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.

Harley In The Sky

This golden, shining cover is wrapped around Akemi Dawn Bowman's latest work of fiction, following on from the bestselling 'Starfish' and 'Summer Bird Blue', both multi-accolade-winning novels in the Young Adult Fiction world.

I already knew about Akemi's books as their covers are the sort that seem to have existed forever in my line of sight; popping up on 'best book' and 'great read' lists and on the myriad publishing news emails I sign up to. So when I realised THAT'S whose book I was about to illustrate, I knew it had to be...

...well, different from those. This was a different story, not linked; new characters and settings. 

And by a different illustrator!

I started where I usually start, by reading the manuscript. Always feeling like a giant skive - reading books during the work day? Someone's going to grass me up any minute - this is the single most important thing I can do before starting a cover. 

And I was gripped.

~ † ~

It's a risky strategy, reading the book rather than opting for a neat summary with key points provided by the editor. You might not actually like the book, in which case you can approach the book more objectively and pick out the key elements that could inform your cover in a rather workmanlike way. You might like the story but not the main characters (let's be honest, just like in real life, you can't like EVERYONE you meet), in which scenario your job is to focus on the environment, the landscape it's set in, and pivotal objects or moments. (If the art director's asked you to focus ON the character, well. Then you just suck it up and crack on.)

The third risk is one I encountered umpteeen years ago, close to the start of my YA illustration career. You don't just like the book. You LOVE the book. LOVE it. So much that you cart the manuscript around with you to the MOT station, to bed, to the waiting room, the bathroom; you laugh (or cry or tremble) out loud in public places and feel The Sad when it's over, even though it's not a proper book yet because you haven't even drawed the front of it so it can't be a book yet.

You might think these books are the easiest to draw for, because you gel with them. And maybe it is for some - but it isn't the case with me.

When I'm this situation I want to get the cover so right it can be paralysing. I want the cover to tell the entire story in one image (which a cover cannot, and should not, ever do). I want the character to look precisely the way I visualise them. I want it to be perfect - and oftentimes, objectivity flies off out the window along with sound judgement and the necessary sense of detachment that's needed to make a cover.

After all, a cover needs to not only hint at the story and mood, and be nice and legible, it needs to be attractive and distinctive on shelves. It needs to leave enough ambiguity for the next reader - after you, you who got to read it first - to pull it down from Waterstones' shelf and go, 'OOH'. Essentially, it needs to SELL, and that little spot just there where a cover artist's personal desires Venn-Diagram their way into the Marketing Team's Monday meeting can be a hotbed of angst, difference of opinion and disappointment.

Which is why objectivity and detachment can be king when tackling a cover.

'Harley In The Sky' fell into this last category. To be really honest, a great many of the manuscripts I read DO fall into this category. I'm a reader, and I love books and escaping, and regularly fail to believe my good fortune that I'm asked to draw covers for such immersive, narratively energetic books. There's only ever been one manuscript I didn't like, and it was because it was written in a certain why that I found hard to read. As it happens, this had a surprising effect: I had to try much harder with the cover, and the end result was one of my all time faves (and I shall never tell which one it was!)

Tackling Harley therefore yielded, as often happens in this situation, a great many initial ideas. Because how on earth was one going to do the job on its own?

I started by visualising a very pretty, very ornate cover, inspired by Japanese paintings, Klimt and botanical art. Set against a pitch-black background, I wanted Harley Milano and her hoop swinging into the middle of it all; strings of jewels and ivy, trails of exotic flowers and ropes as her backdrop. The circus would be communicated through some hand-drawn lettering drawn straight from turn of the century circus posters (suggested by the cheesy placeholder font here).

In an alternative version, she's the focus of attention, her face staring purposefully out from a writhing assembly of rococo flourishes, cherry blossoms, ribbons and fellow aerial performers, her piled-high hair crowned with a mini-Big Top:

And in the third initial suggestion, she's divided by the cover; rebellious Harley who runs away to join the rival circus on the front, the Maison de Mystére, and the 'good' Harley who should stay with her family's own circus, the Teatro della Notte (even though her parents are against it):

The second batch of ideas suggested the world of Harley's imagination as a full side profile, looking skyward into her trapeze-based aspirations - of these, only the circus at the bottom was to stay, but I LOVED everything about these two. I consider these all-ink options 'The Ones That Truly Got Away':

Harley's 'stars' being added

After this, another round of ink-based approaches using dramatic shapes and silhouettes. If Harley was to be featured, she could be seen the way she might be seen from far away on the ground in the Big Top - a sharp silhouette, rolling down her aerial silks.

The background this time IS the Big Top, swirling upward into blackness, acrobatic lettering in the foreground.

(Crikey I loved that Y and REALLY wanted it to stay!)

And here's where the idea of show lighting came in - these sulphurous spots surrounding the performance:

The final cover we settled on looked like this; a combination of the more organic looking lettering, Harley as silhouette, and that big top with the lighting, the circus illustration taking centre stage not the back:

And this is how it was made!

I wanted lots of texture in this cover, so the Big Top was created with a sheet of A3 cartridge paper inked over with mono printing ink and a roller. This gave the points their aged, gnarly texture.

Cut from the centre into radial points with a scalpel, but keeping the piece of paper attached in the centre, I arranged the sheet on a scanner.

A deepening orange background was painted with layers of ink, to sit behind the 'Big Top' and create that sense of peering into the darkness. And the circus was drawn entirely with fineliners!

And the finished cover was appropriately treated to a gold under print, making it absolutely sparkle at the edges. It's a satisfyingly fat hardback, so is lovely to hold in the hands. Check the gold below in the video - and delightful surprise of the gold foil on the back spine beneath!

I insisted Akemi sign her copy for me! The 13-year-old in me is fainting.

Thank you to Heather Palisi for the careful and enthusiastic art direction, and tor asking me to do it.

"Harley In The Sky' is published by Simon & Schuster on 10th March, 2020, 

and you can buy a copy here in the US, or here in the UK.