Writing Their Story

I’ve just posted a new project in my folio, and although I’ve got over 20 years of pharmaceutical work hidden away in a password-protected archive for all manner of legal reasons, this one I was able to share. And I’m glad, because it was both a privilege and a responsibility to work on.

We watched 'Still' last week, the documentary about Michael J. Fox’s life as a person with Parkinson’s Disease. We were shown the myriad clever, agonisingly secret techniques he developed to hide the effects of the disease for as long as he could. We watched the trembling left hand always given the task of holding something or gesticulating, and the way he exaggerated his already restless manner of moving through the day, in order to fold any twitches or unexpected movement into his famously energetic modus operandi.

It was funny, educational and extremely moving, and the moment we were shown his hands beginning to move I thought of this project.

Commissioned in 2020 by Saatchi Wellness, it was designed to communicate the effect that Parkinson’s Disease has on motor control through the power of handwriting. My job was to develop a set of authentic handwriting styles for a set of fictitious patients, each with unique characteristics, that are shown both subjected to the effects of Parkinson’s, and after treatment by the drug Duopa.

Although it isn’t suggested that the treatment returns the patient to pre-Parkinsons handwriting, their motor control is shown to be sufficiently improved as to render their writing readable once more, communicating a sense of a return to empowerment and confidence. The stories of each individual are based around achieving modest, important tasks such as picking up a grandchild, or dancing with a partner.

From the Duopa project, working with Saatchi Wellness: the patient’s handwriting is challenged. It had to be hard to read, but not difficult, and accurately demonstrate the potential effects of the condition. You can see this image in use on the website.

The conclusion to the story is the patient’s handwriting showing the improvement in his condition; he’s able to hold and read a book.

The two shown here are from a larger set we created, with a complete font developed for use on behind-the-scenes assets. The research and development for this project was extensive and very moving at times, and I cried a few times as I channelled everything I’d learned through my fountain pen into the words of the imaginary, but also very real, patients.

Part of the developmental work for this project.

A small section of the font I created for the Duopa project, including the range of variations that are possible within the scope of the disease’s effect on the patient’s ability to write. This is manifested in the changing ‘T’s, ‘U’s and ‘V’s shown here.

Some of the many. many experimental pieces created for the Duopa project, showing notes and adjustments. Each of these handwriting styles must be thought of as ‘a voice’, rather than simply ‘this is how they write’.

I do a lot of what might be called forensic lettering work — maybe that’s too exacting, perhaps ‘reproduction lettering’? — whereby I’m called on to recreate the handwriting of a famous person, or someone deceased (sometimes both) for advertising or TV, film or books. Some of won’t be seen publicly. I’ve also done a lot of work that involves developing handwriting for fictitious characters — in fact, I’m doing one right now, three different ‘voices’, three different ages and situations, with a different choice of writing implement for each.

An example of the specialist lettering work I do. Here I’m recreating the handwriting of the physicist Paul Dirac, one of the founders of Quantum Theory, for use inside and outside the book, using just handful of the extant references available. The age and style of fountain pen used were of great importance too.

It’s harder than you think to override your own muscle memory and install new clicks and flicks of the wrist, different angles and pressure and descenders, a way to dot ‘i’s and cross Ts that’s someone else’s, and to keep it consistent — while tying in any historical factors too. In fact, it feels more like acting than design or lettering work, and it’s a million notebooks away from calligraphy. Once I’ve got the writing locked down, I can get into that costume and ‘be’ that person for as long as I need, even switching between them day to day. (There is, incidentally, always a voice that isn’t mine that accompanies the words I’m writing.)

But I love the immersion and focus that comes with the task, and the attention to detail. It’s very different from the kind of lettering I might make for an editorial or a logo, where I throw my brush, nib or Apple Pencil across the page with energy and only the loosest idea of outcome.

If you would like to know more about this type of work, please get in touch. In fact — write me a letter; I’m far more likely to respond…and who knows, maybe I’ll do it in your own handwriting.

Images shared with the permission of Saatchi Wellness.

https://www.duopahcp.com

A Logo for Maine.

My new logo for the US state of Maine has begun to roll out in the last few weeks, and it's a thrill to see it.

It began in early January 2023 with an email from creative Jordan and VP Neal at Miles Partnership, asking if I'd like to have a stab at updating the logo for the state of Maine. 

Now all I know about Maine can be summed up in three points: 1. Our friend, the poet Andrea Gibson was born there. 2. It's huge and beautiful, and 3. Stephen King!!! 

I said yes and within a couple of weeks was hashing out some proposals. The Miles team had made my job easier by carrying out acres of research with the inhabitants of the state itself. They'd got a stack of feedback on what they liked about the original logo, what they didn't; what living in Maine meant to them, what they thought of when they pictured their home state, and hundreds more answers to in-depth and nuanced, thoughtful questions.

The existing Maine logo looked like this:

The core feedback was that the logo felt "outdated, bland and uninspiring, particularly among Maine visitors". When asked what the new logo should be, the answer that came back most often was "bold" - but with the near-unanimous caveat that it should nod to the traditional nature of Maine.

The findings came to me in an extremely thorough 45-page document which formed the backbone of my thinking. 'Organic, craft, charm, outdoors, nature, wood, trees, breathtaking, rustic, authenticity and sustainability' were other pivotal words which came out of the research.

And that was plenty for me to go on! I had the final logo in mind almost immediately, but presented lots of different looks to the team. After all, sometimes it's just as useful for the client to see what they DON'T want as it is for them to see what they do. All but a couple were analogue, made with ink, crayons, pens and pencil on paper, I was keen to communicate movement with solidness and history; contemporary energy with tradition. 

A still from one of the WIP videos I made while working on the logo.

While wax crayon, used to make a resist version.

Here are a few of those initial suggestions - there were a LOT. I do this because, at this stage, the client could spot ANYTHING in an idea which triggers the final outcome - so I tend to leave very little out; I guess you could call this a brainstorming of sorts:

Preferred options were 'put to research', and after a few weeks a trio was isolated for further tinkering. And by tinkering, I mean the start of the fine-tuning process - without knowing which the final choice might be. This is things like examining the weight of letters, kerning, trying different options on 'e's and capitals, whether on a single line or a little bumpier, like this exploration:

Often at this point the client's curious to see how my very analogue work will look when transformed into vector art (presuming we're working with art that wasn't created digitally to begin with).

This isn't a 'click the button' or 'apply that filter' step - rather, I do this via a series of processes which sensitively and carefully change the format of the piece (from pixel to vector) without changing its nature, preserving its human warmth, detail and idiosyncrasy. Without blowing any of my hand-sketched  trumpets, it's often why people come to me for logos; in a sea of Canva-generated/off-the-shelf/plastic-looking logos they want something very obviously crafted by human hands, but which functions in every format, at every size, and performs in any technical, screen or print environment. I've been doing that a long time, and it's surprising how that need has remained consistent.

Here you can see a close-up of a very carefully vectorised version of this inky option:

This option from the second round of ideas was chosen to get through the third round. Made with simple, freely-drawn capitals in ink on paper, it worked as well in colour as it did greyscale and vector:

And as a partner suggestion to this I made a version created separately with ink and pencil to hint at cut wood, wood and trees being things that emerged as strongly connected to Maine and eliciting affectionate responses in their research group. Here's the raw art before any refinements:

Watch some of the process here:

At this point, I got The Tingles - when you know underneath you've cracked it, and you desperately want the client to agree with you...but you daren't hope too hard, because your experience tells you it can go completely in another direction! But those Tingles came when I played with these layered and coloured versions. Suddenly, I could see this on all the signs, the site, the products, the T shirts...

The team liked it. But there was one more thing. I was aware from the start that when I said the word 'Maine' in my mind, it was actually 'Maine.' - with the full stop. I couldn't stop seeing it this way. I felt it communicated a confidence and pride in this single-syllable name, and suggested that the state was everything you could need - the full stop made it both a name and a statement. 

"Where you from?" 

"Maine."

And so it was added to the next round. Would they go for this punctuatively unusual choice?

The answer was YES. And so, over the course of six months, our logo was born, and final artwork was prepared in myriad formats and al the colours of the new Maine branding guidelines. In its final iteration, the logo is currently working its way over the next few months onto hundreds of products, signs, printed materials and online platforms, but you can see it right away on the visitMaine website, and on these satisfying examples.

To my delight, as well as embracing my 'thing' for the full stop, they're using both the flat-colour version and the textured version together, deploying them in different environments, and that in itself is unusual. I applaud their boldness!

If you live in Maine and you see it about, please take a snapshot and send it to me! "Out in the wild" has become a cliché, but only because the thrill of seeing one's work out doing the job it was created for never gets boring. 

Not for me, anyway.

Thank you to the brilliant team at Miles Partnership in Denver for bringing me on to do this prestigious project, especially VP Neal and Jordan, and thanks to my agency BAreps for their patient, professional cheerleading!

Thank you Marcia Willett: all those books, and all those titles.

I might do all sorts of fancy stuff as part of this job, but I've always done simple lettering for book covers - hundreds of them, many of which I never post.

I love doing them though, especially this ongoing series for Marcia Willett's books, playing my small part in these massively bestselling books.

Today, on the day her most recent book is published - Christmas At The Keep - I learn that she has died. She was amazingly prolific and adored by her readers, and I truly will miss working on her titles.

You’re too expensive, Sarah.

I've done LOADS of book covers - here are a few!

Here’s how a conversation went last week about a new book cover. I’m posting it because it’s not the first of its type, and its tone bothered me.

It’s a neat encapsulation of the kind of conversation I’m having more and more, but I wonder if you, as reader, also see the client’s emphasis on me charging too much, rather than the client offering too little.

Friendly and professional, it’s message beneath the words that I’m concerned about.

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I was taught from the very beginning that the client approaches the illustrator (or photographer, or designer), outlines what they would like doing, and asks for a quote or estimate. The artist then generates a proposed figure, often with a scope of work and terms, which the client may accept, reject, or negotiate on.

I don’t remember me ever telling my builder what he should charge for the job I’ve asked him to do, told my accountancy firm they should actually halve their bill, nor listened to an estimate from my car mechanic and told him that no, actually £200 is all I’ve got, so.

But almost thirty years into this industry, am I out of date with this line of thinking?

In this climate is it a case of ‘take anything going’ and I should be grateful?

Are the days of determining your own fees gone, or am I right to adhere to a career-long policy of curating my own fee structure?

Could an AI system make this cover for zero pence instead, and should I therefore just be happy I was approached?

I want to know what you think!

The conversation is lightly edited for anonymity and brevity (and none of the books in the picture above are related to this conversation, to be clear).

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Client:

We’d like you to do this book cover. You’ve already worked on some covers for this author.
We will have a think about what the cover art should include but perhaps this brief summary already gives you some ideas. As the book is publishing in June we’d like to send you the art brief in early December and have the artwork for January 2023: you can let us know what is possible on your end. We can offer a fee of £500.

I look forward to hearing from you and hope that we will have the opportunity to work together.

Note that there’s no mention of whether that £500 is expected to cover a buy-out, any particular set of usages or geographical applications— so it can’t be assessed as appropriate or not by the artist.

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Me:

Thanks very much for emailing. Nice to hear from you! I apologise for the delay as I was travelling for much of Wednesday and all day yesterday.

The book sounds wonderful and it would be great to keep the continuity by working on the cover for this author. I really enjoyed illustrating their previous books.

My fees for book covers however are much higher than the one you propose, particularly for a wraparound. Industry standard rates have admittedly not kept pace with inflation terribly well, but still sit around the £1000-£2000 mark and for the US, in the region of $2000-$4500.

Let me know if your fee is a suggested ‘starter for ten’ on which we can negotiate, or whether that is all you have available for this. I would love to do it!

All the best, Sarah.

Sounds positive and flexible — doesn’t it? Hm, maybe not!

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         Client:

We appreciate that you charge a higher rate and we are sorry but we cannot match this.

Thanks for getting back to me so swiftly and again, thank you for creating fantastic covers for [publisher’s name].

I charge a higher rate than — than what? Their other artists? Than what they’re used to paying? Higher than the amount they think is fair? 
OK; a little context might be required.

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Me:

Thanks for the reply!

Just to give context for my email, [publisher] paid $3000 for their cover for [title of book by the same author] in 2018, and the bill for title modifications to the cover for [another book by the same author] was £100 in 2019. It was the same for similar title modifications to turn the cover of [book] into [different edition].

So £500 for a full wraparound cover is not an appropriate fee, and although I’m fully aware that someone else (perhaps, but not necessarily, a less experienced illustrator) might eagerly take this on, I’m almost thirty years into the industry and know how long a good wraparound cover takes, and I also know the experience and expertise I bring to my covers.

I do understand that you are a smaller-sized publisher, and I’m sorry it didn’t work out on this one, as I feel quite strongly about cover continuity for author series and presumably this one will look completely different.

But I feel more strongly about fees being structured properly, and I always take the trouble to expand upon a fee if it is ever rejected, so my clients know I’m coming from a place of careful consideration and experience, not greed or arbitrary figures.

Thank you for reading!

With this reply I realised I’d leapt into defending my perfectly fair and appropriate fees (which I don’t need to) while also being rather firm in my stance. (The urge to defend or explain one’s fees is often something that needs to be kept in check!)

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Client:

[. . . . . .]

And that’s where it ended. Fair enough, as there’s not a lot more for the client to say.

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But I’m interested to know what you think. This upcoming 30-year anniversary has had me reviewing a LOT of practises and habits, and there are more articles about these coming up.

Because if I’m to spend another decade or two at the coalface, there are things that need reviewing, dismantling and, as a result, rebuilding, revamping or rejecting. And those things, along with the unavoidable creative review and reflection, will shape what the next chapter of this long and busy career looks like.

“…but how long did it take you get your STYLE’?”

Created in paper and polystyrene for Arjo Wiggins Fine Papers, about 1997/8.

I do a lot of talks and seminars for schools and colleges, and one of the questions I get asked the most is “how important is it to have a ‘style’?” — followed by “how long did it take you to get your own style”?

My answer to this is not straightforward. Have a quick scan down the sample images in this post — they’re all from the same period of about 7 years, from graduation onward. You can see what was going on; I’d graduated with a portfolio of wildly ambitious 3D work, built pieces for the stage, costumes and models as well as poster designs and storyboards and illustrations full of lettering and ink. I basically wanted to do Everything — and, I would pretty much go on to do that, but for a young illustrator starting out the resultant folio was what clients described as ‘exciting but confusing’.

How would I get this (pre-internet) 3D work to them? It would all need photographing — would the client pay me for that? If they give me a brief, how do they know what they’ll get back — will it look like this, or this?

A magazine editorial from about 1998/9. This one actually got me a LOT of work.

I liked to build stuff, I loved to work on a large scale with pastel pencils (you can see an A0 example of that in the slides) AND with my inks, and I loved lettering (I won awards for it and was one of the earliest to posit hand lettering as a ‘thing’ you could commission in its own right — more on that in a separate blog) but I was also fascinated by digital; check out the work I did for the panto dames!

The Panto Dames! I did not know how to use layers properly.

Clumsy but wildly energetic, I was quite literally laughing as I drew them; they were real panto dames. What made people like this image is the energy and the humour — those things eclipsed the lack of sophistication (and lack of Wacom tablet) in the rendering. I only had a mouse then, so you can see that the work here was created with an ink drawing which was then digitally coloured.

I don’t get horses, at all, but at one point found myself doing a monthly slot for Your Horse magazine. Woah there.

And this was one of a series for a bestselling gardening magazine. I had about a week to do each one, and regular income was very welcome at that time! They looked the same as the flyers I was simultaneously creating for the pirate radio station I was working on.

I went on to have multiple magazine series in that style, so I suppose it could be argued that was ‘a style’ for a while — but running simultaneously, I also illustrated a magazine column once a month with built, almost set-like pieces which were photographed, like this (yes, this one involved baking real bread; real baby clothes and a real self-made poppet doll. I ate none of them afterwards, and the illusatration actually lasted for years).

All of these images are very ‘me’, but it isn’t one style and it’s definitely not one medium.

In fact, I’ve always viewed this multi-medium thing as a blessing, not a curse. It means I’ve been able to turn my hand to a vast array of opportunities that, had I favoured one style, medium or way of working at the exclusion of all others, I would not have been willing or able to tackle. It’s made me flexible, adaptable and, in a lot of cases, bold — the ‘sure, I can do that!’ approach (say yes now, worry about it later). A 15m mural in paint? Check. A 3D piece to illustrate a spoken word poem? Check. Detailed pen and ink drawings for a ghost story? Check. Fast digital pieces for an urgent editorial? Check. A set of animated GIFS? Check.

You get the idea.

Some people use pseudonyms to identify their different styles — an example is Toby Leigh who also works as Tobatron, or Tim McDonagh who also works as Avril15. Those identities exist to make sure you know which of their worlds you’re in, and that’s definitely something I’ve thought about over and over again — I even have the names worked out. But I’ve never actually done it…maybe I still will, though, and it could work for you, too, with careful consideration and enough work to hang under each banner — this is important, as clients will need to see that you’re well-versed and a ‘safe pair of hands’ in all of the styles or identities you put forward.

Personal work from a book project that I shelved. I might un-shelve it — though the artwork would look very different today! (the toddler in the picture is now a post-grad).

These two lettering pieces were created in an Edinburgh hotel room, in the middle of what felt like a little breakdown. I was creatively stuck, feeling at a dead end, and really upset, but was away for the week teaching degree students about illustration — so feeling like a massive fraud. My partner suggested combining some of the lettering I’d been doing for years with flowers and plants, and some of the darker stuff I liked to draw. Thank god he did; the work that nervously emerged that week saved me, and set me on the path for the next decade.

Over time, my ways of working all combined to create a body of work that utilises several different media, but hangs together as a look which is definitely ‘mine’. And the ‘mine’ comes via the movement, the energy, the content and the vibe, rather than the equipment I used to make it.

So I say, DO NOT worry about ‘style’ — if you see someone who looks to have a really strong visual language or colour scheme or way of working, they’ve likely had a long time to develop that. Maybe they don’t actually HAVE other ways of working — maybe they can’t! — or maybe they just don’t feel comfortable offering more than one look. And what you probably won’t see are the mountains of work that led to what you see in front of you.

If you're not driving a BMW by the time you're 24...

~ Visual Communcation BA (Hons.) Class of 1993; BIAD's Gosta Green site ~

My university tutor, colleague and leader of the degree course that set me on my path, Bal Nandra, died on Monday morning. That's him leaning on the railings, big watch, big glasses.

I write this with still-surprised eyebrows, because it doesn't seem like enough time has passed for this to be a reality. I graduated from Birmingham Institute of Art and Design in 1993, with a first in Visual Communication, a special award for typographic innovation and a strange and ambitious portfolio that no-one really knew what to do with, filled with lettering, 3D sculptures, ink stuff and theatrical vigour. 

Bal told me and my mate Mel, also on the course, that 'illustrators don't get firsts'.  Naturally that triggered our silent 'Watch This' response [read that in the Brummie accent we would both have had at the time; hers authentic, mine unconsciously adopted over the terms]. Actually, neither of us were that fussed about a grade, wanting to just do our best and find our direction, until at some point we were threatened (again by Bal) with the dangling carrot of 'if you keep this up ladies, you're on track for a first'. 

No pressure then.

As well as the cold dread of being summoned to his office at the end of the studio for unknown misdemeanours or feedback was the gameshow-feel thrill of being late to a briefing (think Squid Game rather than Countdown) which Mel and I were, often. Sometimes because we had done the obligatory all-nighter to meet a deadline, sometimes because we were skip-diving for that precious mineral 'foamboard', chunks of which would be thrown with wanton disregard for its cost into the college bins, or scrap metals we could fashion our mad built things from.

Sometimes we were late because we were getting a toffee flapjack and more tea from the canteen. 

And sometimes, we just hid because, being diligent students, it would be in our direction that any extra-curricular or industry briefs would come hurling, Exocet-style, into an already gruelling 26-briefs-in-one-term* schedule.

Bal was also the deliverer of sobering career advice. When he told us that we could consider ourselves failures if we weren't driving a BMW by the time we were 24, we simultaneously laughed in his face and trembled with horror; we knew that was a horrifically unlikely scenario for either of us. At 24, I had a yellow 2CV that my boyfriend had cheerfully passed onto me in lieu of a weed debt someone couldn't pay him, and Mel had a Micra. Both were sound motors, but not German, and not fast. When I picked Bal up in my BMW to go for cake and coffee with our other tutor Mike Simkin, a great many years later, the joke was not lost on him. 

He was funny and strict and stern, extremely ambitious for every one of us and, though we didn't really appreciate it at the time, highly successful in his field and incredibly well-respected as a designer in his own right. He kept up this work till the very end, continuing his relationship with his alma mater Ravensbourne College, and I know I channeled a little of his knowing-wink seriousness in my own teaching, as I went on to degree and higher ed teaching sessions over the years that followed.

Thanks Bal. 

~ Balvir Singh Nandra / 25th August 1951 – 28th February 2022 ~

*True story.

~ Sarah, not about to look into the cost of a BMW, Spring 1993; grounds of BIAD's Gosta Green site ~

Speaking of illustration:

This is a long read. Get the kettle on, and maybe some biscuits!

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This week I gave a talk via the Speakers For Schools programme to a large, digitally-assembled audience of schoolchildren from schools around the UK.

Live from my studio I was invited to answer questions posed by host Charlotte, followed by questions sent in by the students as they listened. This is always my favourite bit - the questions an audience asks, particularly one composed mainly of children, are always the most interesting to answer, for they are often surprising, insightful, cheeky, direct, oblique or all of those things at once.

I've missed travelling to events, schools and universities over the last year, environments in which I'd be chatting on a stage to potentially hundreds of listeners, but it's actually been very freeing not to have to organise the logistics of a long drive or a train trip - and I've not missed the amusingly awkward fifteen minutes it usually takes to get my drive, disk or CD talking to a college PC system!

No; instead, I've been able to prepare, present and chat from my own studio, which means longer talks, and more relaxed environments for all.

I made notes for this most recent talk as I usually do, because although I never read notes verbatim, especially in a stage situation, I wanted to stay on track and not waste any time fumbling for answers. Since I typed them all out though, I thought it would be useful to share those answers together with the questions here, as they're things I get asked a lot.

I've added a couple of my favourite 'Q&A' questions from the end of the session.

I hope they're useful! Keep in mind that any one of these questions could be expanded into at least an hour-long talk all by itself, so these are skimming the surface; this part of the talk was only 40 minutes long. All the images are from the slideshow.

If you're interested in organising a talk for your own college, school, event or university, do get in touch.

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Firstly, please can you tell me how 'Inkymole' came about?

When the time came to set up my first ever website, sarahcoleman.com was already taken, and there were far fewer domain options in those days. At school one of my nicknames was Mole, both because of chronic short-sightedness and because it rhymed with Cole (another nickname) and Colehole (yet another), and because I was always dabbling about with ink and paint, the 'inky' part began to stick too.

So the obvious choice for a domain, which was only ever meant to be a temporary solution, was inkymole.com. It wasn't long before people started ringing up and calling me Inky, or asking for Inkymole - and so it stayed!

(and sarahcoleman.com STILL isn't available - it's owned by a company who buy up domains purely to sell to the highest bidder - a practice I don't approve of!)

Please could you talk to us about what is it like to work as an illustrator and some of your responsibilities?

- Hard work. It's always hard work!

- You may work by yourself - at home or in a studio - but you’re part of a team whose job it is to get work completed and often to print to a deadline.

- You need to be able to get the job done on time, on your own.

What are some of the skills you need to be a successful illustrator? 

- Flexibility and adaptability - both in terms of your ability to manage time, when you can / want / need to work, and in terms of your style and way of working.

- Perseverance and the ability to stand your ground; this'll be important in negotiating contracts and fees, and in arguing your corner when you feel a direction isn't right, or something won't work a particular way.

- Must be able to take feedback and criticism objectively - it's not personal.

- You need a flair for marketing and self-promotion without sounding fake or inauthentic. If it's just you say YOU! (If there's no actual 'we', never use it. Also: people KNOW when you're being sales-y vs. just talking 'in your own voice'. 

- Ability to manage cashflow!

Please can you tell us about some projects that you have worked on that have been really memorable and why?

 

There are loads, from very small projects to very large ones, and not all for clients. Here are some; they're all on my website (part from the one marked with a †).

- Try 50th anniversary 'To Kill A Mockingbird' cover.
- Illustrating 'Out To Get You' and 'Only If You Dare'† by Josh Allen.
- Some of my own shows; big logistical and creative personal challenges.
- The Playboy cover!
- Hillary Clinton's book cover.
- The 72ft billboard in Times Square.
- My July 4th Fireworks poster for Macy's.

What are some of the main challenges of being an illustrator? 

- Staying in work - generating enough to make a living, long-term and consistently - and not only 'a living', but the kind of living you want, whether for you that means 'I want a big house' or 'I need to be able to support loads of kids', 'buy a horse', 'have four holidays a year' or 'I'm happy with enough to cover my bills'. 

- Managing jobs and your time (you’ll often have more than one job to do at once, often for overlapping deadlines).

- Staying on people’s radars; it’s a very competitive trade.

What advice do you have for aspiring young illustrators? 

- Start looking for clients and work (experience) BEFORE you leave education. When you leave, you’ll be swimming upstream with thousands of others, all trying to get work. This means making contacts, doing interviews with people in industry, writing to them, maybe working for them (work experience), inviting them to your end-of-course shows, and more.

- Your best work is yet to come, so don’t worry about how your work looks right now - it will change throughout your life, and it should.

- Never put work in your folio that you don’t actually like or didn't like doing - even if it’s brilliant or been published or you got paid a lot for it. If you hated doing it and don’t want to work like that again, don’t show it to anyone; that way lies madness.

Are there any misconceptions about illustration and what would you say to address them? 

- It’s not just about kids’ books!

- Yes I do kids' books. 

- That 'it’s easy' - I have DEFINITELY got the impression people think my job is easy!

- That we’re willing to knock out a drawing in front of the TV. If we’re watching TV, we’re watching TV, not working (and vice versa)…

…ergo, just because it’s art and we use crayons doesn’t mean we’re going to do it for free.

How has technology advanced throughout your career and do you think it has created more opportunities for illustrators?  

- It’s made it easier than ever to show work publicly, and deliver it worldwide, cheaper than ever (free in a lot of cases). 

-Technology has sped up the process of actually making [some types of] work and delivering it - I'm thinking of the obvious software, Apple Pencils, and the internet at large - but it hasn't sped up the process of learning to create illustration, think up concepts, answer briefs. And it definitely can't speed up or create shortcuts for gaining experience.

- However, technology means that your competitors are ALSO visible, and suddenly you realise there are thousands of you, any of whom can do the job - whereas when I started, you were mainly hired by clients in the same country, and your work would only be seen if you sent it specifically to the client or they’d seen something you’d had published.

- This also means you were mostly only aware of illustrators who'd been published, rather than the situation we have now where anyone can share any of their work 24 hours a day, published or not, professional or amateur alike - and we can all see it (and see how good it is!) 

In other words: technology means that illustrators trying to gain a foothold in the business today are competing in an enormous, omnipresent market - clients are spoilt for choice.

What inspires you to be creative? 

- Every human is creative, we all just express it and use it in different ways. I’m no more or less creative than a plumber who solves a particularly difficult piping problem, a café owner who’s found a way to carry on retailing through the lockdowns, or a coder who can’t work out a game problem!

- So I wouldn’t say I have to ‘become inspired’ to be creative; I just am - as is everyone, in their own way.

It’s just that I 'look' more creative because my work is visual, and can thus be ’seen’ - being ‘able to draw' has long been seen as a benchmark of being creative, but I don’t think this is accurate.

- On a pragmatic note, I'm paid professional-level fees because of my ability to create on-demand - so I can't really 'wait for inspiration to strike' if I have a deadline.

[Having said that - see below!]

What do you do if you are having a bit of a creative block?

- I go back to the book/brief and have another look!

- Ask the art director for more info/a chat.

- If the deadline allows: switch to a different job for a bit.

- If the deadline doesn’t allow: send what I have! You never know, the client might like it anyway (the best advice an agent ever gave me).

- Sometimes it helps to get the obvious solutions or clichés out of the way - just do them, work through them, maybe send them; at the very least look at them, because that often leads to a clearer path to something more interesting.

- If none of that works: give up! Go back to it later (again - if deadline allows - if not - you have to plough on - it’s what you’re paid to do!) And do something else.

As stated in the last answer, as a professional you're paid money to create to order so, although creative block does occur (you're not a machine), as a pro, you need to have the strategies to get past it and deliver the work - even if you don't think it's your finest output!

~ My two favourite Student Questions ~

Have you ever had to deal with copying, infringement or plagiarism?

I have. Many times. But I need to break my answer into two parts; first, being copied or imitated.

A few years ago I was getting messages from chums and even family saying they liked the work I'd done for a particular high street store (there's a little crew of people who go Sarah-Spotting). It had been a VERY busy few months so I looked up the work they were talking about as I couldn't remember doing it; this didn't mean I hadn't, it's just that sometimes the lead time between doing a job and the job going live is quite long - as much as a year and a half sometimes. And as I said...it HAD been a really busy time.

However, this one I had NOT done - but for second I thought I was losing my mind as it just WAS my work. I looked EXACTLY like I'd done it. The rest of the story is here, but I realised that yes, my style, energy, the movement in my work, the way things flowed across a space, and the other intangible, slightly hard to articulate things that make my work 'mine' had very definitely been mimicked - almost studied. The artist in question maybe knew, or maybe didn't know, just how similar their work was - either way, they carried on working in that way for a good long time, and I had to really keep an eye on things for a while there.

Mimicking a style is harder to prove, should a court situation ever arise, and indeed a recent case of one lettering artist vs another lettering artist which almost came to blows in a very public way was a good example

The second thing I've had to deal with is infringement. (This is distinct from plagiarism - which is a specific piece of work being copied and passed off as an original:

'Plagiarism and copyright infringement overlap to a considerable extent, but they are not equivalent concepts' - Wikipedia.) I'll often share examples on my Instagram account partly to let current or potential infringers see that what they're doing is easily discovered.

My work has been stolen constantly by users of Etsy and Redbubble for making their own (mostly terribly-put-together) products. I have to report each case and get the listing - or in extreme cases, the account - taken down. I bet that if I went to Redbubble or Etsy right this minute, I'd find a new one! 

[Note: I did.] 

[Secondary note: I found 7.]

A full blog on this subject is due for publication soon.

 

What do you see as the future for art and illustration in relation to technology and AI? 

This was a big question that I didn't see coming. But my reply was an honest one. Since this wasn't written down, this is a rough transcript of how I answered! (expanded on a bit).

Although AI and technology in general has made breathtaking leaps in my lifetime - from the very hyperlink itself to synthesising art and the creation process, piercing together visual information fed to neural networks to make 'new' things, AI-generated music like that of Holly Herndon's 'Spawn', and robots which are getting closer to mimicking the natural movements of humans, such as everything Boston Dynamics has been working on, I feel sure that the kernel of that which makes art and ideas - the human mind - cannot be replicated in its full form. Not only that, it's the human mind (rather than merely 'the brain') working in conjunction with with the intricacies of human decision making, moral, aesthetic and emotional judgements, feeling and intuition, nuance and storytelling, and solving problems presented by human existence, which complete the recipe for creating things.

We will probably one day soon see a walking, talking robot that mimics us and can hold a pencil or paint on canvas or write soliloquies in seconds, but it will still be a machine. (I recommend reading Ian McEwan's 'Machines Like Me' which explores this in detail.)

And that makes me think that if that happens, the market may divide into a situation similar to that seen in wartime, when you had, for example, ‘real’ coffee and ‘ersatz’ coffee; the crap stuff, but it was passable when the real deal was unobtainable or unaffordable. At ground level, as opposed to within the research labs or billionaire’s basements, there’ll be Machine-Made Art (MMA) which is cheap and plentiful and just about adequate, and there’ll be Human-Made Art (HMA), which is the real thing, and comes at the appropriate price. Like the difference between a mass-produced made-in-China thing or one hand-made by a craftsman in a workshop. (There may be a lifelong love of the film Bladerunnerwith its replicants coming through there). And 

We’re seeing the beginnings of something which feels a bit like that now with the likes of Fiverr, where you can get a logo banged out for literally a fiver, which will ‘do the job’; but if you want something properly considered, unique, designed and refined, you go to a trained, experienced professional. There’s an argument there that the Fiverr model is the democratisation of design — that you don’t need a degree or training, merely the right software and an ambivalence about the outcome — and that these £5 logos are just as good (indeed some of the people on Fiverr claim to have many years of experience). But that’s for another blog entirely!

Ironically art made with machines (digital) is now being sold by machines as NFTs for ‘I really need to sit down’ sums of machine-generated money — forcing all of us to think about what ownership means — both taking ownership of something’s creation in the first place, and ownership of a finished piece — and whether, when provenance of digital work is as traceable and provable (maybe more so) than physical pieces, there remains any value in the concept of one-offs and originals.

So my outlook is optimistic, while remaining realistic. Those machines are not getting any less clever.

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Thank you to Charlotte Stringfellow and Lily Clifford at Speakers4Schools for organising, hosting and editing the talk.