The Business of Design

Back in the late 80’s and through the 90’s I managed to make a decent part of my income from illustration. In many years it was the biggest part. After we moved out of Los Angeles to Seattle, I found opportunities for illustration assignments slowly dwindling until my only real outlet was in selling stock imagery. While this has continued to provide some creative outlet and income from making fun pictures, it hasn’t really been the same. I really enjoy making illustrative imagery and find it the process cathartic.

For some time now, I’ve been looking for a good opportunity to make my own art again, but time has been a real issue. In the last couple of months, I’ve reclaimed some of that time and am now well into a project I’ve been meaning to do for a while. My wife and I have written a children’s book together and now I am illustrating it. It’s a bigger project than I thought it would be, but also way more fun.

Aside from time, the biggest hurdle I faced in creating the book’s imagery was media. I used to work in traditional media (mostly acrylics), but found that the illustrations just weren’t coming out the way I wanted. This was very frustrating. I used to be able to just crank those things out with good results. Either through lack of use or whatever, I found I wasn’t getting what I wanted out of the old paints. So I went back to the drawing board so to speak and looked to recreate my old style digitally. This of course made sense since I had been using the computer exclusively for all my other professional work for about 15 years.

I have a ton of experience in most design software including PhotoShop, Illustrator, Flash, InDesign, 3D Studio Max, Maya, Softimage and others, but hadn’t really done much with Painter until this project. While PhotoShop is powerful and I consider it my everyday workhorse, it just wasn’t recreating some of the textural qualities and spontaneity of my old traditional work. With a little experimentation in Painter, I managed to get pretty close to my old style. A little prep and finish work in PhotoShop gives me exactly what I want. The beauty of the whole thing is that I’m freer to experiment and push the envelope further than I might have done using my old methods.

Painter is a wonderful program for simulating natural media and I love that I can mix formerly impossible media such as oils and watercolor. There are other benefits too, I used to use an airbrush occasionally for certain effects, but despite good ventilation techniques and the use of a respirator, I always seemed to blow the rainbow out my nose after working with it for any time. No chance of pixel particulate causing some hideous suffocating disease down the road no matter how much I overuse it.

There are also overlaps with some of my normal work doing creative direction and user experience design that I can take advantage of. For example, many aspects of workflow and UI design revolve around some kind of narrative. A children’s book is really just another form of narrative so doing it well involves similar techniques to those I use regularly in working with websites and online applications. It’s not just about making fun pictures that are interesting without context, but more importantly about crafting a story that carries the reader effortlessly through the journey. Storyboarding the whole project prior to painting anything has proven crucial to getting the results I want and made the process so much easier. As I go along and finish work, I will conduct usability testing on my target audience by showing artwork to kids and getting their opinions. So far I have managed a little of this and the feedback has been terrific. Although I’m really enjoying the process of creating the book, I can’t wait to see it finished and in the hands of readers. We have several other book ideas in the hopper so we don’t need to worry about the fun ending when this one is done.