Show notes
This podcast is sponsored by, SVSLearn, the place where becoming a children’s book illustrator starts!
Oh The Places You’ll Go! This is the season of people embarking on the next step of their life journeys, graduating from high school, college, etc. In today’s episode we discuss ways you can move forward in your creative journey.
In the last few weeks Jake has been visited by a handful of high school kids and college underclassmen asking for advice on what they should do to prepare to get a job in the art world. In response to that, he asked a bunch of his artist friends at Emerald City Comic Con what was once piece of advice they had for someone graduating high school who wants to be an artist for a living. To watch that video click here
To read Jake’s blog post: click here. Or keep reading since this show is a mix of Jake’s thoughts with Will’s and Lee’s, that’s why we call it 3 Point Perspective, of course.
A Career In Art Is Possible.
By now you’ve probably figured out that it is possible to have a career in art. Some art careers make more money than others. Some are more stable than others. But for anyone who has the skill, the drive to improve, a healthy work ethic, and isn’t afraid of the unknown it’s possible to get to the point where you can support yourself and even a family with a career in art.
In school there are grades and personal opinion that plays into things, but in the professional world it seems to sort things out. It puts everyone where they are supposed to be, the good people get work, the average people struggle to get work, and those that aren’t so good don’t get much work. It really rewards talent and drive and is pretty fair, there aren’t too many people who are super talented that aren’t getting work.
It also depends on what you classify as success. A lot of people land in art related jobs that weren’t exactly what they were aiming for but for those people they end up loving them. There are some who have book deals and who struggle to make ends meet between book deals, and there are others who struggle to get book deals but are really good at business and are making even more than those with book deals because they are good at freelance and are business minded.
There is a combination of being business minded and finding ways to generate passive income and those who are really good at the craft and struggle with the business side of things.
There are two sides to the coin if you want to really be successful as an independent artist.
This is mostly for independent artists. There are some people who have day jobs who work at studios. This is good for people who aren’t as business minded, you show up and provide a service to the company and they pay you for that service, and then you go home, and repeat.
If someone had sat us down and told us these things as a high school kid it would’ve saved us years of spinning our wheels.
1 - Focus on one path.
“Find out who you are and do it on purpose. “ -Dolly Parton
You need to be a heat seeking missile focused one thing. A heat seeking missile works by finding a heat target and then ignoring any heat signal that doesn’t come from that target. That’s why heat seeking missiles don’t just fly straight towards the sun when they’re launched.
Picking one thing to do does not mean that’s the thing you’re going to do forever. In fact, it’s very rare to be ONE THING you’re whole life. Steven Pressfield tells us of this truth in his book The War of Art:
“As artists we serve the Muse, and the Muse may have more than one job for us over our lifetime”
That said, you have to start somewhere, knowing how to do something. So pick something and learn what you need to master in order to get a job in that discipline. Learn how other artists got their job. Study the art of people who work where you want to work. That’s the bar that you need to reach. Visit the studios, meet up with the artists, acquaint yourself with recruiters. Do internships. Insert yourself into that ecosystem. Make it so that when you finally apply for that job, it’s a no brainer for whoever is hiring, to hire YOU.
As you go throughout your career you’ll probably do a variety of things. You won’t find success until you nail one thing and get good at that one thing and then can branch out from there.
We’re not saying, become the master of drawing eyeballs. There was a discussion on the forum about this, whether you should discover your personal voice and then decide which market you want to go for or to pick the market and match your personal voice to the desires of that market.
Becoming a jack of all trades comes from going down one path and focusing on one thing and then branching out. Jack of All Trades: they can design, paint, model, animate, storyboard, etc.
Pick a style, pick a market, pick an aspect of that market.
Jake’s example: he was taking art classes at a community college, and then he got a job opportunity and decided to leave and learned how to animate for 2 years.
When you pick one specific path, there are side benefits: he had to learn to draw the figure, understand dimension, shape, form, proportion, and style, because he was focusing on one thing.
On the other hand he could have said, “I want to focus on animation, and work on a comic, and do a children’s book, and try to come out with an animated short this year..” That would have lead to a lot of wheel spinning. Rather than going shallow in a bunch of directions, choose one path and really become great at it.
The side benefit to doing this is that whether you want to go into animation, illustration, video games, film, comics, or children’s books the skills you learn to do one of these jobs has applications for other jobs. If you get into it and realize it’s not quite for you, transitioning to another job isn’t going to be an impossible feat. Go deep in one direction, then you can be more prepared to transition to another thing later on. You can find work in that one thing and then you are better able to make any necessary transitions.
Lee had this experience, he was working on children’s books and then realized that his work could work for art fairs as well, he didn’t set out trying to do children’s books and art fairs.
You want to try and overlap your personal interest and what the market wants, this will give you a greater chance of success. You don’t want to be chasing a market you aren’t interested in, or be creating your own personal work in a vacuum oblivious to what the market desires.
The more you focus on one thing, the easier you are to hire. As soon as you get a job in art, that leads to so many things, because then you are working with people for 40, 50 hours a week who are just as good as you and better, and then you get to learn from them and with them. The sooner you can start getting work at something, the sooner you can insert yourself into that world.
A market is a semi-broad field: i.e. children’s book illustration.
2 - Learn your craft.
“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.” -Archilochus
It’ll take you about 4 years to learn the fundamentals of art and then a full lifetime to master it.
Learn the fundamentals, and most importantly learn how to learn. It’s going to take a lifetime, therefore, it’s so important to learn how to learn, because the most successful artists we know are continually pushing the limits of their abilities. They understand that the levels that can unfold in art are inexhaustible. They aren’t content with the art style they learned in their twenties.
Draw things you’re not comfortable drawing. If you’re bad at drawing people, draw people. If you’re bad at drawing environments, draw environments. If you are good at drawing hands but not good at drawing heads, draw heads.
Learn everything you need to learn about your one focused path.
Read books on the subject. There’s an amazing amount of information stored in these relics.
Find a good school that can teach you these fundamentals. You’ll know it’s good if the work coming out of the school is good. If not the school, then find a teacher who knows her stuff. Your focus at school isn’t grades or a degree, it’s skill, portfolio, and friends. Those are the three things that matter and are going to stay with you as you leave the school.
Learn from your peers. It’s not who you know, it’s who you help, so look for ways you can help others succeed, and in return you’ll be made better for it as well.
Find a mentor. A mentor doesn’t have to be someone older than you, just someone more experienced than you. Again, see how you can help them, become a linchpin in their system, so that they need you as much as you need them.
When you get into that training mode, you need to treat it like something that is actually interesting. Some people go through it like it’s eating their vegetables and it seems like they don’t really want to be there. Sometimes they put numbers on it (i.e.draw 100...
