What I would draw if I wasn’t worrying about market and social approval

When I first thought about writing this post I had another title in mind: “What I would draw if I didn’t have to worry about market and social approval”. Have to. I had written it down not to forget it and it stayed there on the notebook for days on until something sounded suddenly wrong. Have to. Has anyone ever obliged me to worry so much about external approval? Nope. Why do I feel obliged then? It’s because of me, only me.

The idea for the post comes after a disappointment. In the past months, I’ve been working non-stop on my portfolio and on a couple of illustration contests which I had put a lot of hope in. I felt ready to give a boost to my job and I worked hard to achieve the goal: finishing personal projects, creating a book project, updating my website to show it to potential clients. I focused on what, according to my thinkings, could bring me more (and better) work. Sometimes even pushing my style a bit to get a more “marketable” version of my illustrations. Everything was ready by the beginning of February. I sent my emails, published the best things on my Instagram account, and then I waited.

 

 

By mid-February, I was still waiting to see the results of my strategy. Neither via email or social network things were moving as I had expected. By the end of February I had received a couple of feedbacks, none of which followed by a commission. I kept waiting – “waiting for Godot” my boyfriend told me one morning – and, in the meanwhile, I tried to do new things. But the less feedback I had the less I felt like drawing for a new project. I desperately needed an external approval and this was not coming. I waited and then I got completely stuck.

 

 

 

It’s impressing how external approval has the power to change the opinion we have of the things we do – and to give or take away the energy and passion. To even change the opinion we have of ourselves. I wasn’t getting any positive feedback and this made me think that nothing of what I was doing was worth the time and the effort. Even worse, I – the mind and the hand behind these creations – wasn’t worth anything. Day by day the passion I had put into my works drained and the energy left to continue, to improve and make new things almost exhausted. It’s at this point that I took the notebook to write and, after some days, I realized I was the one obliging myself to please others with my work. I was the cause of my own frustration.

I don’t know if caring about external approval is wrong. What I know is that it’s not good. And it doesn’t make any good to us. When I started drawing again without thinking about anyone to please but me, joy and ideas slowly came back. I drew whales and lines, and things that don’t make sense but that helped me get back on track. Now I’m still in the process of recovering but what’s important is that I’m back in my priorities. Here in the post, you see some of the things I actually drew the moment I stopped thinking about market and likes on social media. They appeared on the paper sheet and I felt light and free to do as I pleased.

Becoming an illustrator without an artsy background. Some piece of advice

Health issues have a silver lining: while forcing you in bed for days they also force you out of the working rush in which you’d been putting yourself for months. They come right in time – the body knows, they say – right when you started wondering whether you still had things under control, right when you started feeling bored and urged to recalibrate.

I was in bed reorganizing my hard disk, filling my new Behance profile (I read I should have one) and that was already feeling like playing Marie Kondo with this past year’s jobs life. Then came an e-mail: someone was asking me (me?) for advice. It was an email asking if I could share my experience – and, if I had, some advice – as an illustrator not coming from an artsy background.  

I’d never thought about it. My background – a bachelor in Italian Literature and a post-grad Journalism School, plus some years of experience as a freelance journalist in Italy (I’m telling you more about it here) – for some time has been something to set apart, not to mention but to hide shamefully like a past mistake you don’t really want to talk about. Then I made peace with it but still, I’d never thought it could be interesting.

This said I can assure you starting life as a professional illustrator wasn’t easy nor fast. I’m not even sure it fully started. There are still moments in which I wonder if I should take an extra part-time job to pay the bills when commissions are slow to come. It takes a long time to build an audience – meaning people who are interested in what you do, who even appreciate it and might want to collaborate with you eventually – and a lot of very hard work. Especially if you come from a different background.

For instance, I’m not someone who’s been drawing her whole life. I loved drawing when I was a kid. But as I started high school at 14 I dedicated less and less time to it. I drew during summer vacations, mostly copying others’ art or comics. Then I stopped for ten years, from 15 years old to 25, just a week before enrolling for the illustration school. So when I blame myself for not being good enough at what I do I also think that I’ve dedicated my whole self to this activity for only five years. Five years in which I had to learn everything – even how to hold a pencil.

Hence if I had to give a piece of advice to someone entering this field without any artsy background that would be: be indulgent. Don’t compare yourself to the others. Don’t compare your timing with others’ timing. If someone is already successful and mature at 21 or 22 it’s probably because he or she has a different story and 10 years of serious practice and research in the background.

Then I would say be honest with yourself. I remember when I’d just finished illustration school I was so eager to send my portfolio to publishers and newspapers. I spent days fixing my website, trying to look as professional as I could. I hadn’t realized what lacked professionalism wasn’t the website but its content. It took me some time to recalibrate my goals, looking for simpler jobs, privileging door-to-door promotion, studying potential customers.

Last but not least: keep going. Never stop drawing, creating, experimenting even when commissions don’t come, even when you feel invisible. It’s the only way to get more experience and self-confidence. Two things that will allow you, at some point, to go for more highly rated clients, to dream a bit farther.

This job needs a lot of time. A lot of patience. A lot of hard work. And I’m addressing this advice to myself as well.

P.s.: Talking about hard work and time, here’s Lady Gaga’s very inspiring speech at the Oscars. I liked it very much.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Drawing for Me: #theyogaseries

I rarely draw just for myself. I always have to find a purpose to my illustrations, even if they’re not commissioned – a story to submit to an editor, a series of drawings to turn into a fanzine, illustrations to improve my portfolio. Even #theyogaseries, a series of quick sketches of yoga poses I published on Instagram over the past few months (you can find all of them under that hashtag), started with a purpose. I wanted to participate to Ohh Deer’s Pitch a Papergang competition and, following the unwritten rule according to which success comes if you do what you like, I decided I would do a whole stationery project on yoga.

As weird as it may sound I’ve had a thing for yoga poses for months. I go to a yoga course twice a week and it’s true: sometimes I’m so concentrated doing a pose that it feels like I’m following a drawing in my head. I can portray myself while I try to find my balance on one foot, or while I hold up all my body’s weight only with my arms. I see where my legs are even if I’m not looking at them. I feel the pose and it’s a very cool experience sometimes. Sometimes I just feel clumsy and weird.

I thought it would be fun trying to tell all these sensations with a drawing. I started with more detailed illustrations that featured brief thoughts/sentences. I went minimal later, an afternoon when I was trying to get some work done despite a debilitating headache. The result was a series of small drawings of yoga poses as I remembered them. I turned them into a pattern and the effect made me smile. 

 

 

 

 

I then used this pattern for the competition and here’s what my stationery project looked like.

 

 

 

 

In the end, Pitch a Papergang turned out to be just a good excuse to draw only for me. No clients to please, no style limits, just me. Free to use my beloved black and white. Free to draw without any plan. Free to decide that a three-minute sketch is my final illustration because I want that roughness, that gesture, that dynamics.

I didn’t win the competition (the unwritten rule for success can be fallacious sometimes) but I enjoyed so much drawing tiny girls in clumsy yoga poses that I’ve kept doing it until now. I published some of them on my Instagram account and, to my surprise, people liked them a lot. I thought yoga wouldn’t be of much interest to my followers and that’s probably true on the one hand. But on the other hand, it’s not all about the yoga practice, I know it.

 

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P.s. If you like the series here’s a little gift for you. Follow this link to get the free pdf file to print at home your own yoga “Thank you” card.

36mountains, or Falling in Love with a Sketch

I’m starting this blog with the story of a mistake.

It was last summer and I was working on a project for 36mountains exhibition (here all the information about it). I had been asked to fill a concertina notebook with black and white drawings about mountains – free interpretation, free media. I took some days for sketching and deciding what I would be drawing. Then I started.

My sketches looked like this.

 

 

I had overlapped different layers of paper – I didn’t mention it had to be tracing paper, like the pages of the notebook – and I used paper scotch tape to be able to move every part as I pleased. The goal was to recreate the flexibility of Photoshop, a software that I had been working a lot with those days, while dealing with the fact that the notebook had to be “the” original: no prints were allowed on it and, most of all, no mistakes.

I designed my sketches with extreme care, calculating the exact position of each element: nothing had to change in the final work, it would have been just a matter of relaxing and copying. Then something happened.

Has it ever occurred to you that, no matter how much energy and precision you put in the final work, the sketch always looks better? My teacher at the illustration school used to call it “falling in love with the sketch”. It’s a kind of love, I think. It’s probably the lack of pressure, the fact that the sketch is yours and potentially nobody can see it; or it’s the feeling you have when you’re sketching. However, the sketch is special, it has a magnetic roughness and, unfortunately, is irreplaceable.

And here comes my mistake. I convinced myself that I could actually reproduce my sketch. The secret, I thought, is in the paper cuts: it’s this way of mixing drawing and collage that makes the sketch so powerful. I bought a very expensive spray glue and, proud of my discovery, I started drawing and then pasting paper cuts as in the sketch. The result was, of course, terrible: it had nothing of the plainness of the sketch, it was just a bad collage.

I hurried up to remove all the paper cuts but the glue was still there. It took me three days to dry it under August’s sun. The pages were still sticky though. I closed the notebook and put it in an envelope, hoping my addressee would be able to open it. Luckily she did.

Here are a couple of pictures of the exhibition (in the second one you can see people actually looking at my notebook, a photo that honestly made me feel relieved).

 

 

The notebook looked like this.

 

 

Needless to say: if you’re in Rome and you need spray glue hit the “contact” button and I’ll reach back.