Grab Bag Comics

Giving Back: Surround Yourself With Awesome

2012-04-09T20:06:04Z

This is the last of five posts on the topics of my presentation at New Hope Academy’s Ask An Expert Day. Check them all out here!

#5. Seek Out A Community

One of the biggest aspects of college that I miss is the community. I was surrounded by artists for five years, in class and out of it. My friends were artists. Half of my roommates were cartoonists. Since we were in an academic setting, helpful criticism was everywhere, as was encouragement and inspiration.

What a shock it then becomes to leave college and lose that community. I still have a wide collection of friends, but now my friends are actors and directors and writers and teachers and administrators. Very few visual artists. This is natural because, unless you find work at an agency that employes a menagerie of artists, most companies don’t need more than one designer, and freelance and fine artists are by definition alone.

This is why it is vitally important that you seek out and maintain your own community of artists wherever you, preferably in the flesh in addition to online. I meet up with an ever-changing group of freelance professionals once a month and we exchange stories and helpful tips about our work and our businesses. There is no substitute for being around people who really understand what you do. And you never know— that community can become its own studio, or you can all rent work space together.

This community is good not only for your soul, but your business as well. Every potential client that has ever contacted me out of the blue did so from a recommendation by a current client or a colleague. Not every job is right for every artist, and being able to recommend somebody from your circle is not only good for your friend, but good for you too because that client may turn around and recommend you to someone else as an artist who cares. The more connections you make, the larger your community becomes, and the less you have to toil to bring in new clients and new work.

However, there is a wrong way to go about this. When I was in college, many professors impressed upon me the need to “network” — to go to functions and meet people for the purpose of creating connections between yourself and potential colleagues and employers. I hated this idea; it felt like schmoozing and made me feel creepy and desperate. And I’ve seen people attempt this: the girl who shakes everyone’s hand, drops a few lines about what she does, and moves on. Or worse yet, the guy who walks up to a table and just hands out his business card, says thanks, and moves on. If you’re good at it, you can work a room, you can develop a tight network of resources, cultivate a faceless following, and manage to be great at business. But more often than not, those cards get thrown away immediately; the girl leaves your memory within the hour. And the reason is because they are networking without connecting.

Networking, if done right, is the same as making friends. You meet people and talk, you find common interests, you tell jokes, you hang out a little while. I have found it is better to cultivate meaningful relationships with a handful of people that you meet in any business social function than to try carpet bombing the entire event. You will discover that having a community of 10 colleagues and business contacts that you’ve cultivated through friendship and goodwill will serve you better than a network of 100 people who barely know who you are, but follow you on Twitter. This reliable community isn’t just a business tactic, it’s a necessary part of being both a good artist and a human being.

So that wraps up my posts on my presentation at New Hope Academy. It took a little longer to complete than I had anticipated, but I think I’ve covered all the bases I want to. Let me know if you have any questions or comments. I’d love to keep talking about this stuff.

“Hero: The Musical” poster

2012-04-05T18:46:43Z

What have I been up to recently? It’s pretty obvious I haven’t been posting any comics or art projects, and my written observations have not been posted with much regularity. I promise I haven’t been sitting around eating Doritos and watching Netflix streaming all day, though I wish that were the case.

Here you see the first public image from one of the major projects I’m working on now. The Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire is producing an original musical called Hero about a guy who draws comic books. Logically, they need someone to do illustrations for the show, which includes marketing images, onstage drawings and sketchbooks, a website, behind-the-scenes drawings, and a full comic book that will appear onstage and be sold at the show. And that person is me!

I’ve been working on this for a couple months now, and this is the first finished art to be produced. The artistic director and I took some time to land on the exact style of the drawing (somewhere between mainstream superhero and autobio comic with a certain level of darkness to some of it). This is not only the poster for the production, but will also be the cover for the comic book. Each of the characters are based on the actors who have been cast in the show.

In about a month, we’ll have a website up for the production that will feature a regularly updated sketch blog, so you’ll be able to see a lot more then.

Giving Back: Love What You Do

2012-04-09T20:06:46Z

This is the fourth of five posts on the topics of my presentation at New Hope Academy’s Ask An Expert Day. Check them all out here!

#4. Aligning Your Dreams and Your Work

During my presentation, one of the teachers asked me talk about what it’s like to work for other people and create art for them, as opposed to creating my own work with no oversight. It was an interesting question, one obviously designed to get me to tell the kids that they have to get used to having authority in their lives. And its something that creatives deal with constantly— horror stories about problem clients are everywhere.

For myself, I see it in two ways: if you want to have complete creative control over your art, then you are a fine artist. Fine artists are different from commercial artists in that they are drawing primarily from themselves and their interpretation of the world. These are the artists that inspire us, who we learn about in art history class: Jackson Pollack, Pablo Picasso, Marcel DuChamp. That CAN happen for you, just like you could become a Hollywood A-list actor and make millions of dollars and choose your own projects.

The rest of us, however, have to do our own self-directed projects on the side and spend our days working for other people, which means tailoring your art to meet their needs, to fit into their brand, and to speak as their voice. As a creative professional, how do you deal with that? The trick is twofold:

FIRST, you have to be willing to be a collaborator and to work for something bigger than yourself. Sometimes, that something is simply a collective or a company. But for it to be something that you can really buy into, that can inspire you and others, it must be an idea. Hopefully a big idea. Are you just designing a brochure for a local school to get a paycheck? Or are you creating something that will help kids in this community learn by introducing them to new concepts? Does the law firm you design for just pay the bills, or does it help everyday people make sense of a confusing and labyrinthine legal world? The more you can see your work as being for a greater purpose, the easier it is to find the drive to do it. It’s also easier to see yourself as one part of the whole, working in collaboration with others, because you are all working for the same thing. And in the end, it’s simpler to ask if a design accomplishes a goal in service of the idea rather than if your boss or client “likes it.”

If you take this concept a step further, you get to the SECOND point: try to only work for and with people who align with your own values and desires. Find companies whose big goals and ideas are things that you believe in as well. I did it by specifically seeking out theatres; almost all of the work I do from day to day advances brands and an artform that I believe in, and that I’m proud to help craft. I still have my own projects that I try to squeeze in, but I’m so proud of the work that I do every day that I feel fulfilled. This also means avoiding projects and companies that you know will only cause you misery. Can’t stand the thought of advancing the business of a coffee shop owner with shady business practices or a faceless corporate cell phone company? Don’t work for them. You do not have to accept working for someone or something that you hate. Everyone gets stuck in a crap job sometimes, but let it motivate you to find the better job and the better boss.

So the takeaway I gave the class was that you can and should find the alignment between your own vision and values and those of your potential employers or clients. When you need to work for money, work at something you believe in, and be selfish on your own time. Strike that balance and you’ll love what you do.

P.S. This idea of aligning your vision and values was inspired directly from the teaching of one of my clients, a leadership consultant named Marguerite Callaway.