3 Point Perspective: The Illustration Podcast

How to Make and Impact in the World With Your Art.

What work have you done, that has had the most impact in the world?

Meaningful Lessons

Will doesn’t write the children’s books that he has illustrated but he feels like he really is able to bring a lot to the table with his art and is able to make the stories more clear. One of those books is Bonaparte Falls Apart, and he is working on the sequel right now and it has an anti bullying theme that is not overt, in that the story holds up on its own. He loves and enjoys working on them and because the Bonaparte books have sold really well, even though the second hasn’t come out yet, the publisher has hinted that there may be a third book.

Pretty much every kid experiences bullying and even the kids who are bullies probably get bullied at home. It’s really an important message to help kids become empowered and overcome and deal with those emotions in a positive way and overcome. The Frances books have a kid who is a bully in them.

Will had an epiphany reading those books because he used to tease his sisters and sometimes he was a bully; in one of the Frances books he remembers that the sister goes off and is crying because of her brother’s bullying and it really tugged at his heartstrings and must have been pretty impactful because he can still remember that experience now over 50 years later. He realized that he was the bad guy in the story and it really changed him. It was a children’s book that taught him that lesson. I don’t think that you can quantify the impact of your art.

Sometimes it’s hard for us to remember where we have shared things and if we have shared stories before, so we apologize if we keep sharing some of the same things.

Gentle Reminders

Lee feels that where he has made the most difference, it was probably not with his books, instead he feels like it is the connection that he has been able to make with his one off images. Sometimes it’s a momentary thing and he strikes some inspiration and creates a fun print, and then he goes to art fairs to sell them.
One time, Lee was getting ready to close at an art fair when there was this woman who came to his booth and one of Lee’s prints caught her eye and she was holding it up looking at it. Lee was waiting for her to leave so that he could tear down his booth but he noticed that she had tears running down her face, she was crying, he wondered what he had done or what he should do. She was looking at this picture of this girl swinging really high on a swing hanging down from a tree. She shared that her sister had died when she was young and that she liked to swing just like that. Lee gave her a hug and she was just bawling and he gave her a print. It was just such a personal connection and one of the most powerful moments of his career. That’s just one experience.
On a more consistent basis, when doing art fairs, older people will come to his booth and they will stop and look around, and have this starry look in their eyes. One time this lady said, “I remember this”, not speaking of one piece in particular, they were talking about the feeling of being young. It wasn’t just one image or just one book, but the overall impression of Lee’s work.
Lee gets these ideas and likes to make images and are fun, whimsical, and capture a moment. He has seen that happen a lot, with older people coming to his booth and it gives them this shot of something they may have forgot and they leave smiling.

Unanticipated Impact

One of the things that Jake did that inadvertently had an impact on the world was start an art challenge called Inktober.
He didn’t set out trying to make an impact on the world but he gave himself this challenge to try and get better at his craft. He easily could have said, “I’m just going to do this challenge in ink and you guys can follow along.” However, instead he decided to make it a challenge and he invited other people to participate if they wanted to and he made some parameters or rules for the challenge: you draw an ink drawing every day for the month of October and share it online. What started out as a single person doing a self improvement art challenge turned into thousands and thousands of people.
He gets so many emails every year from people sharing how it has helped their creativity; it gets people drawing for themselves again, a lot of professionals share that they draw so much for work and Inktober helped them draw for themselves and remember the fun in drawing; people show how they improved so much from doing this and got better as an artist; others share how they got all of these new followers because they showed up and posted consistentl...

Ship Happens

Today it is all about shipping something and getting it out into the world.

Often we talk about what the difference is between a professional and an amateur, the art is one difference, but another difference is professionals "ship."

Link: Merlin Man Podcast

When people are successful, one big hallmark of that success is that they actually ship things, which means that they finish things. They don't just finish things and keep it in their house but they share it with others, they ship it.

Also, Seth Goddin, Linchpin

Make sure you don’t just start a project and let it fizzle, don’t start one after another and let them fizzle.

Look at all of your artistic heroes under the lens of finishing things and shipping things, what you find is a constant project based mentality. Where their projects go further than they do, they have to figure out how to publish it, and look at who it is going to go to.

Lee’s Story:

After school, Lee needed to try and get work, so he did the postcard thing. His idea was to create and send out 6 postcards a year, to 600 clients. He sent the first card out, and nothing happened, then he sent the second, and the third... and he was getting no responses.

However, his goal was just to get those cards sent out, they had to get out into the world. He decided that he was going to go on a trip to New York and he felt that he needed to have have something more substantial than a postcard to give to publishers so he made these really nice custom build books and custom mailers and sent them to 21 dream clients. 13 of them had him in for an interview.

Earlier he felt like he was just sending his postcards out into the void and was seeing no results, however, as he went around to meet with different publishers he noticed that a lot of the publishers had his postcard on their wall. Some of those publishers, he is just now starting to work with. There was lots of stuff happening behind the scenes that he didn't know about. All of it came from him shipping things out..

Lee finished college where I was drawing and painting all the time. Then felt that after he was now just creating stuff to ship out. The shipping paid off.

The Power of a physical object

Jake been to every publisher and to Chronicle, he's been to all their meetings, and he can attest that their walls are full of postcards.

One of the art directors told him, speaking of the postcards on the walls, “I don’t know if I’ll work with them, but I want to remember them, and I hope that our paths will cross.”

Sometimes we think we need a broad audience and that we need to get our work out there onto the inter web, but sometimes something tangible for a small audience can be just as powerful as something digital to a huge audience.

This was evidence to him of the power of physical objects.

There is no guarantee of anything. It almost always costs more than what you might have anticipated. It’s terrifying putting yourself out there, you might be scared of failure.

You might have thoughts or hear people say, “who do you think you are?”

Will's Story: after finishing school he was planning on doing the postcard thing. His dad was doubtful and said “What are you gonna do? Send postcards to people? Without a cover letter? How will they know what it is for?" Despite his Dad's skepticism, he sent out postcards. It worked! He came home one day and his Dad was excited because there was a fax from Psychology Today wanting him to do work for him.

It's very powerful when you ship something out into the world. If you haven't sent anything out, you might be wondering if it will pay off, and you don't know. But once it is out there it is moving and there is this serendipity that Lee has faith in now that good things will happen when you put your work out there.

While there is not guarantee that you'll get work or that it will pay off the way you want it to, there is a guarantee, that if you get your work shipped out, you will learn things from doing this! Sometimes the value you want isn't going to be the value you get. Sometimes the value is the failure. Value in learning.

Even putting your work out there digitally in a finished way i.e. creating a website, is valuable.

Personal Takeaways

Jake- never sent out postcards. Was going into animation and had an agent pounding the pavement to get him comic and illustration work.

However, he had his first Missile Mouse Comic book. He made it at the copy center. And had to fold all of the 8.5 x 11 sheets, and get them all in the right order. It was a pain. He made a bunch of these "ashcan" booklets, and took a bunch of them to San Diego Comic Con in 2001 and started to hand the...

Every time we get an offer to do a book we feel super grateful and flattered that someone would want one of us to illustrate a book for them, but for many reasons we can’t say yes.

In this episode we get into the details of book publishing, including the economic, social, and career-building reasons we take on certain book projects, and why we say no to others.

Here are Will’s 10 Reasons for "Why I Can’t Illustrate Your Children’s Book.” Some of them deal more with submitting a book jointly with an author to a publisher, or self publishing a book; they are all things to consider and reasons for why you may want to second-guess saying yes to that person you sorta know who wants you to illustrate their self-published book.

1. Bad Protocol [5:40]

This question, about how to deal with people asking you to do their children’s book, is talked about often at SCBWI. The Most Asked Question: how do I find an illustrator?

Editors at publishing companies will tell writers, "You don’t need to find the illustrator, that’s our job." They take pride in this. One of the publisher’s major roles is to find the right illustrator and match them to the right manuscript. They have resources and lots of connections to find the best match.

Some people jump to conclusions and think that just because someone can draw and someone has a children’s book idea that they should be paired to work together, without doing research beforehand to see if they would be a good match. You wouldn’t go around prescribing medication to people before learning what their symptoms are and it's the same with writing and illustrating children’s books.

Publishers don’t want to be in an awkward situation where they love the manuscript but they hate the art, then they have to tell you and it can be something they just would rather avoid.

They have more art and manuscripts than they can publish.

They oftentimes will dismiss you, just because you are filing jointly, and the art is already done. As with everything, there are exceptions.

There are many other reasons as to why publishers prefer to pair the artists and illustrators. One marketing strategy they often use is to match a more veteran author or illustrator with a newer author or illustrator. A new author with a new illustrator, or vice versa, is too much of a financial gamble.

As you have more experience and become more well-known, you may have more power and influence over who you are paired up with.

Little Snowplow

1. Industry Perception [13:35]

Another reason Will would be hesitant to file jointly with an amateur or work on a self-published book is that it may affect publishers’ perception of him.

Even doing lots of projects on Kickstarter can look amateur. This is something that may be frowned upon merely because it’s a little more new. But sometimes books that started on Kickstarter can get picked up by publishers.

Even your online followers on social media has an influence on how much of an advance you are allotted.

One book that may be an exception to this :

Rick Walton Frankenstein book

They filed their book jointly and then 3 different publishers got into a bidding war over it. However, this is different, because they were two pros working together. So it’s not really an exception. We can’t think of an example of two amateurs who got a book published together that did super well.

1. I Don’t Know You [19:10]

When a publisher contacts an illustrator to do a book, the manuscript has already gone through a lot of rewrites. This is hard work and takes a thick skin.

However, if you contact Will to do your self-published book, he doesn’t know who you are and what you are like. Manuscripts always have rewrites and edits. It can take a very long time to complete the project. He doesn't know if you are in it for the long haul.

1. Award Submissions [22:32]

This is not super well known: Publishers, at their own cost, often submit books for awards, such as the Caldecott, the Dr. Suess award, state awards, etc.

It is a lot of work, they have to fill out all of the paper work and ship a couple hundred books to the right person at the right time.

Getting these awards is what helps the book take off. It gets more publicity, and starts to get bought and recommended by librarians. This is more for self publishing but is another reason that Will wouldn’t want t...

What does Tom Cruise getting stuck in a time loop have to do with becoming a great artist? More than you’d expect! Learn how to iterate, how to avoid generic character designs (EVERYTHING has been done before, no exceptions!), and how you can supercharge your art skills with an online education for WAY cheaper than a traditional art school. Only on 3PP!

3 Point Perspective Podcast is sponsored by SVSLearn.com, the place where becoming a great illustrator starts!

Click here for this episode’s links and show notes.

We’re winding back the clock to this interview with illustrator Samantha Cotterill! Join Jake Parker and Lee White to discuss the pros and cons of social media, limiting distractions, adapting to physical challenges, and much more in this insightful episode.

3 Point Perspective Podcast is sponsored by SVSLearn.com, the place where becoming a great illustrator starts!

Click here for this episode’s links and show notes.