finding our spark. It’s just this big stupid, way too eager feeling, just like falling in love. We do all kinds of crazy things for love, and we don’t always know for sure that it will be reciprocated. But we have to put ourselves out there if we’re going to have a chance.
Okay, I know this is a bunch of questions, not just one. But it all comes down to knowing what you want, and asking why that is. And then from there, asking, what can you do about it, right now, before really knowing what the next two or three steps might be? Just because you know what you want, it doesn’t mean you know exactly what that looks like. The only way to know for sure is to start walking, putting one foot in front of the other. If you make a misstep, if you go in the wrong direction, you’ll find out soon enough, and you can always correct your course from there.
In my final year of Computer Engineering, we had to design these robotic mice that were supposed to find their way through a maze. They also had to drop off 3 ping pong balls in three different targets along their way. We had to actually write the programs, and build the circuits and mechanical parts, and the project was pass/fail. We could graduate if our robot successfully completed its task. The way our robot found its way through the maze wasn’t to know the way from the beginning. We didn’t know what the maze would look like, or where the finish line would be. We had to write code that gathered information as it went. It would remember where it had come from, and whether turning in one direction resulted in a wall or an opening, and from there, it sort of just fumbled its way to the end. The robot had a mission, to get to the end of the maze and drop off its load in the right spots. Each robot found its way through in its own way, some turning left first when they should have turned right, but every wrong turn gave it important information about where to turn next.
When we’re starting out, from our spark moment—when we first say “I want to do that”—we are like those robots before they start down the maze. We have a mission, but we don’t know where the end is. We figure it out as we go. We have to drive forward until we hit a wall, and then reorient ourselves from there.
But like those robots, we also have tasks to complete along the way. Their side-quest was to drop some balls in some pre-determined targets. On your way to becoming an illustrator, your task DOES have some predetermined targets as well. These are things you can name—these are objective things you can know, that we all must check off before we arrive at the end of the maze.
For our purposes, the end of the maze is you Becoming an Illustrator. It’s the moment where you can say for certain that you’re doing the thing—that the dream is now a reality.
In the next episode, we’re going to talk about getting more specific about what this means. What does it mean to become an illustrator, and what are those balls you have to drop, where are those targets, along the way. But for now, that’s where I’ll leave you.
Alright, 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.