My Story So Far

“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft a-gley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain
For promis’d joy!”
To a Mouse, Robert Burns 1785.

Have you ever found that your life didn't follow the path that you thought it should have? Well this sometimes happens and especially if you don't make any concrete plans? So if I was to give any advice to any Illustration students out there it is this: Have some sort of idea about what you are going to do when you leave the comfy confines of your course. Have a plan!

The advice to us when we graduated was that in order to have a career in Illustration we would have to move to London; the great centre of all things. Then we would have to take our portfolios around every publisher, agency and design office that would look at it. I formulated a vague plan based upon this advice; not much of a plan looking back in hindsight.

Going to art school wasn’t the great leaping off point for me that it should have been. I hated the last two years of it and couldn’t wait for it to be over. I don’t cope well with stress and I suffered badly with depression whilst at art school. My work suffered as a consequence, and I lost my self esteem. I graduated but with no confidence and a portfolio I had no love for. The most important thing an artist needs is a love for their work. I also left art school with a psychological inability to draw; bad news for any artist.

Well London was and still is an expensive place to live in, and I was up to my eyeballs in the debts left over from being a student. That paired up with my lack of confidence in my work meant I never did go off to London. I ended up working in a completely different field from illustration; I got a job with a company that recycled electronic equipment. The job paid the bills, but I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t fulfilled. The spectre of depression eventually reared its head again and I left the dead end job.

I re-evaluated my life at this point and realised that I was suffering from depression this time, not because I was under pressure and suffering from stress, but because I had given up on being an illustrator. Now I had never quite given up on illustration, it was always in the back of my mind, it was what I still dreamt of doing, but I’d given up hope. I now realised that I had allowed other peoples negativity and my unhappy experiences at art school to blight my career.

Now I decided to make a portfolio of work that I did love and that I would be happy to show to publishers. I worked on a few book ideas but without any real focus, I could have gone on for another ten years like this, but some pretty wonderful things started to happen.

First I joined a local book group to broaden my horizons and meet new people and after I had gotten to now the members of the group I started to show them a dummy of a pop up book that I’d been working on which is called ‘Horace the Intergalactic Explorer’; a story I had originally written in 1998 for the Macmillan children’s book prize, now heavily reworked. I got a real confidence boost from all the good criticism I received from the group members.

Second, a week after I showed my book to the book group I received an email from David the organiser of the book group telling me that Waterstone’s were running a competition called ‘Picture This’ a competition to find a brand new children’s book illustrator. The object of the competition was to illustrate a text by Julia Donaldson, writer of ‘The Gruffalo’, called ‘Freddie and the Fairy’. It felt like providence.

Working on the competition was like a rebirth for me because all of the negative feelings about drawing and the negative memories of my art school experience were gone. I found I could draw again, and more importantly I loved the work I was doing. The requirements of the brief were character sketches for the 3 main characters; Freddie, Bessie-Belle the Fairy, and the Fairy Queen; plus sketches of at least 2 animals that were in the story which were a dog, a frog, a cat, a bat, a mouse, a louse, a parrot, a caterpillar, and a gorilla. Finally you had to produce one full colour double page spread from the book. I achieved all this and managed to post it all away on time, and waited expectantly to see if I would make the shortlist.

Well I didn’t make the cut! Over 900 people entered the competition which was phenomenal, and must have been difficult to whittle down to just 6 finalists. I was unlucky this time but I feel like I won anyway because I got my confidence in my art back. I will just have to go back to plan A and finish off my own story book.

Anyway I realise that this was a long post and you’d have finished ‘War and Peace’ twice over in the time it’s taken to read, but I promise future posts wont be quite as long, they’ll be more like updates.