I am never short on ideas for illustrations. I have hundreds of ideas a day. But there are two different things that I run into trouble with as an artist and illustrator. The first is trying to sort the ones that work from the ones that don’t. I spend at least a few hours per day sketching my ideas out. I wake up around 4:30 a.m. and sketch for about an hour. Then I work on sketches for about an hour before I go to bed. In the morning I’m trying to decide what I will work on for the day, and in the evening I’m trying to figure out which sketches I want to further develop at 4:30 a.m. the next day. I do a lot of erasing. I throw a lot of sketches in the trash. Sometimes an idea looks good in my head, but when I draw it out on paper it just doesn’t work. Sometimes I think that an idea is great, and the sketch is great, and I spend hours working on the illustration only to discover that is just doesn’t work. I might toss it and move on, or I might come back to it weeks or months later and see if I can work it out. In the above illustration (titled Summer) I had sketched the girl out exactly how she is above. I had no idea what she was going to be holding or doing or what the background would be. It sat in a box for a few months actually. It wasn’t until yesterday morning when I was looking through sketches that I came across it and it suddenly hit me what I should do with it, and I painted it yesterday afternoon.
The second problem I have as an illustrator and artist is a little strange I think. It’s trying to keep myself from editing my own vision out. It’s hard to not think about how other people will interpret what they are seeing. With book illustrations you have to think about how it will be interpreted. The purpose of the children’s book illustration is to inform the text. But for my own personal illustrations I find it difficult to shut that part of my brain down. I might have a thought to add something and I really have to ask myself whether I am putting that particular thing there, such as the map in the below illustration, because it should be there or because I think the viewer would “like it.”
These are problems I think that a lot of artists and illustrators face. Being in a creative field isn’t cut and dry. But I think that the reward is the work that does “work” and that’s huge!
