Digital Llamas
A look at time and growth.
Hello March, hello Butterflies!
Warm weather is here, and I’m again volunteering to eat raw carrots. Needless to say, moods have been lifted, and hydration feels more intuitive and less like a chore.
So today, much like Spring, we’ll look at time and growth.
Time
I’ve had a strict I-make-art-by-hand motto for years. I view it as a craft, and a commodity that has (and will retain) value. But truthfully, I also never had the means or access to try digital art. Five years into making picture books, I finally had consistent enough work to consider it as a possibility. I wasn’t aiming to shift my practice, but I was very aware of two processes that take bucketloads of time to do. One is development time, the other is scanning time. And since large format scanners cost $4000, I went the other route first —
and this winter I bought myself an iPad (my very first one). My computer is ancient, so it was a bridge to that, but mostly I hoped it would provide me with the gift of time.
As a freelancer, time managed for a paid gig is fine. I know how long it takes me to make final art and I ask for compensation accordingly. The time put into developing a book idea that will (or will not) be sold to a publisher is the problem.
You can spend months or years developing an idea, months or weeks putting together a mock-up (a loosely illustrated book dummy with full sketches, finished text, and 2-3 art samples) and it’s still very likely that it will not sell1. That is so much unpaid time, hundreds of hours of work for free. So I got an iPad to help streamline my process.
Analog v Digital
My pre-iPad development process went like this: sketch thumbnails, scan, set text, print, sketch edits, scan, layout full page, print, sketch at scale, scan, check layout, print, draw final image, scan, edit, layout text, make files, save, send. (crawl into hole and hibernate for months)
Every time there was an edit (which happens a lot), I’d be pulling out pencils, and light boards, and scanners, and computers, and desperately trying not to clock my time.
Now, with an iPad, it goes like this: have idea! Open ProCreate and get idea out:
The development process is the same — thumbnails — rough sketch — set text — final sketch. But since it’s done in one place, it eliminates multiple, laborious steps to get from analog to digital. It’s saving me hours of time, and bucketloads of paper.
There is also less angst and frustration at revisions because edits are easy to make. (I wrote about the lack of Ctrl+Z in analog art last month.) And since the evolution of ideas is pertinent in creating, and revisions are unavoidable, this feels like a big new chapter opening up.
Growth
Will I make more dummies because of it? Yes. I think more ideas will see the light. I also think I will let go of ideas quicker, because my investment in time is a fraction of what it was.
Will I fully switch to digital art? No, probably not. But now I see how and where I can use it to my advantage.
Carson Ellis wrote about that recently, just as I was struggling to accept that I did indeed like drawing digitally … You can read her take here.
Paper Bits
And lastly, some little hopeful Spring recs:
These are my favorite walking (or running) shoes.
We saw Tyler and Carl live, and I love this album even more now.
I cannot wait to fill up these beds and plant wildflowers.
And this cookbook has been a hit, even for a picky eater.
I’ve been through the submission process 4 times and got two contracts out of it. That doesn’t include the re-writes and fully fledged dummies that got killed before ever shown to publishers. Getting to about a 37% success rate.