Being a creative person professionally is an awkward balancing act of wrangling ‘creativity’ and applying the technical skill of putting out into the world the thing that’s in your head, but in a way that people respond to in the way you want them to. What happens to your art once it’s out in the world is a whole other blog post.
In regards to skill, a lot of people think art skill is something you’re born with, but it’s really, really not. So to continue to grow as artists on a technical level, we need to be able to see, accept and decide to work on those elements we still feel awkward about. The part we feel shame about. Ugh. In order words, we need to practice “deliberate practice”. (For a great podcast on this, see my fave episode of Freakonomics: How to Become Great at Just About Anything. )
When it comes to visual art, we all have things we just like to draw, and things we just… happen to ignore conveniently. My love and hate is drawing people. I think this is sort of universally a challenge for a lot of artists because the human brain is so in tune with how people should look and is on high alert for ‘bad people’ (See the Uncanny Valley effect, for an example, look at the people animation in Toy Story 1, or the re-drawing of Sonic the hedgehog to make him more cute and less human like, including removing his human teeth.)
It’s sort of an ironic love and hate because the first type of art I got very good at as a kid was drawing pencil portraits of classmates and family members. I specifically drew girls, boys felt so much harder because boys weren’t as accepting of flattery that hides mistakes.
In my graphic design and illustration work, we are often trying to think of how to best get across information to people in ways that are easy and intuitive for our brains to process. Often information is emotional, rather than analytical. Now, compared to other things, it’s very easy in campaigns to ignore having to illustrate people. But when it keeps coming up as an idea, that’s when you need to realize you are avoiding it and own that facing it head on will make you stronger. So starting in April 2021, that’s what I decided to do. Make room in my practice for practicing people.
Below are some of my results, and an example of a campaign that it eventually got used it, for social media.
