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?
What are some of the skills you need to be a successful illustrator?
Please can you tell us about some projects that you have worked on that have been really memorable and why?
- 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?
What advice do you have for aspiring young illustrators?
Are there any misconceptions about illustration and what would you say to address them?
How has technology advanced throughout your career and do you think it has created more opportunities for illustrators?
What inspires you to be creative?
What do you do if you are having a bit of a creative block?
- 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!
Have you ever had to deal with copying, infringement or plagiarism?
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
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!
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.
