Take Drawing is Important on Skillshare — https://skl.sh/3UWWY00 — Use my link to get 30 free days on the platform! Just like saving money in the bank, your drawings can gain interest over time. In this episode I explain how this works, and I share how this principle has yielded both creative and financial rewards in my own life. I open up the episode with some recap from the summer! In the end you’ll learn how to set your daily drawing practice up for success with my 5-step plan. Happy to be back for Season 3!
Take Drawing is Important on Skillshare — https://skl.sh/3UWWY00 — Use my link to get 30 free days on the platform!
Just like saving money in the bank, your drawings can gain interest over time. In this episode I explain how this works, and I share how this principle has yielded both creative and financial rewards in my own life. I open up the episode with some recap from the summer! In the end you’ll learn how to set your daily drawing practice up for success with my 5-step plan. Happy to be back for Season 3!
How to Support
Episode Links
Inky Maps (Procreate Edition) — Create an Analog-Inspired Map on Your iPad — https://skl.sh/3Swd9SK
Drawing is Important — https://skl.sh/3UWWY00
In This Episode
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 37. So it is season three. It's time for things to get going again. I took a break over the summer, but obviously here I am. I'm back. I hope you're doing well. I hope you had a great summer and, you have something to look forward to this fall. I think fall is a great time of year because it kind of feels like a mini, unofficial new year.
Obviously, when you're in school, you're in a new year, a new grade, whatever it is. And so there is that very obvious New Year kind of feeling. You're starting a new you have a new teacher, you have new student friends, buddies. And if you're working, it still kind of feels that way. I don't know if it's just like a remnant from being a student back in the day, but fall really does feel like it's time to start a new chapter.
I guess maybe it has something to do with the fact that my kids are in school and they're back. they were home all summer. So there's that. That change from them being home to them being in school. And of course, there's always the excitement of new seasons on Netflix to watch. Like, we're pretty excited around here about the new season of Young Sheldon,
I am just warming back up into this podcast thing.
I've tried to record and rerecord a few of these already by now, and I'm trying to find my footing. If I'm honest, and I think that's fine. You know, when you take a break, you got to expect that when you come back into something, there's going to be that warm up period. You know, even if I just take the weekend off, which I do and always should, sometimes I work over the weekend.
But my point is, when I take the weekend off and I come back on Monday, I do have to warm back up into working head working brain. So today for this episode, what I want to do is just share with you one insight, one tip.
that means a lot to me right now, and that is to put ideas in the bank and to see if they accrue interest over time.
And I'll tell you what that means. But before I kind of get into that part, I just want to tell you a little bit about what's new around here. It's not much. It's just basically, I have a new class. It's called Inky Maps for procreate. This is a reboot of an older class that's called Inky Maps, and it's really about how to illustrate a map that looks and feels like it's handmade and it's charming and fun and beautiful.
The original class was taught in Photoshop, and the new one, as the name goes, is in procreate Inky Maps Procreate Edition. I'm just kind of riding that wave of people really flocking away from Adobe software and toward, you know, programs like procreate. I'm still a Photoshop guy. I'm not a fan of the company, but I've just been using Adobe software for so long that I'm.
I like Photoshop. I think it's an incredibly it's an incredible program. And so it'd be sad if somehow I, I couldn't use it anymore. So that being said, I'm, I'm trying to, you know, roll at the times and and if people want to learn how to illustrate on procreate, I'm enjoying the process of learning how to illustrate more in procreate.
To be honest, since I started using it in 2017, that's when I got my first iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. I've really just been using it as a digital sketchbook because that's what procreate has been great for. For me, it's just I get they have the best pencil brush, like I've never used a digital pencil brush in Photoshop that felt like an actual pencil.
I struggled to find even good pencils in fresco. No offense to anyone, but, I just got used to doing that in procreate. Anyway, that's the new class Inky Maps Procreate edition. It's on Skillshare now, and I'll leave a link to it in the show notes. I'm really excited about it. It's a well-reviewed class so far in the maps that people are making are pretty incredible, and the process of making, sort of handmade analog vintage feeling map in procreate is very different from the process that I teach in Photoshop.
There's a few workarounds because of you're working on a tablet, you don't really have a scanner that you can attach and stuff like that. So one of the things that I add to this class that I didn't teach in my first class is that instead of taking these inky marks and then kind of copying and pasting them and using various masks and stuff like that to to make them work in your composition, you just turn them into stamp brushes and then use that brush and stamp in your textures and stuff like that.
So it was really cool just learning even how to make a brush in procreate. For a long time I've just been postponing learning how to use. I shouldn't even say postponing, just avoiding learning how to make my own brushes in any program, Photoshop, procreate, or whatever because it just felt like there's too many of those settings and checkboxes and and there's like these settings and sliders that I just didn't know what they were.
Anyway, I finally had a reason to actually pay attention, figure it out. Kind of inspired by Lisa, actually, in our conversation here on the podcast, Lisa Bardo, who is the in my guest, she was my guest in the previous episode. So another interesting development around here in the Thoughts on Illustration universe is that I started doing these weekly newsletters called the Friday five.
I didn't think I'd start a newsletter. I'm not much of a newsletter guy myself. Like I don't subscribe to very many and the ones that I do subscribe to, I don't really like read very often. I'm doing a very bad job of selling this already. But anyway, the Friday five is five newsy nuggets that you can read in about five minutes.
And I don't know, I think I was inspired to make these because every now and then there's something that happens. Some news story and I want to share about it, but I don't want to just tweet about it or retweeted or rethread it. It's it's sometimes fun to write a little bit more about it, give a little bit of context, but not too much.
Like I said, each each, full newsletter can be read in about five minutes or less. So I've been having fun with that. If you want to follow the Friday five or subscribe to it, it's on my Substack. You can go there. Mr. Tom Froese. Dot substack.com. I'll leave a link to it in the show notes. So yeah.
Friday five my Inky Maps Pocket Edition I have been working very steadily over the summer. Unfortunately, I didn't really get a chance to get out there and and, do a whole ton of work. no, sorry. I had a whole lot of time to do work. I didn't have a lot of time to get out there and get outside and camp and go on vacation and stuff like that.
My kids pretty much had the most boring summer ever. Maybe not the most boring, but I feel guilty that I couldn't take too much time away. So what did I work on? Mostly I've been working on an illustrated kids book with my publisher. I don't know how much I can divulge about it. It's with Nosy Crow and one of their big kind of museum clients.
So it's it's a fun book. It's coming along nicely. There are some moments over the summer, and I thought I would just completely not be able to complete it, but thankfully I kind of pulled through and things are. Things are happening. I can't wait to share progress on that book very soon.
Another kind of stream of work that I've been working on all summer was, interestingly, a lot of maps for editorial clients.
I had one for The Independent, I had two for the Sunday Times and one for time magazine for their 100 Worlds Greatest Places issue, which was so cool. How cool is that? To get in, to illustrate, a two page opening spread in time magazine and then a whole bunch of spots to go along with that, that article.
So I'm very thankful for that. So far this year, I've had a lot more client jobs, and I did in 2023. So it feels like I'm back in the saddle. The the clients are coming back. I seem to be a map guy and honestly, if I could keep illustrating maps only, I think I'd be pretty happy. I'm considering whether it would make sense just to kind of go all in on that, because I really have a groove in that and I enjoy it.
I'm good at it. That seems to be what I'm getting, but
I don't need to figure that out right now. I'll figure that out off the podcast.
Anyway, welcome to season three. We're here. why don't I give you, the little tip that I was going to leave with you? And, there's not it's not like, I don't know why I'm giving such a big preamble to it.
I'm going to just give it to you here. So put ideas
in the bank and see if they accrue interest over time. So what do I mean by that?
Draw things daily or follow ideas and try them out for a season. In other words, create a series of series. What I mean by that is I mean the most obvious or clear expression of this in my own life is my daily drawing practice. So every morning first thing I do just to warm up is I start drawing, and I find that if I consistently draw on a theme, like for a while it was drawing from this book, this Acme catalog, and I would just draw one product or a few things that I saw in it that caught my eye or whatever it was.
On the next page, I draw it in my ugly book sketchbook, and then I'd use Posca paint, pen markers and spend maybe a little bit too much time, but I try to spend maybe half an hour 45 minutes on it, shared on Instagram. And then that would be it. Next day, do the same thing over and over again.
And I just consistently did this for a few years. Unfortunately, I kind of got a little bit burned out on it, and I stopped for a while and I had to stop because there were some big projects coming through that I had to work on. But my point is that. I kept that practice up. I didn't know what the big things that these would amount to, if anything would be.
It was really just about keeping a practice. I was just showing up every day to draw because that's all I need to do. I can't just be doing client work, I need to do something for myself. And this was just something that I started enjoying and getting into. And as part of my practice, part of my routine. And it was a great way to warm into warm up, into the day.
Now fast forward to today. I'm still doing my daily drawing practice. I right now my big kick is doing camper trailers. Or if you're British caravans, these are like, you know, Winnebago type things, but usually just things you tow behind a car. And I, I recently bought a trailer. I can maybe talk more about that another time, but I tend to process what I'm going through in real life or something that I'm interested in, and I bring it to my daily drawing practice.
Now, back on my main point, I.
Was looking back through some of my drawings over the years, let's just say since maybe 2022, and kind of loving what I made in a way that I didn't when I was drawing it. At first, a lot of the things that I made, I would just make it and move on. Sometimes I liked it, sometimes I didn't, and it didn't really matter.
Just kept kept going. But then recently I started thinking about prints that I might be able to sell just thinking about how to create a little bit of side income. And so I started looking through some of my old prints. I mean, my old my drawings in these drawing books, my sketchbook, basically, and seeing a lot of potential in them and stuff that I would never have thought would have made a good printer a T shirt graphic started to look like a good idea, and it it made me appreciate the practice, not just as a way of seeing fresh or developing your skills or, you know, creating content for your social media accounts which are
old, which are all good and fine. It's also like investing now, just like I'm not an investment expert by any stretch, I don't know much about it, but what I do know is all you have to do is say if you put 10% of your earnings away, whatever you can afford, you put it into some kind of investment.
Something is better than nothing. You know, if you can do your research and find a good investor financial advisor to help you know where to invest, that's that's even better. But as a rule, generally speaking, if you're not gambling, you know, if you're investing in an an actual investments
over time
you will get a return on your investment.
The $10 you put in today, in five years will have made more than itself back possibly. I don't know. I don't know if that's a realistic scenario, but basically you're going to get interest over time on the the money you put away today. So when it comes to creating things, drawing things daily, coming up with ideas, first of all, you need to have a consistent practice of making things.
And that's really going to come down to having a daily drawing practice
what that looks like. Exactly. We can go through that another time. My best thoughts, my most full thoughts on that subject are in the class in my Skillshare class called drawing is Important.
the idea is that you're consistently coming
every day for a certain amount of time
with a specific technique that you're going to use, a specific book, a specific pen, a specific source of inspiration that helps you just come back and know what you're going to do.
So you don't have to say, what am I going to draw today? What pens am I going to use today? You just come and show up. Your system tells you exactly what you're going to do. You just get into it and then later over time, you can go back and with a different mindset, with more objectivity, you can look at the ideas you made.
They may be good or they may be bad, some may be excellent and some may not be. But it's very likely that there's going to be some ideas there that you see more than you would have seen
in them and in the first place. And so on this point, you know, have that practice of making things daily or regularly and don't worry too much when you're making it, whether you love it.
It would be nice if we loved everything we made in our daily drawing practices. It'd be nice if we loved everything we made for our clients. For that matter. But what's important is you're making it consistently. You're not half asking it, you're doing it and you're you're you're at least trying. And then in the future, it could be a year later, it could be two years later.
And like in my case, could be five years later. Maybe you'll see something in that piece that you never saw before. And that's where that interest comes into play. You put it in the bank, and then years later, the more evolved, more mature part of you see something that maybe previous you didn't see in that work before, you know,
I think we have this idea that we're only evolving and only progressing and getting better, which means every everything that we were in the past was worse,
that we have more insights and more wisdom.
The older we are and the younger self was somehow too naive. And we, you know, we apply this even across history. We we apply this to the idea of like cavemen being dumb, dumb, you know, playing with fire and hitting each other with clubs and, I don't know, smelling like poo,
I don't know about cavemen. I don't know what what their status was in the true evolutionary tree in terms of IQ and stuff.
But I can say that not everything we were and made in our past cells is less evolved. It just maybe we weren't ready for it in some other sense at the time. We make something
and in the moment we don't see value in it. And it's not until later that there is a part of us that sees how sophistic needed or intelligent or just interesting the idea that we created years ago, months ago, whatever it is, we could have even just been yesterday.
Sometimes I look at a drawing the next day and love it way more than I did the day before. So there's a it's almost like a part of you is making something great that the other part of you at that same time can't appreciate. And then later on, there's a part of you that catches up to that smarter part of you.
I don't know, I'm probably stretching things here, but what I'm saying is you come back to your the, the idea, the drawing, whatever it is that you made a little while later or a long time later and it's new to you, it's more interesting to you. It has more potential. So here's a question you can ask yourself, and maybe a little bit of, a thing you can do as a result of what I'm talking about today.
Can you go back to your old drawings, maybe used to post every day on Instagram, or you have been doing this for a long time, or maybe you keep a sketchbook or you used to, but there's some record of work and ideas somewhere that you can go and look at right now and going through them.
You can ask, what do you like that
maybe you didn't appreciate at the time.
you were more critical of whatever it is.
And then maybe you'll find some ideas that are good enough to build on. It's not usual that I need to go back and dig up ideas from the past.
I'm usually okay to just start fresh and and build a new idea based on, say, a client brief
I haven't been in this habit of banking up ideas on purpose.
But recently as I was thinking about, oh, what if I have something that I can sell as a printer t shirt? Then I remembered, oh yeah, I have, I have all these drawings I've done and.
Maybe now it's time to go back and see if anything can be used.
So you never know what you're going to end up doing when you're making something. And I don't think you should always think too hard about that because it maker is stuck.
Like, what if every time you sat at your desk to draw, you thought, oh, I need to make something good enough to sell as a print. I need to make something good enough to put on a t shirt. I think if we started off our daily drawings like that, especially daily drawings, because this is this is just a sketchbook exercise that shouldn't take us more than a half hour to an hour in the morning, or whatever time of day you're going to get
all stuck in your head and and worry about whether it's good or not.
And that's just not not a place of creativity. That's that's pressure and anxiety. At least it is for me. So does that make sense? It's like just continue to show up, make space to
sketch or keep a sketchbook. This is something I call a daily drawing practice.
Be consistent about it.
Be intentional about it.
If you want to know more about my thoughts on what that means, like I said, I have a class called Drawing is Important on Skillshare, but the essential way of doing this is is making what I call very simply a plan. And there are five elements of your daily drawing plan, and that is your purpose, your media, your inspiration source, your sustainable schedule, and your sharing strategy.
And so having a purpose is just stating your intention. Why am I doing this? What is what do I hope to get out of this? This 30 day project or this ongoing lifelong drawing habit? And then in terms of media.
What techniques, what tools, what sketchbook, what pens, what colors am I going to consistently use for this? And the reason we do this isn't to lock ourselves in.
You can change it at any time, but it's simply to have the tools at hand and not to have to decide every day what what tools and colors are you going to work with? If you get stuck on those kinds of decisions, just write it down. Use a tool that you enjoy using. For me, it's just sketching in with pencil and then drawing over with Posca paint pens.
I love it, it's just very satisfying. So that's media and then your source of inspiration. When I was doing a lot of my illustrations back in the day, it was from this Acme catalog from like 1978 or something like that, and it had all these just products like outdoors stuff, sleeping bags, household stuff like blenders, candle holders, but for me, this is a very nostalgic catalog because a lot of the products that I see in this catalog, I would I saw around me growing up.
So it's very nostalgic. That was my source of inspiration. And I would just pick up my book, my my catalog, flip it to the next page and draw what I saw. And whether I wanted to draw it or not, whether I liked the thing that I was drawing or not. It was a decision I did I didn't even have to make.
I knew that's what I was going to do, and it was only going to be half an hour or even less if I really wasn't feeling it. So that's the inspiration source. And then the sustainable schedule is really just saying, like, how much can you draw every single day? How much can you draw in a session that you can tolerate and keep doing so?
Don't make it an hour or two hours at a time, if that's going to like, dig into other time that you actually don't have. Just make it five minutes. Do a five minute drawing of your hand every day with pencil. Take a Sharpie marker and spend ten minutes drawing. whatever you happen to see in front of you, draw your dog's nose.
See? See how many times you can draw your dog's nose before you kind of start seeing the complexities of it, and all the textures and how wet or dry it is, at what time of day. But the point is like choose an amount of drawing. I like to say about it about half an hour to an hour or a quantity.
So it's like I'm going to fill this page or this spread of my sketchbook and when you've done that, you're done. And then in terms of that same set, a sustainable schedule, you also want to pick a time of day, and your frequency. So I like to do it in the morning. And I like to do it five days a week.
You know, just before I start my work day. Finally, we have
the sharing strategy. And that's really like, where are you going to share the work? How are you going to store it? How are you going to do something more with the thing that you made? I really believe that the power of a daily drawing practice is exponentially magnified when you
share it.
Share it with people. You might get no views for a while, but if you're consistent, I think you're more likely to get an audience
clueing into what you're doing than if you're not sharing. I can say that at very least. Usually the best place to share is where other people are sharing similar stuff. You know, at this time, it's still going to be Instagram.
Maybe if you have an appetite for making videos like vertical format reels showing the process of you drawing, the thing might be how you document your sketchbook. Personally, I still find video just takes too much mental energy away from me and I'm thinking about camera angles and lighting. So I still just scan the thing and I share it.
And again, I do that consistently. I have a black background, I open my book, I scan it, I do a few adjustments to the, you know, the coloring and stuff, and then I share it. It's all a system that I really don't have to think too much about, and it's always a pleasure to look back and say, look at the thing that I made.
Look at all these things that I made, look at this series, look at all the color. And even when I'm not getting client work, even when I'm getting tons of client work, no matter what, I have something that I'm doing just for me. And, I'm drawing an audience. Like, people are coming and and and liking and commenting sometimes.
Yeah.
Sometimes they're not. But like I said, we're we're just banking up, putting things into our investment. And we know that over time they will accrue interest.
Another great analogy for this, and perhaps even better than investing, is casting seeds out into the wind. You never know where those seeds are going to blow and land and take hold and and grow and flourish. I'll tell you just a couple of instances of how my daily drawing project
has become such seeds and yielded fruit that I didn't expect.
So most recently, I had my sketches like a few of my sketches from my daily drawing project featured in a book called Sketched Out. This is by Eviction Workshop. They do these beautifully designed, kind of curated collections of art design, illustration,
And so yeah, they they included a number of my sketches inside
alongside a whole bunch of other great artists, illustrators.
And they even featured one of my drawings on the front cover of this book. I don't know what's going to happen from there, but, you know, one way of thinking about it is maybe
my seed landed, became the tree, and that tree was
eviction, making this book and featuring my work. But now that's its own tree, casting its own seed.
And who knows where those seeds, where it will land and what opportunities they will yield. I don't know if that's a guarantee. I just don't know. But certainly I have more of a shot of those becoming something more than I would have if I didn't do my daily drawing project. And importantly,
share it.
So the other example I'll share with you about my daily drawing project and how it's grown into something more, is just the the very fact that I was able to make my class drawing is important. It's one of my favorite classes. It's one of the classes that I'm most proud of when I look at the student projects, because people really did the project, they they did 30 days worth of drawing
in a very deliberate way, making a plan and showing up every day.
And just to look through the the Student Project gallery is very inspiring. And as a teacher, to see people taking your project in class to heart in that way, it's it's very heartening. So the the drawing practice that I had gave me a platform to teach from because I wasn't just telling people to draw every day. I'm saying, look, I am drawing every day.
This is what I'm doing and this is what I'm creating. And it it gave me
something to bite my teeth into and to share and inspire with other people. And very thankfully, this class has just become one of my most popular, and therefore it's generating income for me that I, I depend on to live,
especially through times when I'm not earning from client work,
as illustrators, we're not always getting,
you know, a steady stream of work.
It's sometimes peace and famine.
drawing every day truly has become not just an opportunity for me to get my name out there, get my drawings out there, but also to, like, create actual
useful classes for people that inspire them and get them drawing, get them casting their own seeds, investing, accruing interest. And that has resulted in me actually earning a living.
I mean, there's there's more that I could I could go into about this whole thing, but
I'm going to leave you with that encouragement. If you are someone who already has a daily drawing practice, keep going. And if you don't have a daily drawing practice, consider starting one today. Put ideas in the bank and let them accrue interest over time.
My name is Mr. Tom Froese. And those are my thoughts on illustration.
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you can find my work and everything else at Tom Froese.com.
Thank you for listening all the way to the end. I'll see you in the next one. The music for this podcast was written and performed by Mark Allen Fok.
You can find all of his beautiful music and more at Linktree/SemiAthletic.