Art by Melissa Bailey
What kind of art should you make for a living? How do you balance learning with working? Is teaching art the right path for me? And how do you learn a new illustration program like ProCreate? This week, Jake Parker, Lee White, and Will Terry discuss the pitfalls and struggles with working in academia, teaching art at a college level.
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SHOW LINKS
Lee has a follow up question that has to do with a topic from about a month to a month and a half ago- NFT’s. Bitcoin has recently gone belly-up and he asks if NFT’s crashed with it.
Jake agrees and adds that the market around NFT’s is slowing down. Cryptocurrency is what was used to buy NFT’s and now that it’s value is decreasing, people are opting to spend it elsewhere. This is just Jake’s understanding of the situation. He is not an expert on the subject.
Jake then goes into describing his most recent lecture and how it has well over 100 slides in it now because as he goes along he keeps discovering things he needs to talk about and make sure his student’s understand.
Lee calls this phenomena ‘teacher drift.’
He also mentions that the Children’s Book Pro course is up and running and that it will be available for enrollment again. They got a lot of interest in it the first time around and so they had to put a cap on enrollment but it will be coming out again at some point in the future.
Jake is very proud of the cover’s lecture that he’s done. Lee and Jamie Zollars did a ten week covers only course, so Lee says that he will be the judge of whether or not Jake’s course is up to snuff.
Will tries to stir up trouble by saying that one class is definitely worse but Lee shuts him down right there, saying that the classes are different experiences. Jake’s class deals with just picture books while what Lee and Jaime did leans a little more in YA lit.
QUESTIONS
Lisa asks- at 45 the clock is ticking.
I started seriously painting and drawing at age 40, and I just turned 45. With kids and other family responsibilities, going to art school is not an option, but I am happy to learn from artists online.
This is my dilemma: (1) I cannot decide which medium to focus on, and (2) I cannot decide what I want to do with my art.
I enjoy exploring different mediums. So far I love acrylics, watercolor, photoshop and ink. I have eliminated oil pastel and chalk pastel. But among those mediums that I love, I can't decide which one I love best, and I am frustrated at myself for not being able to focus on one or two things, because I keep wanting to explore all, and I feel that I can't improve as fast as I want to.
I do want to make art my career, and if I were 18, I wouldn't mind taking more years to explore. But at this stage of my life, just taking time out of everyday responsibilities to make art is already difficult as it is. I really want to make up my mind to focus on one or two mediums and make it great.
I also cannot decide what kind of art I want to make. Long story short, here is a list that I have explored in the past few years:
- Children's books illustration and writing
- wall decal design
- abstract painting in acrylics
- Watercolor painting of florals
- Fabric pattern design
- T-shirt design
- Nursery wall art prints
- face painting
Should I decide on which medium to focus on before I decide which path I should take? Or should I decide what I want to do with my art before I decide on a medium? Or is it normal to explore while I am still learning?
I see that successful artists/ art influencers always have one medium or style that they focus on. I am absolutely aware that I am all over the place. But part of me cannot help it; I want to try new styles and techniques, and if I don't, I keep wanting to know how it would turn out if I try it. It bugs me so much that I will end up trying it.
Lee is super excited about this question and, chopping at the bit to answer, he says that Lisa is a person after his own heart.
He knew people in college who have been painting the same way since then. They found their thing and they stuck with it, but he’s never been cut from that cloth. He’s done book illustration in so many different mediums-- pastel, watercolor, acrylic, digital, etc.-- because in his own edited words all of those mediums make him angry.
Acrylics, for example, dry really fast. And, depending on where you live, sometimes they dry even faster. Will says they dried too slow for him but the majority of the time their window of drying time is too short for Lee’s liking.
There have been advancements in the field that extend that window (Lee mentions Open Acrylics by Liquitex) but he still has not gotten a consistent open time with acrylics.
On the other end of the spectrum, oil paints take days to dry. And once you add the curing time on top of that- no illustrator has the time for this process.
He mentions this in order to point out that every medium has its drawbacks, but they all have their positive points too. He recommends that you find a medium that feels natural- he fumbled a bit with watercolor when he first found it but he really likes the look of it.
He also recommends mixing mediums in order to get the pros of each without having to deal with the cons. You can put watercolor on top of acrylic and put oil on top of that and you can bang out those paintings in a day. You can put a pencil on top of that to tighten up your details. You can make a collage. You can do a lot of things but this approach does require a lot of playing around and exploration to figure out what mediums work well together.
Sometimes you just find a thing that you really like and you stick with it, but if not he would think about mixing and matching but it will require some time for exploration.
Jake thinks you choose the thing you want to make first, and then you figure out and perfect how you’re going to do that thing.
Mike Rowe, an inspirational speaker who Jake is very fond of, advises you to follow opportunity and bring your passion with you. Figure out what you’re good at and what makes you happy and what makes you money and the overlap in that venn diagram is where you’re going to be successful.
She wants this to be a career- she doesn’t want to be dumping money into this and get nothing back. So she has to find that balance. She might really love portrait painting but she likes nursery prints too and people are willing to pay her for them then that’s what she should do.
Jake thinks that artists are really good at putting carts before horses. They think “oh, I’ve got to post to instagram” or “oh, I’ve got to make a youtube video” and, pretty soon they’ve got a bunch of posts but nothing they can actually sell.
To make a career, he advises you work from the top down. You find the thing that you want to make a career out of and then you do the stuff like instagram posts to support it.
Will agrees with what Jake said, but has a problem with the question in general. To him, Lisa is asking what market should I work in? That’s kind of like asking someone else what flavor of ice cream should I buy at the ice cream parlor. You can’t ask that. If you’re going to be an artist, you have to decide for yourself what you love doing and find yourself a market for that. It’s not something others can do for you.
When he first got out of school- he had to make money. His wife gave him a window of time where he could try to be a freelance illustrator, but it was a pretty short window of time. She would ask him how he was supposed to get work and he’d tell her about the postcards he was told to send out and how those were supposed to spark interest in him and his abilities. The interested parties were supposed to hire him, and those jobs were supposed to lead to more.
That worked out for him. He was able to make money (and avoid having to get a ‘real job’) doing illustration work. But, he did have to scramble for it for a bit. He didn’t have the luxury of choosing what he wanted to work on right out of the gate. He had to do what made money and for him that was editorial work. He hated it but it made him his career.
You can be successful, but you might end up hating it because you are going to get asked to do this same thing over and over and over again.
Will challenges Lisa to answer her own question and to think about what she loves to do. Identify the things that you love and the skills that those take. Do what makes you happy and that you have a bit of a talent at.
Jake says that the more narrow and niche and specific you can go the more successful you will be.
Lee talks about the cooking show “Kitchen Nightmares” (He calls it “Hell’s Kitchen” but that is a competition show) where Gordon Ramsey goes into restaurants and gives them advice to help them thrive. One of the problems that these restaurants have is their menu providing customers with too many options.
He compares this to illustration because Lisa has created a menu for herself of too many different options and she needs to pick just one thing to focus on so she can be successful. Too many choices can be overwhelming. She needs to dial it back.
“If you try to be everything for everyone you’ll end up being nothing to no one.” - Will Terry
Tanya asks- Forget work! I want to learn illustration.
"I've worked as a layout designer, tabletop games designer and a fantasy map illustrator for years, and am now finally dedicating more to illustration, something I always had difficulties for many reasons, but was always my passion. I've been dedicated to learning illustration at svs and practicing every day. But the issue is, how to harmonize learning vs working, especially when all I want is to spend the entire day practicing drawing and illustration? I am not at a point where I feel I should be accepting work in illustration. I've done it already, cause I'm crazy like that and it seems someone is crazy to hire me for a children's book with my lack of portfolio, but truth is, my skill level makes the work very stressful, because I end up having drawing/composition/painting situations that I'm not ready to deal with. And, of course, for the skill level I have, the payment is not that much.
Basically, how do you manage to change your career when you still have to sustain yourself while learning the new skill.
Just a side note, I also can't push myself too hard right now because due to both work and personal reasons, I had 3 burnouts last year, or 3 big peaks of the same one, I think can also be seen that way, and I'm slowly recovering, so I can't overload myself too much
To finish, thank you so much for all you do at SVS! No words are enough to express how much SVS is helping me change my life regarding illustration. SVS was the big blessing of the year for me."
Will says that the way he handled those transition periods between harder/outdated/different work and the stuff he actually wanted to do was not fun. He had to keep working on the older stuff as he slowly brought in the new stuff. The foundation for his work was changing, but he couldn’t just drop one thing and move to the next without knocking out the floor on which he was standing.
He had to keep doing the work that he didn’t like because it paid him and he had a family to feed, and he had to do that work while changing his portfolio into something that would get him children’s book jobs.
There is no easy answer and, for him at least, that’s the answer. Introduce change slowly so that you always have something underneath you.
Will used to talk to his students about how in school he used to party it up when Friday night rolled around. He was always looking for something fun to go do after class, but that’s not the way the people who were excelling would behave. They were constantly working and doing what needed to be done.
Constantly working and killing himself doing the hard stuff really paid off for him. Now he feels great about his position in life because he has time to do things the way that he likes.
Lee comments that if she’s already a pro illustrator (and it sounds like she is) then this transition is going to be fairly quick. Lisa (the asker of the first question) still needs to figure a lot out about her market and her medium. Tanya probably has that stuff sorted out, and so her transition process is probably going to be faster and smoother.
Lee thinks that Will’s advice is spot on and would add one more thing to it. He recommends finding a way to reduce your costs and workload so you can do both. You can have a part time job that makes you money and a part time job that teaches you the new skills you want to add to your repertoire. Once you’ve learned the skills necessary to make it in your new field you can quit the first job because the one you really want is now the one that makes money.
Expecting to be able to jump right into what you want-- working 40 hours a week, providing for a family and other living expenses-- is just not realistic. There’s going to have to be some give and take between the work that you want and the work that you need.
Jake’s transition from animation to illustration was less about learning the skills to be successful in a new field (because the skills needed in each are very similar) and more about changing an animation portfolio to an illustration one.
He read a YouTube comment that said “two years and a plan is all it takes.” This pearl of wisdom came to the commenter by way of their entrepreneur friend. Two years and a plan and you can get anything going that you need to.
In two years, Jake had done two graphic novels. His plan was to shift from animation to publishing. It took two years of grinding and late nights but he was eventually able to make that shift.
He took to teaching to bridge the gap financially as he was making that shift and altering his portfolio so that it would get him the jobs he wanted. His teaching helped him downsize his life like Lee mentioned while still letting him make the income that he needed-- his first few publishing jobs did not pay that well.
This kind of work is never easy and the evolution of your wants and needs both in work and life will never let you take shortcuts. You have to face your problems head on. You can’t go under or around them- you have to go through them.
Lee and his wife have a saying about how transitions are never easy. You kind of just have to brace for turbulence because it’s coming whether you want it to or not.
Jake compares it to a caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly. When caterpillars go into their chrysalis- they dissolve. Their cellular structure breaks down and they turn into what is basically bug gut soup. It is from this collection of cells that the caterpillar turned butterfly builds itself a new body- little by little, deciding which cells need to be legs or antennae or wings.
Can you imagine how painful that would be? Changing from your caterpillar form to your butterfly one is going to be hard. There will be a time when it’s rough and gooey and messy, and you really just have to roll with it because your final evolution will be so much better than anything you could ever imagine.
PS. You can watch these podcasts on YouTube. You’ll get to watch Jake, Lee, and Will talk and you’ll get to see Lee’s beard that he’s growing so he’ll have a face warmer when he goes to Colorado.
Nancy asks- teaching art and working freelance
Thank you for creating the children's book pro course. I've already learned a lot in the past week. All three of you have taught illustration in higher ed. I'm thinking of pursuing that route after my MFA in illustration. In your experience what helped you to get hired? What were your expectations of teaching initially and how did that change during your teaching career? Is it viable to be a freelancer and teach at the same time with teaching obligations? I appreciate the podcast and all the advice has been amazing!
Will says that having a good portfolio will help you get hired. He knows a lot of people who have their MFA but struggle to get jobs because they don’t have the portfolio to back up their degree.
When you apply to teach illustration you need to have a versatile skill set. The school that you’ll be working for isn’t looking for one-trick ponies. They want to know that they can plug you in where they need you whether that be in figure drawing or illustration 1 and be confident that you can teach that class.
You have to have a portfolio that demonstrates mastery of lots of skills.
His answer to the other part of the question (can freelance and teaching careers cohabitate) is no, not really. He doesn't know anyone who has a full time teaching career and a freelance business. With the exception of Lee (who apparently did that for 12 years) who is a workaholic and an anomaly.
In Lee’s experience, people leave freelancing for teaching because of 1) the consistent paycheck and 2) teaching really does demand a lot of your brain space and time.
It’s a good gig if you can get it and if you can control it. Lee basically went to his bosses with an ultimatum. They hired him as a teacher who was also a full time illustrator, and he wouldn’t have time to do both if he was always going to planning meetings. He went to them and told him that if it was more importent to them that he attend meetings then do what he was hired to do and they put it down in writing and signed it he would quit working in the field.
Will has spoken with people who’ve tried to do freelance work and be teachers at the same time, and all of them have complained about the time constraints. When you are a teacher you are required to go to all sorts of meetings and teach all sorts of classes, and you are also required to be a working illustrator because you become irrelevant in your field if you are not also working as an artist. Trying to do both illustrating and teaching is burning the candle at both ends.
This causes teachers to pretend to have a career- going to a workshop doesn’t necessarily count. They jump through a ridiculous array of hoops in order to maintain the facade.
Lee was rather passive-aggressive in his dealings with the administration where he taught. He was put in charge of the service committee that was supposed to decorate the walls of his department. In response to being forced to head a committee when he’d already said no, Lee stepped up, just not quite in the way the school wanted him too.
He went to the school printers and printed off pictures of his students' work in the biggest size he could and spent four days pinning those all over the walls. He finished on Sunday and he got a message on Monday asking him to stop because the print job had cost the school so much money in paper and ink.
Will asked if the other two have noticed that getting an MFA hurts some people’s careers. He noticed that MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) programs can sometimes hurt a person’s art style and effectively kill their career.
Lee has an MFA in illustration and he just used it as a way to focus and transition. It was okay, he says, but he did spend a lot of money on a transition period when he didn’t really have to.
His program was taught by illustrators like Murry Tinkleman and Gary Kelley. It was a rare program because most illustration MFA’s are not taught by illustrators.
Lee thinks the full-time teaching position is on its way out. Why would you hire a full-time teacher when you can hire a bunch of adjunct professors to teach the same amount of classes for so much less? The quality of education will go down but people are still signing up for the class so who cares?
PNCA in Portland OR has one full-time position and the rest of the professors are adjuncts who are all hoping for the full-time position but the job never opens.
Jake brings up that this shift has been happening in a lot of schools in the past 15-20 years. And he brings up that with this shift in teaching comes a shift in learning. University is so expensive and it's saddling its graduates with loads of debt. Jobs that are available upon graduating are not what they once were because the amount of education and qualifications that you have to have in order to be hired for certain things has gone up.
He suggests an art trade school where the focus is less on getting an MFA and more on working and creating, getting in-field experience.
Lee attended a couple of programs that work like this out in L.A- concept design academy, associates of art, etc.
These programs really worked for people. They would take entire semesters off during their studies to come to these places and really focus.
There’s two opposing forces in everyone’s life: experience and security, and you have to decide which one is more important to you. If you’re a person who needs lots of security a freelance career is going to give you an ulcer. If you're a person who needs to just go out and do things you’re going to suffer in a 9-5 type work environment.
You have to figure out what your mix of the two is-- 70/30,80/20, etc.-- and go from there so you get a good mix.
Lee doesn’t recommend getting an MFA for most people but he does want to emphasize the benefits of teaching. One thing that he, Jake, and Will all have in common is that they really love teaching illustration and helping other people become successful with it.
The moment when a student levels up and creates a piece of art that they couldn’t before- the spark in their eyes of understanding and triumph is the coolest thing in the world. There’s something so magical about that moment.
Teaching something to someone else requires you to slow down and think about each step in the process. It can really help you learn more about your craft, seeing how someone else picks up what you put down can show you things about a subject that you never thought about before. So, being a teacher is something he would highly recommend.
Only teach if you really want to help your students. Only teach if you really care about other artists and genuinely want them to succeed.
Will relates an experience that his students had with another professor while at UVU (Utah Valley University). He said they came into class one day, complaining and upset about one of their professors. They had told them that they should quit because it’s impossible to make a living as an artist these days.He gave his students the names of some artists who had been out of school for a few years to take back to that professor and see what they said about them.
Apparently, this professor was just cranky and depressed about his own failure in the field. He was an older gentleman and wasn’t able to keep up with the times. He didn’t teach. He would leave his students basically to their own devices during class time.
Institutions are rife with people like that- who don’t really believe in what they're doing or who they're doing it for- and then there are professors like Perry Stuart. You could tell he was invested in his students because Will’s class often couldn’t start on time because Perry was still in the room talking with students.
He loved his students and he loved making art. Never trust an art professor who doesn’t love to make art.
Also, don’t trust those professors who withhold information. A good professor wants you to have all the tools you need to succeed and so if there’s a tool you’re missing and they can give it to you- they should.
Teaching creates accountability. You can’t teach someone how to do something correctly and then turn right around and do something completely different. When you teach you’re words are in your head, calling out your hypocrisy.
There’s also perspective that comes with teaching a concept to someone else. In breaking something down to its most basic parts you find yourself making connections and having epiphanies about concepts you were already familiar with.
Ellen asks- PROCREATE! PHOTOSHOP! HOW TO USE to create illustrations
Hi love you guys!!! So I've been a member of SVS Learn for over a year, you guys helped me so much on my journey to learning illustration. I am an artist like Lee, and in my early 50's til now learning illustration, not so much to be a professional illustrator, but to create and publish, or have published purely children's books. I and a friend have created a what I think is a very cute 2-D children's book, soon to be self published on Amazon. I say 2-D, because, I am still learning how to add shadow and light to illustrations. I know from watching your videos that it's not the "traditional" way to go, but alas here I am. Your classes got me through this book, and Yes, I know you have some photoshop courses, I don't know photoshop that well, but I do have it, I mostly use procreate, I am looking for resources to clearly guide me through illustrating using photoshop and procreate. Can you suggest for me and your viewers....where can you do that, there are lots of videos and it can be very overwhelming. A Great big thank you to all you offer to illustrator wannabe's I can't get enough!!!!
Procreate and Photoshop are always getting updated and any tutorials that are made can be easily outpaced. You’re not going to find a lot of updated stuff unless you go to YouTube. It just doesn’t make fiscal sense to sell a course on how to use Procreate version 9 when you know that version 10 is going to be released next year.
Also, Will adds, everyone uses these programs differently. He personally thinks that you should figure out what kind of strokes or textures that you want to make and you go to photoshop and make them until you run into a problem. Then you go to tutorials or instruction guides and you figure out how to get through that road block. That’s how he learned. He didn’t have a tutor or anything- he taught himself how to get what he needed out of the program.
He still doesn’t know everything that photoshop can do because there are thousands of different ways to get the same result, and there are tools that he just doesn’t need to use.
According to Lee, the best way to learn a program is to do a master copy- even if it’s a master copy of something you did.
Jake says to give yourself an assignment- make 5 pieces only using the program that you want to learn.
And for specific questions, like how to create seamless texture, you have YouTube. It’s easier to search for videos on specific topics than it is to just generally search something to teach you how to use an entire program.
Start with the eraser and pencil. Jake is teaching his kids the basics of digital media tools right now and he’s just showing them simple things. Here’s how you make a mark. Here’s how you erase a mark. Here’s how you cut and paste. And once they understand that he shows them colors and layers.
It’s the same thing when teaching yourself- start small and once you understand the basics then start the more challenging stuff.
It feels daunting because there’s all those tools, but it’s not. Learn the basics. Learn what works for you. You can do it. Learn one tool at a time and pretty soon you’ll have everything you need.
Stay away from techniques that you can’t do traditionally. Focus on keeping it simple- you don’t need all the fancy tools and stuff because chances are when you use those tools what you make will look more digital than you intended.
ALSO, there is a basics in Photoshop course on SVSlearn.com!
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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