If you follow my work and musings anywhere else, you’ll already know this but I’ve been burnt the heck out. Lately I’ve felt making anything meaningful is SUCH a task. Part of that is not having allowed myself true creative play for a long while - I’ve romanticised what it is to have that time, and therefor feel like the grounds for creativity need to feel a specific way in order to create something worthwhile. That pressure made me subconsciously feel it was never the right time to make anything - even when I’ve found myself with time.
I decided it was time to actively combat that, or at least see if that theory of there being a perfect time to create was true or not. Instead of waiting for fertile grounds for painting, I decided I would foster the right environment in preparation for the feeling of wanting to paint. I was in the city and I decided to buy a large canvas (side note: I didn’t know good canvases were so expensive - I don’t think I’ve ever worked on canvas in my personal work before). I decided to take out my Holbein Acryla Gouache (old tubes and the new tubes I recently bought on our trip to Japan), throw out a drop sheet and prepare my wet palette.
When I felt ready, my studio would be ready... Could I will myself into being ready now? I sat down in my sketchbook and sketched out some thumbnails. I took two of the thumbnails and did a quick colour study and honestly didn’t love them. I resisted the urge to do more colour studies, and to rework and blow up the thumbnails to scaled sketches - this obsessive process has sent me into burnout before and I also know it causes my work to lose looseneds - something I’ve been trying to retain in all parts of my process. Instead I took the canvas, decided to trust a process I’m unfamiliar with and scale up directly on the canvas. I didn’t transfer the thumbnail perfectly, but I still liked it. Then I decided to trust myself to go straight in with the gouache without hesitation.
I wavered between loving not fully knowing what I was doing and feigning confidence to feeling like this was all a big mistake constantly throughout this process. When I finished there were some parts I appreciated, but many that I wished I could have done better. I decided not to go back in and rework for the sake of my future sane self - my main priority with this piece was proving that art-making can be quick, carefree and fun again - and stopping where I did achieved that. The painting sat in my studio for about a week and half before I brought it home - enough time for me to pick parts about it that I didn’t like. By the time I was ready to hang, I didn’t love the piece even though I liked the process.
But then I hung it up in my bedroom. And like magic I suddenly liked it, at least in my space. It looked a little amateur because it is - I’m not used to working on canvas, entirely with gouache, at this scale and void of something with a cute face on it. I’m actively deciding that’s okay!
I still feel kind of down in the dumps but I’m proud of this piece and the journey it took me on. I’m happy I did it! I wanna do it again!
Speak soon okay?
Sha’an
P.S. This last part is a sidenote: but we’ve been living in our apartment for 6 months and I still love it. It is truly my happy place. I love our garden and feel so lucky to be able to visit it whenever I like. We made the most wonderful discovery a week or so ago - there are three apple or crabapple trees outside of our bedroom window - maybe getting this place was meant to be! I mean it feels right but is this a sign? Hahah, eagerly awaiting them to ripen up so I can taste our very own garden-grown apple! Fingers crossed the birds and possums don’t get it first!
Although I don’t consider myself to be an “internet artist”, I am definitely an example of a creative who has built a brand and managed to make a name for myself online. I speak about the internet, accumulating a large audience and it’s importance to my practice a lot in interviews, but something I realised recently was that I’ve never really taken any of you on the journey from first point of contact to conception and completion. One of my most recent commercial illustration projects is a perfect example of how publishing your work online can translate into real-life work so I thought, why not? Let's dooooo it.
Recently I had the pleasure of working with the boys from Kisschasy on a tee graphic for their farewell tour. I’ve worked with bands and musicians before on everything from merch and promotional material to album art, but this was different because Kisschasy was one of those bands for me. You know one of those bands you completely wreck the CDs from over-listening as a teenager? It’s one thing to work for bands you think are cool, but it’s another to work with a client who’s music you’ve loved for over a decade.
A few weeks ago, just after I had learned the band was embarking on their final chapter and I had wrapped my little paws around those e-tickets, I made an Instagram post with a bear graphic I had designed for my collection with The Club of Odd Volumes. Although it had nothing to do with the image, I paid homage to the band in the caption and thought nothing of it.
“I just bought tickets to Kisschasy's last ever show in Sydney - the end of an era! Album covers were something that really sparked my interest in illustration and design - one of the first things that made me think "I really want to make that!". I remember United Paper People being intriguing to me because in comparison to the other CDs I owned, it was unusually painterly and had such a rich palette. It's kind of weird seeing it on their farewell tour poster 10 years on!”
The next day I received an unexpected email from the band’s bassist expressing a mutual love for my work and that they hadn't realised I was aware of their music. I was ecstatic, and what’s more he proposed we work together on some tour merch - it’s not often you’re told by another creative you respect that they think your work is great, and so I was in. Coincidentally they had loved the bear image, but it already had a use, so I suggested they come back to me with some animals they were interested in having on t-shirts in a similar style. They came back with two, a bear and a tiger, and so I began sketching.
For me, sketchbook entries are just as important as the final piece because they act as a roadmap to guide and navigate you through the creative process. After getting down some ideas quickly I refined a couple of the sketches and sent them off for feedback.
In the end we went with the tiger and so I widened the stripe-type to make it more legible and less subtle, the only other feedback was that the band wanted to make reference to the fact that this was their final tour, and so we settled on ‘The Final Roar’. I photographed the sketches and brought them into Illustrator to start the digital leg of my design process.
I find that working on my freelance work can be difficult sometimes because of the isolation. Working at Cypha, I’m able to ask for other people’s opinions which in a lot of cases allows me to see things that I couldn't actually see while working so closely to an image. I’ve started to realise the importance of having another set of eyes in my freelance work-flow because of this, and so I asked Rocket to take a look at the design and let me know if there was anything he would tweak. He made a suggestion of rotating it a little, and at first I was hesitant because I had the final image at a certain angle in my mind, but after trying it out was elated with the change! Rotating it just a few degrees meant that the illustrative type became more legible.
I finished off my design and emailed it to a couple of people to see what they thought (people from all walks of life and experience levels - my boss, a friend who was a fan of the band and a friend who had never listened to their music) then, nervously I sent it off for feedback. I’m quite confident in my creative work, especially when it comes to the depiction of animals, but sending work off to clients for approval is like freefall, you don’t know how it’s going to end and at this point, there’s nothing you can do.
There isn’t always going to be a moral to my stories (you can breathe a sigh of relief), but I guess what you can take away from my experiences is to be open to sharing your creative process with others.
You never know who's eyes will land on your work or where publishing it to a global audience will take you, and
You're sure to find flaws and/or improvements that you hadn't noticed before (especially if you work in solitude).
There is little more valuable than a fresh set of peepers.
This project ran like a dream - I got word back from the band, plain and simple: they loved it.
