Just for luck

I recently went up to New York City to visit some friends and do some illustration-related forays — specifically, attempting to do some old school portfolio drop-offs, checking out SVA’s masters program and hitting up the Society of Illustrators secret HQ as well as the Met. I tried to hit the ground running and get as much done in the short time that I had up there, but my notion of cardinal directions failed me with disturbing regularity (barely made my first drop-off time by a matter of minutes) as did the soles of my feet (dogs, barking, etc.)

Drop-offs were fun to do, even if they were just a physical manifestation of what an illustrator does already: sending your work out (almost) blindly and hoping for a response. Beating feet with a box under your arm and getting from A to B feels a lot better than sending out an e-mail though. If a publication had me drop-off at a mail room, I noticed that my booklet looked a lot different than any of the other ones that I saw — theirs were armor-clad in black leather cases, while my wire bound booklet flopped about unashamedly naked. Next time I’ll design it differently, but at the time I pulled a Rumsfeld and went to war with the army I had.

That’s kind of the crux of my illustration experience thus far: lots of guess-work. Having little to no illustration instruction in school, I’ve tried to piece together what I think being a successful illustrator and small business owner means, to varying degrees of success. In short: being an illustrator is a very mysterious concept to me.

However, I managed to snag a bit of Marshall Arisman’s time and visited the Illustration as Visual Essay MFA program at SVA. It’s located on the top floor of one of their buildings and visiting it was a really cool experience — a lot of what I’ve done as an illustrator, aka imitating facets of others practices, was done while looking at the careers of SVA graduates, so seeing all the spaces and student work was exciting. It was kind of like visiting the kung fu enclave nestled away on the mountaintop, except there was an elevator.

Marshall was very generous and forthcoming with his experience and the program. He emphasized being true to your drawing and storytelling intuitions; not drawing what you think people want to see, or to match some preconceived notion of what you think illustration looks like. His descriptions of the scale to which students promote themselves makes my own efforts look minuscule (collective mailing lists of thousands of publications vs. me at a book store) and his critiques of my work were accurate and informative. I came away excited about illustration, as if a lot of the “mystery” was lifted, and eager to draw. I’m still undecided as to whether or not it’s the right time to apply to the school (although I would love going there immediately, I’m going to have to scare up a great deal more money.)

The Spectrum show was up at the Society building when I visited. The video interviews with illustrators echoed Marshall’s sentiments: you don’t want to be the best at what you do, you want to be the only one who does what you do; be honest and don’t worry about it so much. The highlight of the show for me was seeing an actual James Gurney Dinotopia painting; stumbling across a giant James Thurber cartoon while looking for the bathroom was a nice surprise as well.

Back in Memphis, I’ve been trying to keep up the figure drawing regimen. However in these past two weeks I’ve been swamped with storyboarding work –it was an awesome gig, but also a lot of late nights. I’ll probably do another post about storyboarding in the near future.

This week, I’m heading up to Kansas City for a workshop with Chris Ying and Jordan Bass. Very, very excited.

All in all, it was a great trip to New York and I’m looking forward to going back. In the meantime I’ve got to, you know, totally retool how I think about illustration.

Thanks to Craig and Mike for the pics and Leath for putting me up.