As I expected, my last post must’ve been something really special, because it gave me FOUR TIMES the number of views I usually get.
That’s right. FOUR VIEWS! Thanks for coming back, Mom!
Without a doubt, the most difficult part of attempting to get some artistic recognition is the feeling of yelling into the abyss. New post I stayed up all night to write? Crickets. Big batch of manuscripts I kissed on my computer before sending off? Hellooo–ohhh–ohhh-ohhh…. At this point, I might even appreciate some hate mail, just to know I’m not alone out there.
(Actually, please don’t do that. I’m not ready.)
I realize that part of my problem is my aversion to social media. Oh sure, I go on Facebook as a middle-of-the-night lurker in my college alumni group and some other special interest groups. But I’m an introvert with a small group of real-life friends, and there comes a point where it’s just not possible to expand my “friends” group. It’s simply too embarrassing. I’ll happily accept the invitation of someone I’ve met who reaches out to me, but reach out to someone else, when I have, like, 30 “friends”? Umm, c-c-can I be your friend, p-p-please?
No.
So how can someone as uncool as I am get my work out there, without seeming mercenary? Well, here’s my latest attempt: shamelessly topical subject matter, which I’ll now enter into all the billions of contests that exist on social media. I mean, cute animals in masks?
Whoo-hooie — two down! I have to say, I’m pretty darn tickled with the way this one came out, though that could just be the afterglow of a particularly difficult birth, tricking me into thinking my ugly baby is beautiful. And good God, this was difficult. A bowing flower! A spotlight! A HUMAN HAND!
Another year from now, and I might look back on my crowing with absolute horror — I hope I do! — but when I look back at my earlier posts to where I started, I do feel I’ve earned my pat on the back. And accomplishing this has already given me more confidence in my illustration abilities — this week I need to design a logo for a client who asked for “a tree of life with birds in the branches, surrounded by dogs” (someone needs to explain to my client what a logo is, I think), and it feels within my grasp, and fun! That’s HUGE!
One thing that was enormously helpful in creating these two illustrations has been the thumbnailing process. Since I was unable to take my regular painting class at The Art Academy, I’m instead taking their “Manga, Superheroes, and Comics” online class (the class is supposedly for both kids and adults, but when I signed up they called me to ask the age of the child. Umm…49.). Although the class isn’t exactly what I’m looking for to accomplish my picture-booking goals, it has given me some good critiques and a couple of valuable tips — first and foremost the importance of forcing myself to do multiple thumbnails. I’m a web/graphic designer, and in twenty-five years of creating mockups, I’ve never once sketched out a little black-and-white image of my page ahead of time — I’d just pick a couple of directions and flesh them out to pixel-perfection. How much time I could save — and how much better my work could be — if I first took the time to explore multiple possibilities before committing.
To give you an idea of how this particular composition came about, let’s look at my first idea. Until I put it down on “paper,” this was what I had in my head:
Thank goodness I didn’t stop there! Although the scene is supposed to be about the sheer happiness of the tulip achieving his dreams, the angle of his face doesn’t allow any emotion — the viewer is gazing into the abyss of his head.
I was supposed to do five thumbnails, so I soldiered on: Here I could at least see his face, but we’re so zoomed in on the body that I worried it wouldn’t read as a ballerina.
So onto the next:
Here I pulled back a little so we’re both seeing the face and the ballerina’s dress, but in trying to make the tulip appear to be bowing, I’ve put him in a terribly contorted position.
So, finally, I did this one:
Much better! I could’ve continued — the guideline was 5+ — but I was pretty happy with this composition and figured I’d be tweaking as I went. And indeed, my final illustration did veer from my thumbnail, in large part because my class critique revealed that people didn’t interpret the larger image as the imagination of the tulip.
In this case, each of my thumbnails was correcting the flaws in the previous one, but that certainly won’t always be the case — for my previous illustration in this series, my thumbnails were simply five different placements of the main characters.
I do hope I can remind myself in future to create a variety of views for each image, even if I’m already “certain” I know how it will look, and even if it feels like a boring and unnecessary step. My work will certainly be better for it.
It’s been a year since my last post, and what a year it’s been! Peace in the Middle East, President Obama back in the driver’s seat, that crazy giant fan they erected that seems like it might put an end to global warming — who would’ve thought that would work?
Erm… no. But we won’t dwell.
Looking back at my last post, I can see how it was a bit of a cliffhanger: Woman torches website of prominent organization… and then… nothing. Was she fired? Now living on the streets? Bumped off? Nah — as far as drama goes, it was a complete nonstarter. Got the site finished. Client happy. Got paid. Yawn. Plenty of other humiliations small and large since then.
But this blog is really only about my humiliations in one realm: “art.” And here, as with the world at large right now, there’s been both big changes and a feeling of constant stasis.
Over a year ago, I wrote about my classes at The Art Academy, and how after months of painting only in greyscale, we still had not yet been introduced to color. Well, that was a year ago! Now, after another year of weekly classes (up to, of course, a couple of months ago) we’re finally there! Color!
Well, one color. Brown.
One of the frustrating things I’ve found about classes at the Art Academy is the lack of a transparent agenda. Clearly they have a method. I’m now one table up from the kids’ table and I can see that nothing is winged: There are the same compositions of Dopey and the Oven Mitt, the same story about Jim’s sister and her school dance dress. But we, the students. are completely in the dark about where we’re headed. Thus it was that after endless weeks of painting and repainting the same ghastly grey head, my friend Becky finally reached the precipice — she was given a list of colors to buy and told to come in the next week with 16 toned canvasses. Oh, the excitement! We were all grey with envy. But alas, those 16 toned canvasses were fated not for great masterworks of color, but for the next stage of the mysterious process: underpaintings. An endless slog of single-color copies of NC and Andrew Wyeths, designed to break us down until only the strong are left standing. (Or maybe it’s to teach us about value. But I don’t know, do I?)
And now we’re in a pandemic, and I’m stalled out painting in one single, dark color. Pretty frickin symbolic, no?
I needed something else.
Have you ever heard of the Midnight Disease? It may or may not have been coined in Michael Chabon’s great novel about the creative life, “Wonder Boys” — at least that’s where I heard it. To quote Chabon:
“The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep.”
Not sure if you’ve experienced the midnight disease? You haven’t experienced the midnight disease.
Before these last few weeks, it had been awhile for me. 2016. I know that, because I recently dug up the picture book manuscripts I’d written back then, and once again those dang manuscripts started rattling around in my head like “a fly trapped in a Coke bottle,” waking me up in the middle of the night, and sending me to my computer early, early, early — this time not to fiddle with the story, but to attempt to illustrate them. Myself. (You did see Dopey and the Oven Mitt, didn’t you?)
Now, I’m not someone who really loves kids. I mean, they’re fine. Whatevs. But the picture book form is so… elegant. It’s poetry, really (even if it’s not!) — every word has to be carefully chosen, every image has to advance the story, every character needs to express his emotion clearly enough for a nonreader. What an incredibly fulfilling challenge for someone who loves both art and writing!
But I do realize that I’m not the only one who feels that way. Thousands of actual artists and writers want to publish a picture book. I’ve seen the work of some incredibly talented people who somehow have never managed to get published.
It makes my stomach hurt a little.
And I also know from experience, because I sent out several of these same stories to agents years ago, and heard… nothing. And looking back at them again, I still like many of them. I’m not going to be convinced that they’re not good stories. Sending them out into the void and getting no feedback whatsoever was enough of a crotch-kick that I stopped writing them completely.
So I know. You don’t have to look at me that way.
I’ve created the first of 5 or so illustrations I’ll do for this first story, about a dandelion with big aspirations, and her naysayer neighbors (that would be YOU). I’ll continue to post as I go along, along with resources and things that I learn along this new path.
From Mess to Master(y) 