The focus of this course:

“Stage Three aims to synthesize your learning by extending a systematic and coherent body of knowledge, utilizing specialist skills through self-directed study, critically evaluate ideas and evidence from a range of sources and apply creative skills and significant judgements.

This stage should be shaped by your own interests and ambitions, and it provides a platform for you to define and achieve your own creative outcomes.

It aims to equip you with the knowledge, understanding, and application of skills to continue your practice in whatever direction you choose.”

The aims of this unit:

A1 To enable you to identify external contexts for your creative practice.

A2 To inform practice through external engagement and contextual research.

A3 To encourage independence through professional levels of persona, transferable, and graduate skills.

A4 To enable varying modes of presentation and information sharing to communicate knowledge, understanding and skills.

This is a very different undertaking from what I’ve done previously, because I’ve very rarely needed to illustrate with others in mind. I’ve had commissions, but that’s different from changing one’s practice in order to create a type of platform. My general aversion to social media and my difficulty with showing others my work in general, have resulted in a month of practical research on the different approaches illustrators take when building a platform and a whole lot of soul-searching. I’ve been postponing this moment for a long time, unconsciously. I have had work up on the internet for years, but have always been very reticent about sharing it and interacting with others about it. This is something I would like to grow out of.

Or something I must grow out of, because my grand goals are rather dependent on enjoying the process of sharing stories. I confess that I don’t have a clear idea around what I want my ideal career to look like “at its zenith”, but I do know I want to write stories, tell them in pictures, and share them with others. People use different methods to do this, and I examined several pathways during this month. I confess, it was a very jumbled and neurotic process. I evidently, have a lot more personal hangups around all of this than I thought I did.

I will try to outline my thought process below.

Before explaining the last course, I feel the need to reflect on much more recent events and the difficult time I had starting this course. Perhaps I’m cloaking myself in excuses, but I feel like many of the worries I’ve been battling in the past month or so are not uncommon in someone who is taking up a creative profession ca. 2024. Perhaps I could have approached the subject with more diligence, and I definitely should have been outlining my thoughts in writing throughout instead of untangling the awful snare I managed to catch myself in, blowing past every single deadline I set.

Illustration 3.2 External Practice started out with an excess of energy and excitement. I was eager to continue my work from the previous course and had big plans. I wanted to do everything. Five mini comics, one for each character I had created previously; update my website from a student’s to a professional’s; write a couple of short blog articles relating to my interests as part of the website; film process videos; I had a list of illustrations I’ve been meaning to make both for my own sake and because I need fresh content for social media; I had several articles and books I needed to look over for my dissertation; and I really needed to narrow down my subject matter for said dissertation.

The social media posts were going to be a way to interact with people about my work. I wanted to see what others thought, and I wanted to see if they were willing to make the process interactive. I have an outline of my story and some solid characterization, but I don’t have all the details fleshed out precisely because I’m interested in trying out a more fluid, interactive sort of storytelling. Which is why the social media posts were important.

Updating the website was important because I had plans to use it for sharing the graphic novel. The format on social media isn’t very good for what I have in mind, and so I needed to take people somewhere else for them to actually read it.

Each learning log update for 3.2 was going to have two sections: Verner’s Tale, where I would report on progress of the story; and External Reach, where I would share my social media updates, the work I would make on my website and research in how others succeed in the illustration industry along with what paths I plan to experiment with myself.

The social media updating was going… fine. I was spending too much time on it, but it was going fine. The troublesome bit was the research. The research which turned into a whole lot of worrying.

I updated social media for a week, and then vanished again. I had gotten to the weekend and realized that I was wading in the shallows, not even having enough information to gather my thoughts about what I wanted to do, let alone enough to make a “proper” update. My first mistake, because this section is literally about planning and I did actually have a plan at this time, it just wasn’t one that was likely to work.

I overwhelmed myself with the sense of other people’s expectations, whether or not they existed, with my own expectations, and with the looming uncertainty of the future. And as has been the pattern in the last few years (a thing I’ve recently come to terms with), I stopped showing my work.

On the left is my Instagram feed with the latest posts, all made with the objective to share the story I’m currently working on, Verner’s Tale. I used both images I made in 3.1 and some new pictures. And a short video! I was quite proud of that one.

The thing I should have continued doing is making regular work-in-progress updates instead of panicking over the things I had still not completed learning-log wise and stopping work in that direction entirely in order to “focus” on “research”. I was not focusing on research, I was just panicking and stopping work in the image-making direction only made things worse for my general productivity because everything turned into a procrastination train headed for fiery doom at the end of the tracks.

Fiery doom being the stress I am currently experiencing, because I have a hard course deadline for January 5th which cannot be missed. As of the actual publication of this post, which I’ve been already working on for weeks because of neurotic research (and moving to a different country), the deadline is up in less than eight weeks.

The actual purpose of these social media posts is to dip my toes in the waters of interacting with others about my stories. I have posted work before, as a portfolio, but I’ve never had the courage to create any sort of meaningful interaction over said work. There wasn’t much engagement but that is predictable because I haven’t posted in a good year and the algorithm has changed a lot. I’m willing to bet that most of the people who follow me did not see my posts at all. I also only posted for about a week. It takes more time than that to create significant interaction, and that’s not even mentioning that most of the people who saw said posts aren’t really my target audience.

Another priority in this particular facet of this course is updating my current website. It’s outdated, plain and simple. If I want to direct people to it, whether I want them to look at my work or read my stories, it has to look different than it is now. The goal for the future would be to direct people who are interested in what I do or the stories I write to my website where they can browse and read and where they would leave their email address in order to receive updates. The email list is obviously the end goal here. Being able to interact directly with people who are already interested in what I do would be golden.

I am privileged to have someone else who knows about this sort of thing much better than I do and is willing to help (hi Mom!). She’s also helped me set up a different blog page, where I’ll be free to write some very short articles about what I do and what I’m interested in to give viewers a look into my process. I thought about just linking this learning log, but I’m afraid that it needs too much context at this point for that to make sense.

This website business, along with subjects related to branding, email lists, and search engine optimization are things I researched, but will be addressing in future posts because this one is getting monstrous just with the reflection and whingeing. I will say I got carried away in a certain sense, because I ended up neglecting my actual work in the pursuit of knowledge which I absolutely do not need to put into practice right away. But given that my ultimate goal is full time freelancing as an illustrator, these are unavoidable evils which I must at least be aware of, even if I cannot currently do much to apply them.

Verner, the youngest of all the siblings in “The Wild Swans”, still has a swan wing at the end of the original story. What happens to him after? The Snow Queen never appears when Kay leaves her palace. Was she alright with him just leaving for warmer pastures? What happened to the Little Robber Girl who helped Gerta in the same story? Thumbelina gets her wings and a husband at the end of her trials, but is being Queen of the Flowers really something she’s cut out for? If the Steadfast Tin Soldier and his lady love were to somehow survive the fire and become human, how would they fare? These are the questions I asked when designing the characters for that first assignment which turned into a story.

Who are the characters?

Comic / Prologue Experiment

In 3.1, the initial goal had been to create a few portfolio pieces and keep it simple, but things changed when the characters from the character design section took on a life of their own and it became much more interesting to make mini projects with these characters in mind. This isn’t a deviation that I regret, but the lack of new plan made it necessary to reroute when I was already well past the halfway point in the course. I think I would like to either avoid that or learn to be less bothered by micro adjustments throughout the creative process. A well thought out plan is necessary either way.

The Illustration/Visual Development stuff from the previous project is good groundwork for the graphic novel project I want to make. I had initally designed characters for a couple of Hans Christian Anderesen stories as a Five Man Band (a Protagonist, a Lancer, a Mentor, an Expert, a Heart), but once I had drawn the designs, figured out why some of them would even be alive past the end of their tragic stories and the potential dynamics between them, I already had an actual story to work with. So I decided to go with the flow and continue the project with these characters at the forefront. The story itself follows a minor character from Andersen’s “The Wild Swans” as he sets out to save his kingdom from a curse. He meets other characters from Andersen’s stories on the way and enlists their help.

The problems I had in the last section are all the usual suspects for artists: bad organization, unfocused goals, and crippling self-doubt. Downright mundane, as these things go, though no less likely to create a snowball effect of issues. I daresay that little was learned because I started this section (3.2) in pretty much the same fashion as 3.1. I have tried to do too much all at the same time.

Keeping all of this in mind my initial plan for this new course had been to create five big projects in the ten weeks available whilst working on both the Dissertation and building an online presence for the External part of the “External Projects”. Far too much, in short. The end date was, and still is, the 5th of January because I can’t afford to continue working on this degree for much longer than I already have. This doesn’t leave me with as much time as is generally recommended for this course, but as I still have some time to work on this full time, I’m willing to take on the challenge… by also being a little more reasonable about the workload. The main purpose of this 3.2 is external reach, after all.

I did not have any plans in terms of what form the story would take. I certainly have interests in comics, picture books, and other forms of sequential storytelling, but I had no final form in mind.

I still don’t. Frankly, I think this story is the perfect opportunity for some experimentation with presentation to a wider audience as well as the form the story itself should take in order to reach the intended reader.

The thing is, I have all these stories in my head and these pictures I want to make, but I’m not sure what other people like. Or at least the best way for me to share them. The methods which would be both sustainable for myself and entertaining for others.

Is it better to mold the story to match the current market, pitch it to a publisher and pray they would accept it, by some strange miracle? Do publishers even accept pitches anymore? Did they ever? Is it a good idea to make full books on my own and self-publish them with print-by-demand? Is it better to publish pages on a blog as I finish them, instead of making the whole thing? How about only using social media? Lots of people seem to use Instagram and such to share their stories. What about more modern apps for digital comics like Webtoon and Tapas? Should one publish everywhere one can have a platform, changing the format of the work to fit the structure of said platform? Or should one keep things simple and only share one’s work on a personal page? What about YouTube and other video platforms? Lots of people prefer to see the person behind the art and some of their process, especially in an AI age.

What paths should I even take? Most advice for illustrators seems dedicated to editorial or children’s books illustrators. While a lot of it is very applicable, I feel like I still don’t know where to start. The children book/graphic novel direction is obviously the more relevant of the two, but the types of stories I want to tell would be for a slightly older audience. There are a plethora of more mature comics and some illustrated books for young adult or just adult readers, but I have no idea how a single, unknown artist/author is supposed to start in order to go down that road.

How do I get people who are interested in the sort of stories I want to write to see my work anyway?

And once they do see it, how can guarantee consistency of both quality and frequency? And why would they keep looking, when other things competing for their attention are going to be so much higher in quality and scope? Creating work only for myself is all well and good, but at the end of the day one tells stories around the fire for the sake of the tribe and if no one is willing to listen…

This doesn’t even touch how I will be able to afford any of this. In cold, practical terms, even if I do find the ideal medium for transmitting my own stories, I know that it would be quite a while before they also become some sort of source of income. Theoretically, one can work on commissions whilst carving out time for the “book project”. But how am I even going to get those in the first place? So far, I’ve mostly worked for people I’ve known or friends-of-friends.

If I were to take a more self-made format for sharing stories, would it actually be viable for the future? Should I just spend my time building a portfolio which would be attractive to publishers and spend my time doing market research instead?

Is it too naïve and prideful to think that I could find success by my own work if I take the time to look at my options and cover my bases?

The internet is obviously not the solution to everything but for people like me, writers, fine artists, other craftspeople, it’s what has made the difference between success and failure. We can get in touch with other humans who like the same sort of things we make without the aid of an intermediary. This takes an extraordinary amount of work, and not really work one can do on one’s own (at least, not for years on end) but some would say it’s worth the effort for the reward of publishing one’s practice in a form untouched by the need to cater to trends and the lowest common denominator in order to be competitive in the publishing market. (Virality on the internet is found by catering in this way almost exclusively, but virality isn’t necessary for success.)

It’s obviously not all or nothing. I’m an illustrator, not a fine artist or a poet. I won’t feel like I’m betraying myself or my muse or something equally ridiculous for working on other people’s stories. I happen to like doing so, even when I don’t agree with the creative direction. I have and will be taking commissions from all sorts of people, and hopefully from publishers, in the future. And as much as I love stories that change one’s thinking and pictures that make one feel, sometimes it’s just nice to make and/or read something entirely formulaic. There’s a satisfaction in making something you know will work and a comfort in reading something you have basically read before.

The issue is time. What is the best use of it? Because it feels like I’m running out and I have to making smart decisions about the sort of work I’m making and the sort of areas I’m exploring in order to not dawdle on curbs I should be passing on the road to… at the very least moderate success. I just want to be able to live doing what I like and share some of the stories that have been marinating in my mind with others. I’m not looking for fame or glittering riches, I just want to not be a “starving artist” and have a group of people who might regularly find a ray of hope and comfort in the work I make. But it feels like I’m both drowning and thirsting for options and like the decisions I make now will make or break my dubious chances at success.

I’ve heard those exact words from other people my age and can’t help but cringe. Feeling like you’ve run out of time and don’t know what to do or where to turn towards the end of university is extremely common. Doesn’t make it any less real, unfortunately. And the effect is no doubt exacerbated by the solitary style of education I’ve had for the past few years.

As far as I can tell, even though the journey of each artist is extremely individual, the traditional path for illustrators seems to be to first to work for others and only publish one’s own work after about a decade of experience. It’s obviously very different for webcomic creators, because posting online is much less costly. Some print their work for their readers, and greatly reduce printing costs in comparison to self-publishing in the past because they have precise numbers in terms of readers interested enough in making a purchase of a physical copy.

It’s all very overwhelming and stressful to think about. I feel like I’ve been flailing about for weeks, looking for some sort of viable path. The answer obviously lies in picking and choosing arenas which are currently available to me and experimenting. Every artist working today is basically a freelancer, and multiple platforms, sources of income, and methods of exposure are the norm.

Another problem I’ve been trying to solve has been my current lack of connection to any sort of artistic community, let alone illustrators specifically. It’s extremely common for illustrators to be hermits, and it’s predictable for me to be one, since I’ve been working entirely from home both for my degree and otherwise. I also confess, that I don’t have a problem with this generally, but I find that I’ve slowly been building up courage as the years have gone to actually try to reach out… only to have absolutely no clue how to do so. Searching locally has offered no results so far. I moved very recently, so there is still hope, but I have very little idea of how long I will be staying. There are plenty of other artists online, but I have no idea how one would build a connection on social media beyond the most superficial of interactions. The vague plans I did try to make around pursuing any sort of connection were all unlikely to pan out or vaguely stalkerish and therefore not viable.

And these are questions that do not actually need answering for the sake of this course (not in this first chapter, at least) but they did manage to stall my progress in my pursuit to answer them.

This is my main objective as of now, to make work and to find the best vehicle to share it.

I have no idea what I’m doing in any of the areas below, just as a blanket statement. Sequential storytelling, writing, and social media are the top three skills needed to advance my practice. Organization/time management is a general life skill, but perhaps the one my practice will most hinge on.

I have worked on several tentative projects in the past but have not made anything anyone would consider professional-looking. I want to have something to be proud of by the end of this course. As previously stated, I wanted to have five mini-projects for the portfolio. This is unlikely to happen, especially at any level of quality within the timeframe I have set for myself and the level of experience I am at.

My technical skills in drawing, using digital programs and colors are acceptable, but I have found that scene-setting and composition for sequential storytelling to be unduly difficult. My brain keeps wanting to use traditional composition rules and it doesn’t work.

I want to draw more movie scenes as practice. I have always liked comics with a more cinematic sensibility and it’s as good a place to start as any.

Writing isn’t actually a craft that I’ve been very diligent about cultivating. I’m not too much of a slouch with words, and I’ve taken a course before, but I haven’t made a practice of finishing work, showing it for the purpose of critique, and then improving. I keep what I write even closer to the chest than what I draw, and that’s no way to grow. If I wanted to be a hobbyist it would be fine, but that isn’t my intention. With this endeavor, I must write and show. Hopefully this will help me get into the habit of putting myself out there regardless of my current skill level (which I’m starting to realize, I will never be satisfied with), and start learning in truth.

This, I have little to no experience with. I still have to look up some sort of “social media for creatives” course that is both current and won’t make me want to tear my hair out with stress. I have various accounts from Facebook, to Instagram to LinkedIn, but I can’t say I ever knew, or wanted to know how to manage them as an individual or as a professional. A pretty big obstacle, considering I’m planning to put my work on the internet.

This skill is, by far, the most important. I’ve been attempting to manage my attention problems and perfectionism for years and have started seeing headway only in the past few months (if one discounts the disaster that was the last couple of weeks). I think genuinely tackling the problem of exposure I’ve been avoiding for years could either make or break this streak for good. Obviously hoping for the former.

I’ve read enough time-management and self-help books that I think I could write my own at this point. At the very least, I could recite the general gist in my sleep. That doesn’t mean that I don’t struggle immensely with putting all those catchy, cookie-cutter principles into practice. Gaining clarity, making a plan, setting deadlines, executing, and reviewing are all well and good. So are to-do lists and twenty-minute timers, calendars and accountability buddies. Eliminating distractions, time windows, and fancy organization apps are all awesome, but…

At this point, the best thing for me might just be taking the reins tied to my fear of exposure/failure or whatever it is, and proving to myself I can actually put something a more-or-less complete work out there without the world ending.