Art by Carlianne Tipsey
How do you STAY in the illustration business after you start getting work? How can you tell if an art school is good? How long should a book dummy take, and are you slow or fast? And when is the best time to upgrade your Cintiq? This week, Jake Parker, Lee White, and Will Terry discuss the answers to these questions and give an update on Children’s Book Pro, the new course from SVSLearn.
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SHOW LINKS
Jake starts off with a follow up on the last episode (it was about scams and how to avoid them) by asking if anyone has been scammed since last time.
Will responds that he scams the scammers and Lee brings up that there’s actually a guy who makes YouTube videos where he actually breaks into the scammers computer as he’s talking to them and deletes all their files.
QUESTIONS
Jonathan asks, “How to stay in the biz?”
Once you’ve broken into the business, how do you stay in? How do you line up consistent work and maintain a career? He’s an illustrator who works mainly in comic books and has been published since 2011. He signed an exclusivity contract with one of the big two (Marvel or DC) back in 2014.
That contract has since ended, and during the time that he worked with that company his style evolved to be more painterly. He wonders if this shift in style is to blame for his lack of current work.
He keeps in contact with the people he knows in the editorial business, and the response he’s always given in response to his submissions is “this is great but not the right fit. We just need to find the right project to work on together.”
He’s been self-publishing and crowdfunding for the past few years--which isn’t horrible but it’s a hard way to make a living. He’s been reaching out to book editors and art directors to broaden his search.
He was wondering if the guys have any tips or tricks to turn singular projects into steady work.
Will wonders if Jake and Lee know anyone who is constantly turning down work because they are just too busy. He says that this is because they are just so good at what they do that people are fighting over the privilege of working with them.
He knows a few that have to be really careful about what they choose because if they get locked into a big project they may not have time for the other things they want to do (an exciting project, going on vacation, etc.).
Lee supposes that they (he, Will, and Jake) have all reached that point, and Will agrees with him.
He says that his first reaction when he sees questions like this is that the asker's work could be even better. It’s probably already great but there’s always room for improvement.
Jake shares the link for Jonathan’s Instagram in the chat between him, Lee, and Will. They don’t have permission to share the link.
Jake thinks that Jonathan’s work is phenomenal but he doesn't see children’s books or YA illustration. It leans more towards the fine art side of things. He says that if you want to get work in comics that you should post on your Instagram drawings done in a style that is a little more mainstream.
Keep the things about your art that makes it yours, but try to make it a little more mainstream.
Give them a taste of what they could be having. Say, you got an assignment to do five different X-Men covers and each of those covers featured a different member of the team. They could look at that and say “hey, this is exactly what we’re looking for.”
Jonathan does work in a very specific style - lots of wet media, lots of very energetic lines. Jake calls it artsy. And because it’s so specific, Will says, there will be a shortage of jobs that he will be asked to do.
Lee disagrees and sort of agrees. He says the problem is not how specific the style is. It’s that this style doesn't really fit anywhere. If he was asked “is this person a good artist?” He would say yes. No question. But, if he was tasked with putting this art style into a category (KidLit, YA, Graphic Novels, Gallery, etc.) he couldn’t do it.
He compares this to remodeling his kitchen. He’s looking for new cabinets and two people come to him, telling him they can do the job. One is a cabinet maker. That’s his business. His portfolio is full of cabinets he’s made. The other guy is just a general woodworker. In his portfolio, he’s got a harp that he designed and made. He says he can do cabinets but he doesn’t have any cabinets in his portfolio to show you.
Which would you hire? The guy who's proven he can do the job you need.
That’s his problem with Jonathan’s work. He draws well and is hoping that’s enough, that someone will pick him out of line-up and hope he can get the job done. He’s wanting to get hired over all these people who are already doing exactly what the art director is asking for.
Jonathan’s work does remind him of Dave Mckean’s graphic novels. Their styles are very similar.
You can see that a lot of effort and a lot of care went into Jonathan’s work, but it doesn’t fit anywhere right now.
Will brings up that if the Instagram account is being used as a portfolio, you are asking to be seen by an art director with a vision. You are not going in and showing someone your vision for them.
Art directors that are lower on the totem pole need to be led by the hand into using your work.
Jake compares it to surfing and how surfers talk in terms of being ahead, behind, or on/in the wave. He can’t tell if Jonathan is really behind or really ahead. He hasn't seen hardly anything published in this style. This style needs a visionary art director. Someone who’s going to push the boundaries of what their medium and audience can handle.
It’s one of those things where you either wait for a project to come along that is exactly for your style or you make something that’s a bit more consumable so you get more consistent work.
Lee thinks they should talk about the decision-making process for their hiring audience--the art directors. He compares it to the first websites where everyone had these over-complicated splash pages where you would have to chase an animation around the screen and click on like five different things to find what you were looking for. This was a terrible way to set up a website because people would bail after the first click because they weren’t finding what they wanted.
He says this is like the decision-making process for art directors because they will have ten books or projects that have deadlines looming, and they're going to go with the artist who is guaranteed to get the job done in time.
They want the thing that is the easiest for them. Show them exactly who you are and what they’re going to get for their money. Don’t make them click on/look at a million different things before they find out that you’re the one they want.
Jake brings up that it looks like Jonathan hasn’t done many comics lately, and he doesn’t know how recent some of his independent stuff is. What he would recommend is teaming up with a writer and doing an Image book (an independent comic). This will help get him back into comic shops and re-familiarize you with that audience and they with you.
It will almost be like a calling card. It will show people that he is still professional and still doing comics. It might lead to more work. It might show people that he doesn't need to work for the big two in order to be successful.
Lee disagrees with Jake’s point about making your style more mainstream in order for it to be successful.
Will would put Jonathan in the same category as Mark Summers -- an artist who does a lot of line work--he just does black-and-white scratch work. There’s an argument to be made for him being the best in the game.
When you compare Mark Summers to other line artists who use black and white and color, you have to acknowledge that there’s going to be a lot more work available for the color artist because they haven’t painted themselves into a corner in regards to their art style.
Being a niche artist like Jonathan or Mark is really cool, but your work space will be smaller because your target market is smaller.
Krish asks, “How do I tell if an art school is good?”
"As an 18 year old soon to be high school graduate I've been considering a career in art for a while now and wanting to work in the art department in the animation industry I've been looking for a good art education to instill discipline, gain connections and strengthen my skills as an artist.
But when it comes to the point of looking for a good school, it all feels so overwhelming, I don't get where to start or how to tell whether an art school or university has a good art program,
every website describes themselves as the best but I can't tell which one is the right fit for a career in animation art and visual development
love to hear you guys talk specifics in recommendations on both finding a good school and actual programs to pick!
love your work so much!
thank you:]]]"
Jake’s first step would be reaching out to your recently graduated favorite artists and asking them where they went to school. Tell them that you want to be you in ten years and ask for their story. He would do that to twenty artists. You’ll probably get a response from like five. Some will tell you “I went to this school and picked this program. Here’s what you gotta do” and some will tell you “I didn’t go to art school” and you’ll get some in between answers as well.
Lee agrees with Jake and says to make sure the school you pick is doing what you want to go into. Don’t try to shoehorn your education into a prestigious school that doesn’t teach what you need it to. That’s no way to approach an education. You need to find the school that does what you need it to do the best and work backwards from there.
Find a school that meets the requirements you need it to meet (it has your program, you can swing it financially, it’s doable location-wise). And that goes hand in hand with what Jake was saying. If you ask artists you admire about schools, they’ll probably recommend a good one.
Will brings up that not everyone is cut out for art school. He advises you to ask yourself if you really think you’re going to fit there.
He also mentions that there is a chain of art schools that uses celebrities in their advertising to bring in new students. Most people don’t have glowing things to say about their time there, but he knows a couple people who taught there who were really good.
To add to that, Lee taught at a chain school once. The school he taught at was super high-functioning but some of the other schools in his chain had a 0% placement rate. So, if you’re thinking about going to a chain school you better research the teachers.
Will makes another point about these high priced art schools and it’s a warning. If you start but you don’t finish and you don’t end up working in the field, the schools tend to benefit from that. The people who don’t end up artists after art school tend to hide that part of their life. They move on and don’t really talk about their school.
That kind of thing tends to be looked at like “oh, you just weren't good enough.” But, in reality there are some art schools that just take your money and don’t really teach you anything.
If you break down the pricing of the institution you attend and give everything a price tag based on how much you pay in tuition and fees, it’s easier to see that you might not be getting your money’s worth. You might have some really meaningful conversations with some of your professors that will be worth the cost. But you might only have five of those conversations and the price tag is going to be way too high for the benefit you receive.
Sometimes the price you pay is worth it if you get a lucrative career out of it. Will thinks that it really comes down to the student more than anything else. He relied on his peers a lot throughout school because he isn’t an auditory learner. He would rely on them to explain what the assignments were because he couldn’t listen to the teacher.
Lee brings up how the internet has really changed things and how you don’t really need an art degree from a fancy school because there are so many things online. There are programs you want that are taught by people who work in the industry, and they often cost a fraction of what the schools are charging.
If you are going to be a doctor don’t try to skip the degree, but illustrators are not doctors. They don’t need the degree to be successful.
Jake likes that he’s looking to learn specific skills at art school. There’s a trade-off when you choose learning at home vs. going to school. If you don’t go to school for art, the discipline has to come from within. If you learn on your own, you have to work to make connections. Maybe spend money on going to conventions and spending time in artist hot-spots.
Discipline and connections are a bit easier to find at school, but you have to weigh that against the cost of doing those things.
Will adds that you often hear about the teachers that have a few ‘pets’ in the class, and if you’re not one of them then you don’t get attention. Most teachers will not do this. They don’t try to divide the students. It’s easier to get up and go to work when people want to be in their class but they don’t separate students into groups of worthy and unworthy.
You have to bring the motivation -- NOT the teachers. The teachers will get excited when they see that you’re excited. He would have his students bring up what they worked on in class that day, and he would have students that would bring up and show him the same thing over and over again. This showed him that they weren’t really invested in the class and what he was teaching.
A teacher will end up spending more time and effort with the student who works hard.
There’s nothing that he can say to motivate a student to work hard if they don’t want to.
Jake used to work in an animation studio for several years. There would be people working as production assistants who would help make sure the studio turned projects in on time. Some of these production assistants were on track to be production managers, but some were hoping to make the connection necessary to become an artist. Those assistants knew that by working alongside artists all day and spending the day helping them, the assistants would build the network they desired.
Jake knows someone who went from production assistant at Blue Sky to modeler to animator. Maybe that’s the way you want to do it. Getting an entry level job and working your way up. There are hundreds of different ways to get from point A to point B here. Make your path based on what you are good at.
Natalie asks A Question About Time
How much time do you spend on a picture book project? How much time goes into each stage? How long does it take you now vs. when you first started? I’ve been taking your classes and in the picture book one Jake drew that red riding hood dummy in what seemed like seconds, but it takes me weeks to outline a manuscript. Is that normal or am I just extraordinarily slow?
Will assures her that we are all slow (Jake just makes everybody look bad). You just have to learn who you are in life. He references the movie Unbreakable when Mr.Glass says “It’s so great finally figuring out why you’re here”. We all just need to take solace in the fact that we were not put on this earth to be as fast as Jake.
Jake was looking at the books he’s done and he only has one or two that he’s really proud of and a bunch that he wishes he had slowed down on. Lee is the same. He and Jake were working to put together a lecture and looking through their past books just made them feel bad about themselves.
Will recalls an interview with two different Caldecott winners--he doesn’t remember the name of one of them but the second was Eric Rohmann-and they both answered this question, saying they wouldn’t want to do more than one children’s book a year.
This was ten to fifteen years ago and, at the time, it was pretty unfeasible for Will to do that. He was trying to cobble together an income based on different freelance projects. Rohmann and the other guy were Caldecott winners--they got paid tons of money per project and everyone was clamoring to work with them.
FYI: When you win the Caldecott, your clout in the industry skyrockets overnight. Libraries all over the country have to buy multiple copies of your book.
Will went to Eric Rohmann’s house once and he found that Rohmann had just spent the last two months experimenting with different mediums because he wanted to do his next book in a new style. What a wonderful place to be in! Where you have the money and the time to just be for a bit and figure out what you want to do next.
Will has never had that kind of time. He usually finds himself in the situation where the author of the book he’s signed onto is still playing around with the story and he has people checking in on him to see if he’ll still be able to meet their deadline after he gets the manuscript in a month.
Jake interjects here that he shared a studio with Will for a time and the reason he doesn’t have that kind of time is because he cuts out of work everyday around noon to go play sports.
Will agrees he does take time for himself, but he does give consideration to each page of a manuscript. He sees what will work and (through trial and error) what won’t. He makes drawings and pulls them out and makes substitutions and goes to his art director about it.
He can dummy out a book in a week or two. A dummy is a rough mock-up of the book. For him, he’s got his figured out and fitted in there. He’s got value and composition figured out to the point that he knows he can illustrate it. Then it gets sent to the editor and the art director so they can tear it up and change what needs changing.
Then he needs about two or three months to finish rendering the book. But, that’s on the quick side, he says.
Lee works on his books quickly but in stops and starts. A dummy will take him about a week. Then it will take him about two to three weeks to get it up to snuff enough that he would show it to a client. All in all, it takes about a month to a month and a half to get a book ready for its submission.
But then the book is gone. It's getting edited and reworked and Lee’s not really part of that process. He says there are about four months of him actually doing things (including painting) to get a book ready.
Will says was given a manuscript once and was asked to get going on illustrating it, but it was missing text for three spreads on one page. They were changing the text. They told him to just get started illustrating because they didn’t want to waste his time but he was working around three pages that he didn’t know the text for.
The fastest he ever did a children’s book was twenty-eight days. He had twenty-eight days to draw, paint, texture the paper, all of it. He only took time out of that to sleep and to take a walk each day for his back.
He made good money for that but he didn’t live that month.
Lee asks if the others think that it's fair that illustrators put in their contracts how long a dummy should take them, but then say if you don’t get back to me within six weeks of me turning this dummy in then the deadline needs to be extended.
Art directors will sit on something for months at a time, but your deadline will not change. They sit on your work for so long that when they do get back to you, you are down to an incredibly compressed amount of time to complete your contract.
Jake says the reason for that is that they are working on like ten books at a time. Will adds that they will get in trouble if they don’t get their books in on time, even though they were the ones who didn’t get back to you because they had to leave work early and then left on vacation.
Lee thinks that either the deadline should change or their rate of pay should because that kind of crunched deadline is not fair to the illustrator.
The fastest Jake ever knocked out a dummy was in 12 hours and he doesn’t ever want to do that again. It was one of those things where he was in the zone. The zone born of procrastination--it was due the next day.
Typically though, he’ll spend a week to a month on a dummy. He spends about 3 months spread out over 9 months to do the rendering with a quick get-in get-out type job in between because, as Lee mentioned, it takes a long time for art directors and editors to get back to you.
Lee says that it comes down to him having to do a painting a day. Every time he finishes a project he thinks that next time he’s going to have four days to do a painting but that never happens.
He says you really just have to plow through it.
They are still making videos for the Children’s Book Pro course, and one of the things they (Will, Jake, and Lee) are doing is going through the same manuscript (they’re doing The Three Little Pigs) and doing up to ten pages of it.
The purpose of this exercise is to show that three different illustrators could approach the same manuscript and get totally different results. There’s a lot of overlap but a lot of differences as well.
The point Lee was trying to make by bringing up the course is that he tries to live in that moment of uncomfortableness when you don’t know what you’re going to do. He loves the concept stage. He loves being able to say that he’s not making the dummy. He loves being able to come up with ideas because he’s playing and not working.
He says that we get on this train of thought where we compare how fast we did something to how fast someone else did and that’s no good. It’s important to take the amount of time you need to make something the very best that you can make it. Sometimes you look back at the things you’ve made and regret things you’ve done because you rushed yourself.
Tuirei asks- How often should I update my Wacom to a new one?
"Hi guys!
First of all, thank you for your show. Listening to you has truly supported my path to becoming a full-time illustrator here in Germany.
I have a question about the hardware for digital art. I purchased a Wacom Cintiq in 2016 and it has been one of the best decisions for my career. My Cintiq has served me well with no issues, but lately I have been wondering whether I should switch to the latest Cintiq model or stick to my old one until it breaks down.
Technology advances so quickly and I am afraid that I might be if missing out on some technical improvements, such as color accuracy or performance. When doing digital art, how often should I update my hardware? As these tools can be very expensive, how long do you think is their typical life cycle?
Thanks in advance for your insight and sorry for any typos!"
Lee’s Cintiq is actually super old. That particular brand gets a little longer of a life span. He would say five to seven years and then think about updating.
He does think the Cintiq tablets last longer because they don’t have a specific processor to go with them. He doesn’t care about the pressure sensitivity thing too much.
Will’s is a used 21VX. He got it in 2012, but there’s nothing wrong with it. He looks at the prices of the new ones and says that he just doesn’t need it. He props up the tablet he uses and is going to keep it.
Lee is against being a technology chaser. He’s not one of those people who get super excited by the latest update to a computer when the computer he has works just fine.
Jake’s relationship with antiques is that they either work super well or are terrible. There’s not really an in-between. He had the model right before Will’s but he had to replace it because his computer didn’t support that model anymore. For a while he tried using an older model of computer so he could continue to use his Cintiq but he found it wasn’t worth it because he couldn’t use the latest in Photoshop. So he updated all his stuff and now he’s probably good for a while.
Lee’s has a circle shaped crack around the screen of his Cintiq and he still uses it. It was eight hundred dollars to replace the screen so he said “no, I’m going to draw with the crack.”
Will thinks they used to make them better than they do now.
According to Jake (who got some insider information from a Wacom worker), Wacom is really kicking themselves for making such good products. The Cintiqs last so long and work so well that no one is buying new ones.
Just as a rule, save enough every year so that you have an account dedicated to buying new equipment every five years-- and even if you don’t buy new stuff every five years at least you’ll have that money if something ever breaks.
LINKS
Jake Parker: mrjakeparker.com. Instagram: @jakeparker, Youtube: JakeParker44
Will Terry: willterry.com. Instagram: @willterryart, Youtube: WillTerryArt
Lee White: leewhiteillustration.com. Instagram: @leewhiteillo
Daniel Tu: danieltu.co.
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