Art by Norman Morana
How do you decide which projects to take on and which to avoid? Is there a secret to finding your dream job? And how do you get to that point? This week, Jake Parker, Lee White, and Will Terry focus down on finding your dream art job, how passion plays into making great images, and why you should avoid some projects and not others.
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SHOW LINKS
TWITTER SHOOT YOUR SHOT DREAM JOB THREAD
BRETT HELQUIST (SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS)
INTRO
This episode was recorded in late April!
Will, Lee and Jake discuss the nuances of sneaking into places by wearing a nametag and carrying a clipboard. Check /r/ActLikeYouBelong for people doing exactly this!
Lee added a new part to his book project process to try and finish earlier. He spends one hour at the end, looking at the image and tweaking it, making small adjustments to a finished image. It’s really satisfying -- the last 1% of work that is 80% of the polish.
Jake just finished sending in all the files for his Kickstarter project. Watch his social media for an upcoming link when it launches.
Will is working on a book for a College Prep School. Will was lucky to know the brother of the owner. He is also working on a game.
Lee isn’t very impressed by most mobile games, the art usually all looks the same. This one game is really impressive, though:
HECK YES, OR IT’S A NO!
Lee was talking to Jake and Will about a project that he was looking to do. Jake told him, it’s either a “Heck Yes!” or a “No.” How do we decide what art to make? What facilitates our decision making process for choosing jobs? And how do you even choose which path you want to go down as an artist?
At Lee’s school, a lot of students got a second rate education because they wanted to be illustrators even though the school focused on concept art. The school curriculum didn’t cater to them.
What is your dream assignment, and why?
TWITTER SHOOT YOUR SHOT DREAM JOB THREAD
Figuring out your dream job dictates the rest of your career choices -- you can decide what school to go to, what classes to take, and so forth.
Jake would love to work on a Tabletop Game. Especially if the subject matter is already up his alley -- he wouldn’t be able to say no to it, assuming the pay is good. Jake would love to design a thing from the ground up. How much has Jake pursued that thing, and why isn’t he doing it now? Jake hasn’t pursued it because his style doesn’t really fit in with the current landscape of the board game scene. His style is more cartoony, with one foot in a cartoony animated style. Every machine he draws has a wonkiness to it. That’s why he has shied away from mainstream comics because the art is more realistic. There are a handful of artists pushing the mainstream style towards a more cartoony look though. Jake realized he shouldn’t let what he thinks people want decide what he actually does. It’s important not to self-limit yourself.
It’s a lot like the game Sky, which is different from everything else on offer. It looks amazing and is mind blowing because it is so different.
That’s Jake’s biggest hurdle, besides not knowing the landscape of the industry very well -- who would he contact or reach out to? Jake also doesn’t play a whole lot of board games, so it’s not a world he’s very familiar with. He just likes it as a cool, creative problem to solve. His style doesn’t fit, and he’s not an insider.
If a student came to Jake with the exact same scenario, what advice would he give?
Jake would suggest for them to do their homework first, and borrow or buy or check out from the library some board games. Look up game design on YouTube, educate yourself about the world and what it takes to be a part of that world. You’ll start to see specific names pop up, you’ll figure out what is mainstream or on the fringes, and you’ll become an outsider-insider.
Once you’ve done the homework, start reaching out and make your immediate goal to make friends. Keep yourself on their radar and keep reaching out. Maintain a “long game” mentality, it might pay off years down the line, not right away. But you can still make a friendship and make that its own reward. Educate yourself, then network.
Jake has started to pursue board games in certain ways. He goes through phases where he gets hyper focused on a certain subject matter and it usually burns out in a few weeks. But he pays attention to how often he returns to that thing. A few months ago it was stargazing and telescopes, but he moved on after a few weeks. He knows if he goes through that phase a few more times then it’s something he should probably pursue. This thing with board games is the same thing. He has become interested in the world of board games and was contacted by a game-maker with an assignment, but the schedule was way too tight so he couldn’t take it. Jake started asking questions about the board game industry, though, and set up a chance to work with them in future.
Will would rather make his own projects these days as opposed to working with clients, aside from the excellent Bonaparte Falls Apart project, where he got to do whatever he wanted. Normally working with a client, you draw things you would never work on otherwise. Some client projects are dream projects in retrospect, when you look at it as a finished project. Sometimes the committee or the art director ruins the project.
One of Will’s dream projects is the Kickstarter that he wants to launch. The other is a game that he is working on -- they reached out to him after he showed his work to them. The other dream project is the gallery pieces he is working on -- he wants to make a series of “morals” drawings for parents to give their kids as posters. It’s not heavy handed morality, but it’s nice. Will loves creating stories with images in them, and he feels like he is at a time where he can be his own art director, without someone coming in and changing his work.
Students should do their own work on the side, even in school. Don’t leave it up just to your teachers, do your own assignments and your own work even in school. The students who do that tend to make it. There are students who go to school, and students who use school. The ones who use school see education as a tool and learn what they can, but it doesn’t define who they are.
When Will was earlier in his career, he didn’t have as much skill or confidence to do what he wanted to do. He was mostly worried about making a pretty picture initially, he didn’t worry as much about meaning. It’s different for him now.
Is all the work Will doing a “Heck Yes!” right now? Yes, Will loves where he is right now, teaching, working on SVS, taking the client work that he wants to take, and so on.
Jake gets job offers for the thing that he is already doing. He does a personal piece and then the job offers come in for that type of project. We can sell our own prints or do our own Kickstarters or Patreons these days, back in the day you had to be hired or you weren’t a professional illustrator. These days there are plenty of alternate avenues for selling the work you make.
What do you enjoy about illustration? What parts of the process do you actually love? Lee initially loved working with clients but now is more interested in licensing images, making something and selling it to individuals if they like it. You just make things to be as good as they can be. Sometimes the higher you go in client work, the less freedom you have because there are more eyes on it, more clients adding their say. It’s design by committee, which isn’t the best. Lee could still do a book project, but he needs control over the project, so that only he is responsible for the work that ends up on the page.
Right now Lee’s ideal style is magical realism, or slight magic in a normal world. He doesn’t get that kind of manuscript a lot.
There will come a time in your career when all you care about is getting work, regardless of if you care about the work. There are also times where all you care about is making lots of money by taking on every single project. Will was making a lot of money, but his work was lifeless and horrible. He physically burned about 500 paintings because they were horrible, and he never wanted to see them again.
His friend, Brett Helquist, was starving at the same time, because he was turning down everything because it didn’t fit his vision. Will was taking on every project without regard to artistic integrity. Brett eventually landed the Series of Unfortunate Events illustration gig, and Will realizes he should have been more in the middle and judicious when selecting jobs.
Lee has figured out that everybody needs to make a statement of what you want. Throwing out what you want to happen into the universe will bring the energy back to you. You have to ask yourself what you want to happen and then point yourself in that direction. Come up with a statement and go by it.
Jake has a Manifesto, which consists of:
Provide for my family.Monetary gain is important because Jake needs to make sure his family is taken care of.
Make good things.Jake wants to put good work into the world that makes people feel inspired or good.
Teach people how to do those two things.Jake wants to teach people how to make money making cool art. A lot of his projects and goals lean on one or the other of his goals, but sometimes it’s both.
Jake also wants to tell stories with his work, and enjoys sci-fi.
Lee wants to make images relatively quickly while telling stories, so he settled on book covers -- you get to move between projects pretty quickly while still being involved in storytelling. Lee asked his agent to do more book covers -- the starting point was not finding the market, though, but first asking himself what he wanted to do.
Will gets asked about once or twice a week to work on a self-publishing project. Most of the time the requests are from people that he doesn’t know, but sometimes it’s from people that he does know. He entertains them to be polite though -- a friend reached out to him about a manuscript, and he said he would be willing to work on it if he read it and fell in love with it. The friend asked why he needed to fall in love with it in the first place, and Will felt this was indicative of a disconnect in regards to how laymen view art and artists. This sort of query showed him that it was a no-go.
Will used to get into trouble by taking assignments that he hated. He now does everything he can to sniff out the true nature of the project so that he doesn’t get burned after signing a project. Working on something you hate as an artist is worse than digging a ditch. When you’re digging a ditch, your mind is free to wander, whereas making art that you hate is emotional labor that you are throwing away.
When you’re a student you’re in love with the work, but when you get out into the real world you don’t get your dream assignments, and the work you get is the work you get. The ideal way is to balance it -- you could take a day job starting out to pay the bills so that you can work on what you want to in your spare time. You could also take on menial smaller jobs while telling yourself that you will knock the project out of the park, and you can build your name from this.
Daniel started doing commissions of comic characters for fans. He did thousand dollar character commissions, images filled with details and every piece dialed up to 11. When people started seeing these crazy commissions, more people wanted those commissions and he could charge more. This eventually led to mainstream comic work -- he’s now on Wonder Woman. This all came from him doing spec work passionately and going all out on jobs that are less glamorous to a high level. When you have intense energy for your work, people will respond with the same energy.
“Too often, aspiring artists put pressure on themselves to make their creative work their only source of income. In my experience, it’s a road to misery. If art is your sole source of income, then there’s unrelenting pressure on that art, and mercenary pressure is the enemy of the creative elves inside you trying to get the work done.”
From Timothy Ferriss, Tribe of Mentors
Don’t pull all of your creative energy towards stuff you’re not interested in, it will kill your soul. If you work on the things you want to work on, regardless of if you get paid for it, eventually you will get paid for it in one way or another.
Will would have fought against that idea when he first graduated, but he realized that in order to really make art, you must fall in love with the thing you are making. Your art turns out poorly when you hate the project that you are working on.
Lee was asked to do a 26 book right out of college for Scholastic -- one book per letter of the alphabet. It was educational pricing at $3500 per book. He calculated it to be about a drawing a day. It was the first time he had ever come across this much money in his life, though. He was on the fence, because the money was good, but he knew it would be impossible. He eventually turned it down, and his art director was super mad at him. It was a good decision in the end and his career was better for it.
Here’s Lee’s go-to list:
Figure out the art you want to make -- the best thing you could make, the images you are most interested in and would make you most happy.
Figure out what your next best move is: do you need to take classes in that thing, or are you good enough to start making it and reaching out to people?
Don’t waste your time on things that don’t move you in that direction.
Being passionate as an artist is a requirement for success.
LINKS
Jake Parker: mrjakeparker.com. Instagram: @jakeparker, Youtube: JakeParker44
Will Terry: willterry.com. Instagram: @willterryart, Youtube: WillTerryArt
Lee White: leewhiteillustration.com. Instagram: @leewhiteillo
Alex Sugg: alexsugg.com
Aaron Painter: painterdraws.com. Instagram: @painterdraws
Daniel Tu: danieltu.co.
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